Makers of Modern MedicineWalsh, James J. (James Joseph)
History
Makers of Modern Medicine
Walsh, James J. (James Joseph)
Medicine -- Biography
These times and this part of Italy are famous in history for some of
the opportunities afforded women in the matter of higher education. It
has been suggested that it is perhaps to the liberal culture of the
mothers we owe the fact that this part of Italy furnished for one
hundred and fifty years about this time the greatest men in science of
the time. It is well known that women occasionally held professorships
at the University of Bologna, not far from Morgagni's birthplace. The
general culture of the women of this section was very high. Modern
masculine historians have even been ungenerous enough to point out
that Bologna was famous for two things--the opportunities provided for
the higher education of women and the extensive manufacture of various
forms of prepared food, the best known of which, the classical Bologna
sausage, has come down as a precious heritage to hurried housekeepers
in our own time.
After an excellent preliminary education at Forli, always under the
careful supervision and enlightened encouragement of his mother,
Morgagni, as might have been expected from the place of his birth,
went to the neighboring university town of Bologna for his higher
studies. Bologna was at this time at the very acme of its reputation
as the greatest of existent medical schools. The science of anatomy
had been especially developed here as the result of important
investigations and discoveries made by some of the greatest men in the
history of medical science. Mondino had, very early in the fourteenth
century, recreated the modern science of anatomy as we know it. He was
the first to realize the importance {35} and urge the necessity for
the dissection of human bodies, if any real lasting progress in human
anatomy was to be made. Medical teaching before this time had been
largely by lectures and disputations upon the work of Aristotle,
Hippocrates and Galen, but actual observation on human tissues and
organs now replaced the older method. Bologna became a papal city in
1512, and it is especially after this date that, under the fostering
care of the Popes, the University of Bologna became the centre of
medical teaching for the whole world for several centuries.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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