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Updated: May 8, 2025
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.
The only dissection, as far as I am aware, made during the Middle Age was one by Mundinus in 1306; and his subsequent commentaries on Galen for he dare allow his own eyes to see no more than Galen had seen before him constituted the best anatomical manual in Europe till the middle of the fifteenth century.
Bologna honored its distinguished professors with magnificent tombs, sixteen or seventeen of which, in a wonderful state of preservation, may still be seen in the Civic Museum. That of Mundinus also exists a sepulchral bas-relief on the wall of the Church of San Vitale at Bologna.
He advises his students to consult Mundinus' treatise but to demonstrate its details for themselves on the dead body. He relates that he himself had often, multitoties, done this, especially under the direction of Bertruccius at Bologna. In describing the hypogastric lesion he mentions that he had demonstrated certain veins in it many times, multitotiens.
That he should have acquired wealth is not surprising if his usual fees were at the rate at which he charged Pope Honorius IV, i.e., two hundred florins a day, besides a "gratification" of six thousand florins. The man who most powerfully influenced the study of medicine in Bologna was Mundinus, the first modern student of anatomy.
They were servile followers, when not of the Greeks, of the Arabians. This is attested by the barrenness of the century and a half that followed. One would have thought that the stimulus given by Mundinus to the study of anatomy would have borne fruit, but little was done in science during the two and a half centuries that followed the delivery of his lectures and still less in the art.
Their names are also early met with in the school of Bologna. Mundinus is said to have had a valuable assistant, a young girl, Alessandra Giliani, an enthusiastic dissector, who was the first to practice the injection of the blood vessels with colored liquids. She died, consumed by her labors, at the early age of nineteen, and her monument is still to be seen.
I let my wick burn out there yet remains To spread an answering surface to the flame That others kindle. But between Mundinus and Vesalius, anatomy had been studied by a group of men to whom I must, in passing, pay a tribute. The great artists Raphael, Michael Angelo and Albrecht Durer were keen students of the human form.
Another work which he had begun about the same time was the treatise on Dialectic, illustrated by geometrical problems and theorems, and likewise by the well-known logical catch lines Barbara Celarent. During the summer vacation of 1561 he returned to Milan, and began a Commentary on the Anatomy of Mundinus, the recognized text-book of the schools up to the appearance of Vesalius.
Among the Greeks only the Alexandrians knew human anatomy. What their knowledge was we know at second hand, but the evidence is plain that they knew a great deal. Galen's anatomy was first-class and was based on the Alexandrians and on his studies of the ape and the pig. We have already noted how much superior was his osteology to that of Mundinus.
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