To the modern thinker, accustomed to look rather to the northern nations or to France for great advances in science, it may prove somewhat of a surprise to have an Italian thus put forward as the founder of modern medicine, and especially of the most scientific department of it. Those who are familiar with the history of medicine since the revival of civilization after the Dark Ages will realize what a prominent place Italy has always held in the development of medical science. The first great Christian medical school was founded at Salerno, not far from Naples, in the tenth century. The first regular practical teaching of anatomy by means of {32} dissections of human bodies and demonstrations on the cadaver was done at Bologna by Mondino at the beginning of the fourteenth century. The great Father of Modern Anatomy, Vesalius, was a Belgian, but he did all the work for his epoch-making book, the _De Fabrica Humani Corporis_, at the Universities of North Italy, especially at Padua, Bologna and Pisa, during the first half of the sixteenth century. Every student of medicine in those times who was desirous to secure wider opportunities for medical education went down into Italy, and on the rosters of the Italian medical schools of the sixteenth century are to be found the names of most of the men who in all the countries of Europe became famous for their medical attainments. Morgagni only forms a final link in the chain of great Italian medical scientists, connecting medieval with modern medicine. From the time of Vesalius to that of Morgagni there was never a period when Italy did not possess the leading medical investigator of Europe. We need only mention such names as those of Fallopius, who added so much to our knowledge of abdominal anatomy; Eustachius, to whom we owe many important details of the anatomy of the head; Spigelius, whose name is forever associated with the liver, and Malpighi, to whom the whole round of the biological sciences allied most closely to medicine owes more than perhaps to any other single investigator, to show the complete justification for this claim. As a matter of fact, every encouragement to the progress of medicine was extended both by the secular and the ecclesiastical authorities in Italy during these centuries, and the Italian peninsula was from the beginning of the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth centuries the mecca for ardent medical students desirous of exhausting the medical knowledge of their time, quite as Germany has been in our day. {33}