tonio Musa Brasavola (sometimes
written Brasovola), whose years run with the century. His studies were
made with the famous Leonicenus at Ferrara. He became the physician in
ordinary and personal friend of Hercules II, Duke of Este, and
accompanied him to France when the Duke espoused the daughter of Louis
XII. He was at various times the physician to four Popes and was
called in consultation to Henry VIII of England and Francis I of
France. He devoted himself particularly to medical botany and
pharmacology and was one of the first to hold a professorship in these
subjects. He was well known for his life-saving practice of
tracheotomy and he restored _paracentesis thoracis_ as a standard
remedy. He introduced the use of _radix chinae_, a kind of smilax
related to sarsaparilla, and put _lignum guiaci_ into the pharmacology
of the day. He wrote a series of monographs on botanical subjects
which have given him an enduring place in the history of that time. A
distinguished group of men were near the Popes in Rome at this time
with whom Brasavola was in close relations. They included Eustachius
the great anatomist, Columbus, discoverer of the circulation in the
lungs, Caesalpinus and Fallopius, who was a professor at the
University of Bologna, that city being at this time in the Papal
States.

One of the great Renaissance physicians and surgeons well known in our
histories of medicine for an important contribution to the treatment
of gunshot wounds, is Alfonso Ferri, a Neapolitan, who, after some
years of professorship in surgery in Naples, became the physician of
Pope Paul III. His book, which is founded on his "experience at home
and at war," went through a number of editions at Rome, at Antwerp and
Frankfurt and other places, and he was evidently widely read and
considered an important authority. He invented some instruments for
the removal of bullets and has many practical hints with regard to the
treatment of gunshot wounds. He was the professor of surgery at the
Sapienza, {447} Rome, and has written a volume on the carunculae, or
hard multiplex tumors, which arise at the vesical neck.

Silvius Zeffiri, another of the physicians of Pope Paul III, is the
author of a volume on "Putrefaction or The Best Method of Protracting
Life," which was published at Rome in 1536. Zeffiri seems to have
anticipated the modern popular notion of the putrefactive conditions
in the human system as one of the most important factors in shor