Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 9, 2025
Lewis Pilcher, in his article on "The Mondino Myth," does not hesitate to say that "to the spirit which, from his professorial chair, Taddeo infused into the teaching and study of medicine undoubtedly is due the high position which for many generations thereafter the school of Bologna continued to maintain as a centre of medical teaching."
It is easy to understand that the value of such aids would be recognized at a time when the difficulty of preserving bodies made it necessary to do dissections hurriedly so as to get the rapidly decomposing material out of the way. Beyond his book and certain circumstances connected with it we know very little about Mondino.
One of the fellow students of Mondino at the University of Bologna had been Mondeville. Not long after Mondino's death, Guy de Chauliac came from France to reap similar opportunities to these, which had proved so fruitful for Mondeville.
They were all men, as we know them, who as writers and practitioners of medicine succeeded in going far beyond the level of mediocrity in what they accomplished." This was the teacher who most influenced young Mondino when he came to the University of Bologna, for it seems not unlikely that as a medical student he was actually the pupil of Taddeo, then in a vigorous old age.
The fact that both these assistants of Mondino died young and suddenly, would seem to point to the fact that probably dissection wounds in those early days proved even more fatal than they occasionally did a century or more ago, when the proper precautions against them were not so well understood.
Mondino came from a family that had already distinguished itself in medicine at Bologna. His uncle was a professor of physic at the university. His father, Albizzo di Luzzi, seems to have come from Florence not long after the middle of the thirteenth century, for the records show that, about 1270, he formed a partnership with one Bartolommeo Raineri for the establishment of a pharmacy at Bologna.
"We are accustomed to think of the practice of dissection as having been re-created by Mondino, and at once fully developed, springing into acceptance.
It used to be said of him that, like many of the great men of history, many cities claimed to be his birthplace. Five were particularly mentioned Florence, Milan, Bologna, Forli, and Friuli. There is, however, another Mondino, a distinguished physician, who was born and lived at Friuli, and it is because of confusion with him that the claim for Friuli has been set up.
It is too much to ask us to believe that in all this period, from the date of the promulgation of Frederick's decree of 1231 to the first public demonstration by Mondino, at Bologna in 1315, the decree had been a dead letter and no human body had been anatomized.
All that we know of the work of Mondino suggests that it was not a new enterprise in which he was a pioneer, but rather that he brought to an old practice a new enthusiasm and better methods, which, caught on the rising wave of interest in medical teaching at Bologna, and preserved by his own energy as a writer in the first original systematic treatise written since the time of Galen, created for him in subsequent uncritical times the reputation of being the Restorer of the practice of anatomizing the human body, the first one to demonstrate and teach such knowledge since the time of the Ptolemaic anatomists, Erasistratus and Herophilus.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking