According to a well-known and apparently well authenticated tradition, one distinguished woman student of Bologna, Maria Di Novella, achieved such success in mathematics about the middle of the thirteenth century that she was appointed professor of mathematics. Apparently the faculty of Bologna had no qualms of educational conscience nor betook themselves to such halfway measures as one of our modern faculties, which accords a certificate to a woman that she has passed better in the mathematical tripos than the Senior Wrangler, though they do not accord her the Senior Wranglership. The story goes on to say that Signorina Di Novella, knowing that she was pretty, and fearing that her {218} beauty would disturb the minds, at least, of her male students, arranged to lecture from behind a curtain. This would seem to indicate that the blue-stockings of the olden time could be as surpassingly modest as they were intelligent. I remember once telling this story before a convent audience. The dear old Mother Superior, who had known me for many years, ventured to ask me afterwards, "Did you say that she was young?" and I said yes, according to the tradition; "and handsome?" and I nodded the affirmative, "Well, then," she said, "I do not believe the rest of the story." But then, after all, what do dear old Mothers Superior know about the world or its ways, or about handsome young women or their ways, or about the significance of traditions which serve to show us that even pretty, intelligent women can be as modestly retiring and as ready to conceal their charms as they are to be charmingly courteous and careful of the feelings of others? It was not alone in law and mathematics, however, that women were given opportunities for the higher education and even for professional work at the University of Bologna. In medicine, as well as in law, women reached distinction. The first great professor of anatomy of modern times is Mondino, whose text-book on dissection, published at the beginning of the fourteenth century, continued to be used in the medical schools for two centuries. One of his assistants was {219} Alessandra Giliani, one of the two university prosectors in anatomy. At the Surgeon General's Library in Washington, in one of the early printed editions of Mondino's work, the frontispiece shows a young woman making the dissection before him preparatory to his lecture. To her, according to an old Italian chronicle, we owe the invention of methods of varnishing and painting the tissues of cadavers so that they would resemble more their appearance in the living state, that they might be preserved for further use, thus avoiding to some extent the necessity for constant repetition of the deterrent work of dissection, even more deterrent at that time.