date of publication (1586) of Tagliacozzi's earliest comments on the subject, and that the credit for first bringing the operation to the knowledge of European surgeons is due to Aranzio rather than to Tagliacozzi." The latter's famous treatise on rhinoplasty ("De chirurgia curtorum per insitionem") was published at Venice in 1597.
(4.) Fabricius of Hilden, the distinguished German surgeon of the sixteenth century, assures us that his teacher, Jean Griffon, at that time the leading surgeon of Lausanne (but, at an earlier period, of Geneva), performed the same operation in 1592. The patient was a young Genevese woman whose nose had been cut off by some soldiers belonging to the army of the Duke of Savoy who were enraged at the resistance which she offered to their familiarities; and the operation proved most successful, "the new nose eliciting the admiration of all who saw it." Fabricius adds that during the winter seasons, up to the year 1613, the tip of this nose presented a somewhat purplish hue. The woman married in 1603.
(5.) During the short lifetime of Tagliacozzi several tablets, on which laudatory inscriptions were engraved, were erected in the high school (archiginasio) of Bologna, and after his death a bust that represented him holding a nose in his hand was erected in the same building. Corradi, the medical historian (1833-1892), writes that in his time both bust and tablets had disappeared. Tagliacozzi's remains were temporarily lodged in the cloisters of the church of San Giovanni Battista, and the report was circulated that, a few weeks after his death, a voice was heard saying that he was among the damned. Thereupon the remains were removed to the walls of the city, and the Tagliacotian method was soon forgotten, to be revived only after the lapse of many years.
All the data which I have reproduced in the preceding
paragraphs seem to point to the conclusion suggested by
von Gurlt, viz., that Tagliacozzi was willing to accept for
himself a credit which belonged in reality to another, and
that there would be more justice in calling the famous
rhinoplastic method of procedure "the Arantian operation"
than the Tagliacotian; especially as our knowledge of the
method adopted by the younger Branca is entirely too
vague to justify us in bestowing this honor upon him.
Giulio Cesare Aranzio (or Arantius) was born at Bologna about the year 1530. He studied medicine first in his native
