_Mondino the Anatomist._--Mondino, who was the first physician, after an interval of about fifteen hundred years, to revive the practice of dissecting human bodies, was born at Bologna at about 1275 A. D. He received his professional training at the medical school of his native city and was given the degree of Doctor in 1290, at the age of fifteen(!). Not long afterward he began to teach anatomy in the same institution and continued to serve in this capacity up to the time of his death in 1326. The physicians who aided him in his anatomical researches were Ottone Agenio Lustrulano, his prosector, and a woman named Alessandra Gilliani, from Perriceto. Mondino’s method of teaching anatomy was to deliver his lectures with the dissected cadaver directly before him; that is, he demonstrated the correctness of his statements as fast as he made them. (See Fig. 9.) Such a method was entirely new at the time and proved immensely popular, attracting students to Bologna in large numbers. Partly in this way and partly by means of the treatise on anatomy which he wrote (“_Anatomia Mundini_”), he became the instructor of numerous generations of physicians. His treatise remained the authoritative guide in anatomy up to the middle of the sixteenth century. [Illustration: FIG. 9. THE OLDEST KNOWN PICTORIAL REPRESENTATION OF A FORMAL DISSECTION OF THE HUMAN BODY. The original, which is in the library of the University of Montpellier, France, appears in a manuscript copy of Guy de Chauliac’s _Chirurgia magna_ (fourteenth century). Eugen Holländer of Berlin, the author of _Die Medizin in der klassischen Malerei_, has courteously given permission to copy the reproduction. The many defects which appear in this picture are due to the fact that the reproduction was taken directly from the original miniature, now six hundred years old. Holländer gives the following description of this interesting scene: “In one of the rooms of the hospital a woman’s dead body is lying upon a table. Alongside the bed in which she died a nun is praying for her soul. Two physicians are busily engaged in the work of dissecting the body. An instructor is reading out of a book, for the benefit of the students who are crowding into the room, such portions of the text as apply to the case in hand, and at the same time he is directing their attention to the uterus which one of the dissectors is lifting out of the abdominal cavity. Owing to the defective state of the original miniature it is not possible to state positively what part the three women who stand near the head of the corpse are taking in the scene, but it is not unlikely that they too are physicians, especially as their presence on such an occasion would be quite in harmony with the customs of that period of time.”]