ons to medical science. Professor Allbutt says:--

"The little book _De abditis causis morborum_ (brief title), was not
published in any form by Antony Benivieni himself, but posthumously
by his brother Jerome, who found these precious notes in Antony's
desk after his death, and with the hearty cooperation of a friend
competent in the subject, published them in 1506 in a form which no
doubt justly merits our admiration. Benivieni's chief fame for us is
far more than all this; it is that he was the founder of
pathological anatomy. So far as I know, he was the first to make the
custom and to declare the need of necropsy to reveal what he called
not exactly "the secret causes," but the hidden causes of diseases.
Before Vesalius, before Eustachius, he opened the bodies of the dead
as {85} deliberately and clear-sightedly as any pathologist in the
spacious time of Baillie, Bright and Addison. Virchow, in his
address at Rome, said Morgagni was the first pathological anatomist
who, instead of asking What is disease? asked Where is it?"

But Benivieni asked this question plainly before Morgagni: "Not
only," says he, "must we observe the disease, but also with more
diligence search out the seat of it." The precept is so important, I
will quote the original words: "Oportet igitur medicum non solum
morbum cognoscere, sed et locum in quo fit, diligentius
perscrutari."

Among the pathological reports are morbus coxae (two cases); biliary
calculus (two cases); abscess of the mesentery, thrombosis of the
mesenteric vessels; stenosis of the intestine; some remarkable cardiac
cases, several of "polypus" (clot, which was a will-of-the-wisp to the
elder pathologists); scirrhus of the pylorus, and probably another
case in the colon; ruptured bowel (two cases); caries of ribs with
exposure of the heart. He gives a good description of senile gangrene
which even Pare did not discriminate. He seems to have had remarkable
success in obtaining necropsies; concerning one fatal case he says
plaintively, "Sed nescio qua superstitione versi negantibus cognatis,"
etc. Of another he says, "cadavere publicae utilitatis gratia inciso"
(the case of cancer of the stomach). With this admirable and original
leader, Italian medicine of the fifteenth century closes gloriously,
to slumber for some fifty years, till the dayspring of the new
learning. Of his work Malpighi says, and apparently with truth, "up to
now it