History of the Univ. of Bologna 


                 Nature and the human body


             The teaching of Medicine was including in the
             Arts syllabus following a papal bull in 1219.
             However Taddeo Alderotti, who had recorded and
             analysed several clinical cases in his Consilia,
             had to struggle against the hostility of the
             jurists and read the texts of Hippocrates and
             Galen glossing them in the same way as the legal
             texts were studied. It was only in 1228 that the
             Town Council gave the physicians the same legal
             status that the lawyers held. At the beginning of
             the fourteenth century Mondino de Liucci was the
             first to give demonstrations of anatomical
             practice, and in the fifteenth century Jacopo
             Barigazzi illustrated his works with engravings
             of "figurative anatomy", which were the first
             examples of illustrations of anatomy for didactic
             purposes. In the sixteenth century Gerolamo
             Cardano came to Bologna; he was a complex figure,
             a typical Renaissance scientist-magus, who
             simultaneously studied Astronomy, Astrology and
             Medicine. However, during the Renaissance the
             study of "natural magic" (Paracelsus himself was
             a guest of the Bolognese Studium for a certain
             period of time) encouraged scientific
             experiments. In this period Pietro Pomponazzi,
             the philosopher, defended the study of natural
             laws against the 'authorities' of theology and
             traditional philosophy. Another typical figure of
             this time was Ulisse Aldrovandi, who founded the
             Botanical Gardens in Bologna. Aldrovandi also
             contributed to the study of pharmacopoeia, of
             animals, of fossils and of various natural
             wonders, which he not only depicted in his
             famous, beautiful plates but also collected and
             classified. In the sixteenth century Gaspare
             Tagliacozzi conducted experiments which were
             early examples of plastic surgery. The golden age
             of Bolognese medicine coincides with the teaching
             of Marcello Malpighi in the seventeenth century.
             By then he was already using the microscope for
             his anatomical research, and among his
             discoveries were splenic corpuscles and kidney
             glomerules. Malpighi recommended the dissection
             of corpses to search for the tie between the
             anatomical state and clinical state and clinical
             manifestations in illness. At that time the
             Bolognese Medical School was very famous and
             Malpighi was awarded membership of the British
             Royal Society.

             At the turn of the seventeenth century Anton
             Maria Valsalva studied the anatomy of the ear,
             the eye, the aorta and the colon, and proposed a
             more humane treatment of the mentally ill ( who
             were no longer considered to be possessed by the
             devil). Pier Paolo Molonelli was the first person
             who trained students to operate on corpses. Gian
             Antonio Galli began the clinical teaching of
             Obstetrics and made wax models for didactic
             purposes which are still kept in a University
             museum.

             Giovan Battista Morgagni wrote about his studies
             of the larynx, the aorta, the testicles and bone
             marrow in his Adversaria Anatomica .

             Morgagni was however compelled to move to Padova,
             where he greatly increased that medical school's
             international fame.