ion of Berengar's work, and it did
not come.

A fifth great student of anatomy during the fifteenth century was
Benivieni, who has been neglected in the ordinary histories of anatomy
because his work concerned itself almost exclusively with
pathological, not with normal anatomy. In our increasing interest in
pathology during the nineteenth century, he has very properly come in
for his due share of attention. Professor Allbutt, in his address on
the Historical Relations of Medicine and Surgery down to the Sixteenth
Century, declares that Benivieni should be revered as the forerunner
of Morgagni and as one of the greatest physicians of the late Middle
Ages. Benivieni's life occupies almost exactly the second half of the
fifteenth century, as he was born probably in 1448, and died in 1502.
Allbutt says:--

"He was not a professor, but an eminent practitioner in Florence, at
a period when, in spite of its Platonism, Florence on the whole was
doing most for science; for as Bologna turned to law, Padua turned
to humanism and philosophy. He was one of those fresh and
independent observers who, like Mondeville, was oppressed by the
authority neither of Arab nor Greek."

We are not interested, however, at the present time in what he
accomplished for surgery, though there are a number of features of his
work, including the crushing of stone in the bladder and his puncture
of the hymen for retained menses, as well as his methods of division
and slow extension of the cicatricial contractions {84} resulting from
burns near the elbow, which place him among the most ingenious and
original of surgical thinkers. It is his interest in dissection that
commends him to us here. He must have done a very great number of
autopsies.

His interest in the causes of disease was so great that he seems to
have taken every possible opportunity to search out changes in organs
which would account for symptoms that he had observed. His place in
anatomy and the history of pathology has not been properly appreciated
in this matter, and Professor Allbutt claims for him the title of
Father of Pathology, rather than for those to whom it has been given,
and demands for his work done in Florence during the second half of
the fifteenth century the credit of laying the real foundation-stones
of the great science of pathological anatomy. Unfortunately, he died
comparatively young and without having had time properly to publish
his own contributi