, already cited, is of the opinion, and gives excellent reasons
for it, that Taddeo, the great Bolognese physician of the thirteenth
century, who was Mondino's master, had done at least some dissections
in Bologna. Personally I have long felt sure that Taddeo or Thaddeus,
as he is sometimes called in the Latin form of his name, did not a
few, but a number of dissections.

Professor Pilcher's account of him does not exaggerate his merits. I
may say that he was one of the great Papal physicians of whom we shall
have more to tell hereafter.

"Any comprehensive attempt to trace the real influences to which was
due so great a step as a return to the practice of dissections of
the human body, seems to me must be very defective if it failed to
take into consideration the influence of such a man as Thaddeus
(Italian Taddeo).{67} That he was able to impress himself in the way
in which history records that he did, both upon the general public
and upon the scholastic foundations of Bologna, shows a strength of
character and a mastery of the peculiar conditions of the moment in
the fields of science and philosophy which made him a master and an
inspirer. If he is to be considered in his proper historical light,
as one who declares that the knowledge of the structure of the human
body to a most minute degree is the foundation upon which all
rational medicine and surgery must be built, then it is impossible
to exaggerate the importance of the pivotal moment when, in the
development of science, the human body began to be anatomized. Nor
is any fault to be found with the custom which has crowned with the
laurels of universal appreciation the names of those men who began
and who continued anatomical study, who vulgarized the practice of
dissection.

"In my own investigations and reflections upon the conditions which
led up to this happy renewal of scientific search into the
composition of the body of man, it has seemed to me that writers
have hitherto fallen short of tracing through to its ultimate
source, the earlier spirit of enthusiasm for knowledge, of insight
into the problems of disease, and of contempt for traditionary
shackles, to the influence of which, as shown by the master, Taddeo,
the latter work of the pupil, Mondino, was in great measure due."

Medici, in his History of the School of Anatomy at Bologna, [Footnote
8] quotes Sarti on The Distinguished Professors of t