Sensata Veritas: L'affiorare dell'anatomia patologica, ancora innominata, in scritti di anatomisti del '500 (review)

In three brief chapters the pathologist Giorgio Weber considers the evidence for observations of pathological anatomy recorded in the works of, respectively, Andreas Vesalius, Niccolò Massa, and Realdo Colombo. Weber notes that some of Vesalius's few remarks on the subject resulted from observations made in the course of casual encounters rather than from dissection. Moreover, Vesalius's greatest expertise was in osteology; his accounts of other parts of the body were much more compressed —and notwithstanding their polemical and innovative aspects, for the most part much more traditional —than his presentation of the bones. Nevertheless, Weber commends some observations of various forms of pathology in Vesalius's chapter on the spleen (De humani corporis fabrica 5.9).

By contrast, in the two following chapters Weber calls attention to the considerable record of observations at autopsy both in Massa's Liber introductorius anatomiae (1536) and in book 15, "On things that are rarely found in anatomy" of Realdo Colombo's De re anatomica (1559). These autopsies were performed on individuals of various ages, social positions, and conditions of health: that is, not only on young men, such as the executed criminals who constituted most of Vesalius's dissection subjects. In Weber's view, both these works thus contain substantial evidence of interest in what would come to be called pathological anatomy. In previous works, notably his valuable studies of Antonio Benivieni, Weber has insisted on the significance for the history of anatomy of evidence of autopsy and of interest in the rare or pathological (as distinct from dissections performed in the schools for purposes of instruction in basic anatomy). This is an important insight, which now also informs other recent work in the history of Renaissance and early modern medicine (for example, by Katharine Park, not discussed in the work under review).

The largest part of the volume is taken up by a complete transcription, made by Emanuela Brusegan, of the Venice, 1536 edition of Massa's Liber introductorius anatomiae. Historians of medicine and of Italian Renaissance intellectual and cultural history will welcome the availability of an inexpensive modern presentation of the Latin text of Massa's work.