in the transmission. Our earliest
knowledge of the teaching of medicine at Bologna is connected with a
contemporary of Dante, Taddeo Alderotti, who combined Arabian erudition
with the Greek spirit. He occupied a position of extraordinary
prominence, was regarded as the first citizen of Bologna and a public
benefactor exempt from the payment of taxes. That he should have
acquired wealth is not surprising if his usual fees were at the rate
at which he charged Pope Honorius IV, i.e., two hundred florins a day,
besides a "gratification" of six thousand florins.

The man who most powerfully influenced the study of medicine in Bologna
was Mundinus, the first modern student of anatomy. We have seen that
at the school of Salernum it was decreed that the human body should be
dissected at least once every five years, but it was with the greatest
difficulty that permission was obtained for this purpose. It seems
probable that under the strong influence of Taddeo there was an
occasional dissection at Bologna, but it was not until Mundinus
(professor from 1306 to 1326) took the chair that the study of anatomy
became popular. The bodies were usually those of condemned criminals,
but in the year 1319 there is a record of a legal procedure against four
medical students for body-snatching--the first record, as far as I know,
of this gruesome practice. In 1316, Mundinus issued his work on anatomy,
which served as a text-book for more than two hundred years. He quotes
from Galen the amusing reasons why a man should write a book: "Firstly,
to satisfy his own friends; secondly, to exercise his best mental
powers; and thirdly, to be saved from the oblivion incident to old age."
Scores of manuscripts of his work must have existed, but they are now
excessively rare in Italy. The book was first printed at Pavia in 1478,
in a small folio without figures. It was very often reprinted in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The quaint illustration shows us the
mediaeval method of teaching anatomy: the lecturer sitting on a chair
reading from Galen, while a barber surgeon, or an "Ostensor," opens the
cavities of the body.

I have already referred to the study of medicine by women at Salernum.
Their names are also early met with in the school of Bologna. Mundinus
is said to have had a valuable assistant, a young girl, Alessandra
Giliani, an enthusiastic dissector, who was the first to practice the
injection of the blood vessels with colored liqui