His relations with his patients--for during all of his career he continued to practice, especially surgery and obstetrics--were of the friendliest character. While his distinction as a professor at the University gave him many opportunities for practice among the rich, he was always ready and willing to help the poor, and, indeed, seemed to feel more at home among poor patients than in the society of the wealthy and the noble. Even toward the end of his life, when the loss of many friends, and especially his wife, made him retire within himself much more than before, he continued to exercise his professional skill for the benefit of the poor, though he often refused to take cases that might have proved sources of considerable gain to him. Early in life, when he was very busy between his professorial work and his practice, he remarked more than once, on refusing to take the cases of wealthy patients, that they had the money with which to obtain other physicians, while the poor did not, and he would prefer to keep some time for his services to them. When ailing and miserable toward the end of his life, he still continued his practice, and was especially ready to spend his time with the poor. He was dying himself, as one of his biographers says, when he got up from a sick bed to see a dying woman who sent for him. He was one of the most popular professors that the University of Bologna ever had. He was not, in the ordinary sense of the word, an orator, but he was a born teacher. The source of the enthusiasm which he aroused in his hearers was undoubtedly his own love for teaching and the power it gave him to express even intricate problems in simple, straightforward language. More than any of his colleagues, he understood that experiments and demonstrations must be the real groundwork of the teaching of science. Accordingly, very few of his lectures were given without the aid of these material helps to attract attention. Besides, he was known to be one who delighted to answer questions, and was perfectly frank about the limitations of his knowledge whenever there was no real answer to be given to a question that had been proposed. Though an original discoverer of the first rank, he was extremely modest, particularly when talking about the details of his discoveries or subjects relating to them.