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Probably no man more influenced the medical teaching of the fourteenth and fifteen centuries than Mundinus, or, as he was called in the Italian fashion, Mondino, who wrote this manual of dissection. The expression is well worth noting, because it shows what was still the reputation of Mundinus in the medical educational world nearly two centuries after his death.
Before the close of the thirteenth century, however, a reaction had begun, physicians were protected, and dissections were occasionally sanctioned by the ruling monarch. By the time of Mondino dissections were becoming more frequent, and he himself is known to have dissected and demonstrated several bodies.
It is more reasonable to believe that in the era immediately preceding that of Mondino human bodies were being opened and after a fashion anatomized.
Curiously enough, one of these assistants was a young woman who, as was not infrequently the custom at this time in the Italian universities, was matriculated as a student at Bologna. She took up first philosophy, and afterwards anatomy, under Mondino.
How well the tradition created by Mondino continued at the university will be best understood from what we know of Guy de Chauliac's visit to the medical school here about the middle of the century. The great French surgeon tells us that he came to Bologna to study anatomy under the direction of Mondino's successor, Bertruccius.
Under this worthy compatriot and contemporary of the great Florentines, Mondino was inspired to be the teacher that did so much for Bologna. Until recent years it has usually been the custom to give too much significance to the work of the men whose names stand out most prominently in the early history of departments of the intellectual life.
To understand the place of Mondino, and of the medical school of Bologna, in his time, and the reputation that came to them as world teachers of medicine, we must know, first, this great teacher of Mondino and the atmosphere of progressive medicine that enveloped the university in the latter half of the thirteenth century.
Mondino had devoted himself to the subject with unfailing ardor and enthusiasm, and from everywhere in Europe the students came to receive inspiration in his dissecting-room.
Later this passed entirely under the control of the Mondino family, and came to be known as the Spezieria del Mondino. In it were sold, besides Eastern perfumes, spices, condiments, probably all sorts of toilet articles, and even rugs and silks and feminine ornaments. The stricter pharmacy of the earlier times developed into a sort of department store, something like our own.
As regards the evidence of what the young man had accomplished before his untimely death, probably the following quotation, which Medici has taken from one of the old chroniclers, will give the best idea: "What advantage indeed might not Bologna have had from Otto Agenius Lustrulanus, whom Mondino had used as an assiduous prosector, if he had not been taken away by a swift and lamentable death before he had completed the sixth lustrum of his life!"
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