He is said to have had the assistance of a young lady, ALASSANDRA GILIANI, as prosector. Anatomical demonstrations in those days were, at the best, very imperfect. The demonstrator did not actually himself dissect; this was done by a barber-surgeon with a razor, the lecturer merely standing by and pointing out the objects of interest to the students with his staff. Nor did the process occupy much time; four lessons served to explain the mysteries of the human frame: the first was on the abdomen, the second on the organs of the chest, the third on the brain, and the fourth on the extremities.[794] The bodies were buried, or placed in running or boiling water, to soften the tissues and facilitate their examination. Dissections first took place at Prague in 1348, Montpellier after 1376, Strasburg, 1517. In Italy, sometimes, a condemned criminal was first stabbed in prison by the executioner, and then conveyed at once to the dissecting room, for the use of the doctors. The most famous physicians of this period were:— PETRUS APONO, or PIETRO OF ABANO (1250-1315), a famous physician, who lived at Abano near Padua, and who had studied medicine and other sciences at Padua and Paris. He travelled in Greece and other parts, acquired a knowledge of the Greek language, and was a devoted student of the works of Averroes. He endeavoured to mediate between the Arabian and the Greek physicians in their controversies on medicine, and wrote with that view his work, entitled the _Conciliator differentiarum philosophorum et precipue medicorum_. He knew enough of physiology to be aware that the brain is the source of the nerves, and the heart that of all the blood-vessels. He meddled with astrology, and was accused of practising magic, of possessing the philosopher’s stone. He was found guilty on his second trial by the Inquisition; but as he died before the trial was completed, he was merely burned in effigy. JACOB DE DONDIS (1298-1359) was a physician, who was a professor at Padua, and was famous as the author of an herbal with plates containing descriptions of simple medicines. ARNOLD OF VILLA NOVA (1235-1312), physician, alchemist, and astrologer, did much to advance chemical science, and whose work, the _Breviarium Practicæ_, is not a mere compilation. He advised his pupils, when they failed to find out what was the matter with their patients, to declare that there was “some obstruction of the liver,”—a practice much in vogue even in the present day. He was the first to administer brandy, which he called the elixir of life (Baas). He discovered the art of preparing distilled spirits (Thomson). Collections of medical cases first began to be preserved in an intelligible form in the thirteenth century; they were called _consilia_. Those by FULGINEUS (before 1348), by MONTAGNANA (died 1470), and by BAVERIUS DE BAVERIIS, of Imola (about 1450), are said to be interesting.[795]