Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Padua

  • Book review: Medicine in the Middle Ages

    Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom In the history of Western Europe, the Middle Ages refers to the period between the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century through the beginning of the Renaissance in the 1500s. These thousand years were characterized by unstable nation-states led by kings and nobility. Tribalism was rife, and…

  • Salernitan women

    Vicent Rodilla Alicia López-Castellano Valencia, Spain   Figure 1. A miniature from Avicenna’s Canon representing the Salernitan Medical School. Source The first medical school in the Western world is thought to be the Schola Medica Salernitana (Figure 1), which traces its origins to the dispensary of an early medieval monastery.1 The medical school at Salerno…

  • Charles-Michel Billard, an overlooked pediatric pioneer

    Stanford Shulman Chicago, Illinois   Fig. 1 N Corvisart, F.X Bichat, and Rene Laennec are each shown on a commemorative postage stamp of France. From the author’s collection of medical history stamps. Introduction During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries medicine transitioned into a more science-based discipline. This was primarily the result of gross…

  • Adrianus Spigelius, the last great Paduan anatomist

    In his time the Flemish physician Adrianne van den Spiegel (often referred to by the latinized name of Adrianus Spigelius) was the most renowned practicing clinician in the city of Padua. An accomplished anatomist, he was left with only meager eponymous pickings: the caudate (Spigelian) lobe of the liver and some more obscure structures around…

  • In pursuit of a new anatomy

    Roseanne F. ZhaoChicago, Illinois, United States The Brabantian physician and anatomist, Andreas Vesalius, is widely celebrated for breaking with Galenic tradition to revolutionize the study of anatomy, changing the practice of medicine, surgery, and education in the process. Born in 1514 in Brussels, Belgium (at that time, part of the Holy Roman Empire) to a…