Early contributions of anatomy to obstetrics.

  • Alexander Hugh Freeland Barbour
Date:
1888
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Early contributions of anatomy to obstetrics. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    science. ... In this state matters appear to have proceeded with the Medical School of Bologna till the commencement of the fourteenth century, when the circumstance of possessing a teacher of originality enabled this University to be the agent of as great an improvement in medical science as she had already effected in jurisprudence. This era, indeed, is distinguished by the appear- ance of Mondino, under whose zealous cultivation the science first began to rise from the ashes in which it had been buried. This Father of Modern Anatomy, who taught in Bologna about the year 1315, quickly drew the curiosity of the medical profession by well-ordered demonstrations of the different parts of the human body. In 1315, he dissected and demonstrated the parts of the human body in two female subjects; and in the course of the following year he accomplished the same task on the person of a single female. Though Mondino dissected three female bodies, he evidently did not examine the uterus, for in his Text-book of Anatomy, issued in 1310, he describes the uterus as containing seven cavities. This volume, as the first modern work based on dissection, gained such a position that here and there in Italy it was decreed by law that anatomy should not be taught from any other book (Haller). Mondino's text-book, with its defective and altogether erroneous description of female pelvic anatomy, was thus for the next two centuries the standard work in Italy. Soranus and Moschion lay buried and forgotten. It is for this reason that, although the revival of General Anatomy begins with Mondino, the revival of Obstetric Anatomy (which marks the commencement of our Third Period) does not date from him. Towards the end of the fourteenth century a great impulse to the study of anatomy came from the students of Art. To Giotto's failures to represent hands and feet and the position of the limbs in different postures, we are more indebted for the revival of interest in anatomy than appears on the surface. The first anatomical drawings (for there are no illustrations in the works of Mondino), if not the first efforts to get at what lay below the skin, were by Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1518)—great in anatomy as in ait. Not only have we his own anatomical drawings, but we read that he illustrated the anatomist Mark Antonio de la Torre's book for him.1 Of Michael Augelo's work, Haller says,2— •■ Exact anatomical skill is seen in his drawings; nevertheless he represented muscles more stiffly than is right. Twenty-two anatomical plates of his are mentioned, which he drew himself. Choulant3 gives a plate of one of his drawings, in which, although the skin is not removed, the muscles come out very strongly; alongside of the figure is a scale giving the proportions of the 1 Choulant's Gexchirltte mid Bibliographic der anatomischen Abhildinuj, etc., Leipzig, 1852, p. G. - Op. cit., ]>. 164. 3 Op. cit., p. 11.
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