de France, an institution which he had founded at Paris in 1530. Guidi, upon his arrival in Paris, was at once most cordially received, both by those who were to be his colleagues and by the King. Francis bestowed upon him a suitable gift, appointed him to the position of First Physician (Archiater) at his Court, and assured him that he would receive an ample salary during his residence in the French metropolis. In 1547, after the death of Francis the First, Guidi returned to his home in Florence, where Cosimo dei Medici, at that time the head of the Florentine Republic and a little later Grand Duke of Tuscany (Cosimo III.), made him his First Physician and gave him the appointment of Professor of Philosophy in the University of Pisa. Not long afterward Guidi was transferred to the Chair of Medicine. He retained this position almost up to the time of his death (May 26, 1569), and during this long period Cosimo bestowed upon him various ecclesiastic honors, which not only increased his social rank but added materially to his financial resources.
Dezeimeris says that, while Guidi does not deserve to be placed, as an anatomist, in the same rank with Vesalius and Fallopius,[1] he merits full credit for the very important service which he rendered the physicians of his day by placing within their reach translations of certain Greek treatises relating to surgical topics—such treatises, for example, as those of Hippocrates on ulcers, on wounds of the head, on the joints and on fractures (with Galen's comments), Galen's treatise on fasciae, and that of Oribasius on ligatures and other surgical contrivances.
Apart from his merits as a worker in the field of medical science, Guidi occupies a creditable place in the history of medicine as a fine type of the well-educated and kindly disposed physician, as the following testimony given by Benvenuto Cellini, the distinguished Florentine sculptor, shows:—
On the occasion of my visit to Paris I made the acquaintance of
Messer Guidi, and I wish to state in what a very friendly manner
- ↑ Also often spelled "Falloppius."
