regard to
dissection. We have already shown by our quotation from Roth that
Bertrucci was very active in dissection work and did many public
dissections. He was followed by Pietro di Argelata, who died toward
the end of the fourteenth century. These men followed Mondino in the
chair of anatomy at Bologna, and Julius Pagel, in his chapter on
Anatomy and Physiology in Puschmann's Handbuch der Geschichte der
Medizin (Vol. I., p. 707), says that "the successors of Mondino were
in a position, owing to the gradual enlightenment of the spirit of the
time and the general realization of the importance of anatomy as well
as the fostering liberality of the authorities, _to make regular,
systematic dissections of the human body._" This would bring us down,
then, to the end of the fourteenth century.

To return now to Roth, who takes up the next century. He says:

"For the fifteenth century, the university statutes of Bologna for
the year 1405 furnish many sources of information. There is a
special division which is concerned with the _annual anatomy or
dissection_ that had to be made and the selection of the persons to
be present, the payment of the expenses and other details. An
addition to the statutes, made in the year 1442, determines the
arrangement of the delivery of the body from the city to the
university authorities. Every year two bodies, one male and one
female, must be provided for the {77} medical school dissections. In
default of a female body, a second male body was to be provided. In
the presence of such detailed regulations, the absence almost
entirely of details as to the actual performance of dissections can
mean very little. Bologna reached its highest development as a
medical school at the beginning of the sixteenth century when
Alexander Achillinus and Jacob Berengarius had charge of the public
dissections there. Of these I shall speak later." (All this is at
the University of Bologna, where ecclesiastical influence was
supreme and where the Popes exercised their jurisdiction as the
ultimate authority to be appealed to in all disputed educational
questions.)

Roth continues: "Padua had, like Bologna, dissection in the
fourteenth century. There is the record of a dissection made in the
year 1341, in which Gentilis made the discovery of a gall-stone."
(It is evidently not because the dissection was unusual, but because
the discovery was unusual, that this inc