Mondino was professor at Bologna till his death in 1327. His work,
easily accessible in one of its many editions, ‘is corrupted by the
barbarous leaven of the Arabian schools, and his Latin defaced by
the exotic nomenclature of Avicenna and Rhazes’.[157] But it is not
the language alone that has suffered. The schoolman’s attitude, well
fitted for the classification of ideas, is an ill instrument for the
investigation of Nature, and in the scholastic Mondino the very basis
of scientific judgement is undermined, so that he readily accepts the
views of the ancients against what must often have been the evidence
of his own senses. The work, however useful to the contemporary
student, was thus essentially reactionary as against the efforts of
the earlier Salernitan anatomists and of William of Saliceto. This is
the more remarkable because it is quite clear that he was accustomed
to demonstrate on the actual body--a privilege denied to the early
Salernitan school,--and he was, moreover, a popular and successful
teacher. His work is a manual of dissection rather than a treatise on
anatomy. This, added to its conciseness and brevity, strengthened its
appeal to the ‘practical’ man--an epithet claimed then, as now, by the
majority of stupid and unpractical people. The personal influence and
enthusiasm of its author no doubt helped also towards the phenomenal
success of this work, which for two hundred years held a position
without rival as the text-book of the medical schools of Italy, where
even as late as the sixteenth century Mondino ‘was still worshipped by
all the students as a very god’.[158]
Mondino was succeeded in the chair of Surgery at Bologna by his pupil,
the Lombard Bertuccio, who died in the Black Death of 1347. Bertuccio’s
surviving work is unnoteworthy, but he was the anatomical teacher of
Guy de Chauliac, whose _Surgery_[159] is of great value and was very
influential in standardizing practice, especially in the north and west
of Europe. Nevertheless it appears to us that the anatomical section is
the weakest part of Guy’s great work. The teleology that is a blot in
Mondino has here become a perfect plague, and Guy’s anatomy consists
of one-third description and two-thirds wearisomely reiterated reasons
for the existence of imperfectly described structures. Through Guy
de Chauliac the anatomical tradition of Mondino passed over into the
University of Montpellier.
A later fourteenth-century Bolognese writer was Tommaso di Garbo (died
1370), who did little but comment on Avicenna. A surgeon of the next
generation, however, Pietro d’Argellata, deserves to be remembered for
his description of the examination of the body of Pope Alexander V, who
died suddenly at Bologna on May 4, 1410. His account throws light on
the customary procedure and may be rendered here.[160]
‘I ordered the attendants’, he says, ‘first to cut the abdomen
from the _pomegranate_ [i.e. the Adam’s apple or laryngeal
cartilage[161]] to the os pectinis [i.e. the symphysis pubis].
Then, so that they should not rupture the intestines, I myself
sought the rectum and ligatured it in two places and then cut it
between. Next I removed all the intestines as far as the duodenum
and dealt with them as with the rectum, and so I had the intestines
clean and without fetor. After this I extracted the liver, seizing
its ligaments; then the spleen and then the kidneys, and these
were all placed together in a jar. I now passed to the spiritual
members [i.e. the thorax] and removed lung and heart and all
their ligaments. Then I ligatured the _meri_ [the Arabian term
for oesophagus] and removed the stomach. When this had been done
there were some who wished to remove the tongue but knew not how. I
however cut under the chin and extracted the tongue through that
hole, together with _trachea arteria_ [trachea] and _meri_. Then
I passed to the _arteria adorti_ [aorta] and _vena chilis_ [vena
cava]. Lastly I removed the ligatured remnant of the intestines as
far as the anal margin.’
Giovanni da Concoreggio (died 1438), who was lector in Surgery at
Bologna in the early part of the fifteenth century, left a few
anatomical observations of little note,[162] and not very much more
can be said for his successors and Manfredi’s contemporaries Gabriele
Gerbi (de Zerbis, died 1505) and Alessandro Achillini (1463-1512).
Gerbi[163] does little but repeat in the most verbose fashion the work
of Mondino and of Avicenna, some of whose errors, however--e.g. the
three ventricles of the heart--he omits. He wrote also an anatomy of
the infant, or rather of the foetus,[164] and a treatise taken mainly
from Avicenna’s _De generatione embryonis_. Like all his work, these
are in the full scholastic style of a professor of Logic, a position to
which, in fact, he ultimately attained.
Achillini’s work[165] is but a slight advance on that of Gerbi. It is
really little else than a note-book for students, and gives the baldest
directions for dissection, accompanied by a few comments taken from
Avicenna. Achillini occasionally ventures to criticize Mondino, and
his work has at least the advantage of brevity. He has a claim to be
remembered in that he was the first to describe the duct of Wharton and
is said to have been the first to describe the ear ossicles, malleus
and incus. Achillini, like Gerbi, was a windy and very ‘scholastic’
disputator. He was best known to his contemporaries as a supporter of
the philosophy of Averroes. In 1506, when driven from Bologna with the
other supporters of Bentivoglio, he became professor of Philosophy at
Padua.
[Illustration: Fig. 8. THE ABDOMINAL MUSCLES