Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/391

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property by inheritance. But nothing further was heard of them until they were discovered, early in the eighteenth century, by Lancisi, the Pope's attending physician, in the possession of Pini's descendants. They were published for the first time in 1714. Haeser says that these pictures are true to nature, but that in artistic merit they are not equal to those which belong to the treatise published by Vesalius. The name Eustachius is permanently connected with the channel which leads from the tympanum to the nasal cavities—the Eustachian tube.

Only the briefest possible mention may here be made of those anatomists who, following immediately in the footsteps of the three great leaders mentioned above, played parts of greater or less importance in building up the science of anatomy. Each one of them did creditable work in correcting the errors made by their predecessors or in supplying descriptions of structures or structural relations which these pioneers had overlooked. Thus, long before the sixteenth century came to an end, the gross anatomy of the human being had attained a large measure of the completeness which it possesses to-day. The names of some of the more prominent men among those to whom I have just referred are the following: Giovanni Filippo Ingrassia, Matthaeus Realdus Columbus, Julius Caesar Arantius, Constantius Varolius, Volcher Koyter and Hieronymus Fabricius ab Acquapendente.

Ingrassia (1510-1580), a Sicilian physician, cultivated osteology assiduously, and is entitled to special credit for having first described the stapes, the third one of the ossicles of hearing, and for having made valuable contributions to our knowledge of epidemic diseases. He was a professor in the University of Naples, and, after the year 1563, held the position of Archiater in Palermo, Sicily. His descriptions of the different bones of the skeleton were made with such care and thoroughness that later anatomists found very little for them to discover or to alter.

Matthaeus Realdus Columbus (or simply Realdus Columbus), who died in 1559, was born in Cremona, Northern Italy. He served for some time as Prosector