Education: How Old The NewWalsh, James J. (James Joseph)
History
Education: How Old The New
Walsh, James J. (James Joseph)
Education -- History
In Naples women were allowed to practise medicine, and we have some of
the licenses which show the formal permission granted by the
government in this matter. An almost exactly similar state of affairs
to that thus seen at Salerno developed at Bologna, only there the
university was founded round the law school, and the first women
students were in that school. When Irnerius established his great
lectureship of Roman Law at Bologna, to which students were attracted
from all over Europe, he seems to have seen no objection to allow
women to attend his courses, and we have the names of his daughter
{283} and several other women who reached distinction in the law
school. As the other departments of the University of Bologna
developed we find women as students and teachers in these. One of the
assistants to the first great professor of anatomy at Bologna,
Mondino, whose text-book of anatomy was used in the schools for two
centuries after this time, was a young woman, Alessandra Giliani. It
is to her that we owe an early method for the injection of bodies in
such a way as to preserve them, and she also varnished and colored
them so that the deterrent work of dissection would not have to be
carried on to such an extent as before, yet the actual human tissues
might be used for demonstrating purposes.
As the result of the traditions in feminine education thus established
women continued to enjoy abundant opportunities at the universities of
Italy, and there is not a single century since the thirteenth when
there have not been some distinguished women professors at the Italian
universities. Nearly five centuries after the youthful assistant in
anatomy of whom we have spoken, whose invention meant so much for
making the study of medicine less deterrent and dangerous, came Madame
Manzolini, who invented the method of making wax models of human
tissues so that these might be studied for anatomical purposes. Made
in the natural colors, these were eminently helpful. In the meantime
many women professors of many subjects had come and gone at {284} the
Italian universities. In the thirteenth century there was a great
teacher of mathematics who was so young and handsome that, in order
not to disturb the minds of her students, she lectured from behind a
curtain. It is evident that the educated women of the Middle Ages
could be as modest as they were intelligent and thoughtful of others,
quite as much as if they had devoted their lives to gentle charity and
not to the higher education. Women physicians, educators,
mathematicians, professors of literature, astronomers, all these are
to be found at the universities of Italy while the Church and the
ecclesiastics were the dominating influences in these universities.
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