Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/352

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corpse. Instead of dissecting him for the benefit of science, the doctors bestirred themselves in the man's behalf, obtained a pardon in due form, and sent him back to his home in Bavaria under the escort of the college janitor. Not very long afterward, however, he committed a fresh crime, and this time was effectively hung. History does not state whether the dissection then came off, or not.

The Medical Faculty of the University of Tübingen established the rule in 1497 that one human body should be publicly dissected every three or four years; it being understood that during the progress of the dissection the professor should read aloud to the class appropriate portions of Mondino's treatise on anatomy. The instruction in this department of medical science was of the same general character in all the other universities of Germany at that period. Anatomical drawings, of a very crude type, were employed as substitutes for actual dissection.

At Padua, in Northern Italy, the science of medicine had already before the end of the first half of the fifteenth century made a decided advance, in proof of which several circumstances may be mentioned. In the first place, the importance of the study of anatomy had by this time become so generally recognized that no special difficulty appears to have been encountered in securing the erection, in 1446, of an anatomical theatre; and during this same period several physicians connected with the medical school acquired considerable celebrity by their publication of important treatises on topics belonging to the domain of general pathology and therapeutics, and by the wide influence which they exerted as teachers. Among the number of those who helped in these ways to spread the fame of the Medical School of Padua may be mentioned Hugo Benzi, Antonio Cermisone, Giovanni Savonarola and Bartolommeo Montagnana.

Hugo Benzi (or Hugo of Siena) taught philosophy as well as medicine in different institutions of learning—at Pavia, Piacenza, Florence, Bologna, Parma, Padua and Perugia. His death probably occurred at Ferrara about the year 1439. In addition to commentaries on Hippocrates,