of human
anatomy, was to re-establish the practical pursuit of study on the
human cadaver as the common privilege of the skilled physician, and was
to engrave his own name deeply on the records of medicine."

Under this worthy compatriot and contemporary of the great Florentines,
Mondino was inspired to be the teacher that did so much for Bologna.
Until recent years it has usually been the custom to give too much
significance to the work of the men whose names stand out most
prominently in the early history of departments of the intellectual
life. Mondino's reputation has shared in this exaggerative tendency to
some extent, hence the necessity for realizing what was accomplished
before his time and the fact that he only stands as the culmination of a
progressive period. Carlyle spoke of Dante as the man in whom "ten
silent centuries found a voice." The centuries, however, were only
silent because the moderns did not know how to listen to their message.
We know now that every country in Europe had a great contributor to
literature in the century before Dante. The Cid, the Arthur Legends, the
Nibelungen, the Troubadours, naturally led up to Dante. He was only the
culmination of a great period of literature. We know now that men had
worked in art before Cimabue and Giotto, and had done impressive work
that made for the progress of art. These names, however, have come to
represent in many minds the sort of solitary phenomena that Dante has
seemed sometimes even to scholars.

Because Mondino did such good work in medical teaching it is sometimes
declared, even in rather serious histories, that he was the first to
accomplish anything in his department, and that before his time there is
a blank. Some historians, for instance, have insisted that Mondino was
the first to do human dissections, and that he did at most but two or
three. Only those who are unacquainted with the magnificent development
of surgery that took place during the preceding century, the evidence
for which is so abundantly given in modern historians of medicine and
especially in Gurlt's great work on the history of surgery, from which
we have quoted enough to give a good idea of the extent to which the
movement went, are likely to accept any such declaration. There could
not have been all that successful surgery without much dissection not
only of animals but also of human bodies. The teaching of dissection was
not regularly organized until Mondino's time, b