we accept the
conclusion that their author had done many dissections, under many and
varying circumstances, during his career as an anatomist before
writing this volume. We have other evidence, of a much more direct
character, for this fact. Mondino uses the expression, that he had
demonstrated many times a certain anatomical feature which could only
be the subject of demonstration after dissection. The expression
occurs in a description of the hypo-gastric region which he calls the
sumen. Through this region, he says, there pass to the surface certain
veins which transmit fluid in the fetus {45} during the time of its
life in utero. For this reason they are better studied in the unborn
than in the fully developed, since they lose their function as soon as
complete development is reached. In this description Mondino uses the
words "ego hoc modo multitotiens monstravi."

As with regard to this, so as to another bit of evidence of Mondino's
frequency of dissection, Professor Pilcher has supplied the material.
He says in his article on the Mondino Myth, already cited:

"Shortly after his (Mondino's) death, the young Guy de Chauliac, of
Montpelier, came to Bologna to study anatomy under the tuition of
Mondino's successor, Bertrucius. When he wrote his own treatise, 'La
Grande Chirurgie,' thirty years later, he prefaced it with an
appreciation of the study of anatomy, saying: 'It is necessary and
useful to every physician to know first of all anatomy'; and that a
knowledge of anatomy was to be acquired by two means; 'these are,'
he says, 'the study of books, a means useful indeed, but not
sufficient to explain those things which can only be appreciated by
the senses; the other, experimentally on the dead body, according to
the treatise of Mondinus, of Bologna, which he has written, and
which (experimental anatomy on the cadaver) he (Mondinus) has done
many times'--'_et ipsam fecit multitoties._'"

Besides this evidence we have details of the lives of two of Mondino's
assistants which furnish further proofs of the frequency of dissection
at the University of Bologna during these first two decades of the
fourteenth century, which, it will be recalled, are also the first two
decades after the promulgation of Pope Boniface's bull. Curiously
enough, one of these assistants was a young woman who, as was not
infrequently the custom at this {46} time in the Italian universities,
was matriculated as a stu