Mondino de' Luzzi (1275-1326)

Mondino de' Luzzi - Italian physician who marked the revival of medical practice in the West following the Dark Ages. Arabian and Persian doctors, the greatest of whom was Avicenna, had continued the Hippocratic and Galenic traditions, but their works remained in the framework of Greek medicine and did not produce new methodologies. Although Mondino de' Luzzi is historically important as one of the first physicians of note following the Dark Ages, his medical procedures were, in fact, a step backwards. He taught his students while seated on an elevated chair, and employed a barber surgeon to perform the actual dissections. He believed in dissecting from the inside out, since internal organs rot the most quickly. In the process, he inevitably destroyed parts of the body in the process. Furthermore, Mondino de' Luzzi blindly accepted Galen's anatomy, even when a simple dissection would have conclusively proven him to be at odds with actual observations. He wrote a compendium of anatomy, which was basically a guide for understanding Galen. This represented a regression from scientific procedures, and stands out in sharp distinction to Grosseteste's and Roger Bacon's extensive experimentation and questioning of established authorities which were being undertaken in approximately the same period. Unfortunately for medicine, as well as science at large, Mondino de' Luzzi's methods became standard practice in medical schools until they were eventually replaced by the sound observational and experimental practices of Vesalius.

Mondino divides the body into three cavities (ventres), the upper containing the animal members, as the head, the lower containing the natural members, and the middle containing the spiritual members. He first describes the anatomy of the lower cavity or the abdomen, then proceeds to the middle or thoracic organs, and concludes with the upper, comprising the head and its contents and appendages. His general manner is to notice shortly the situation and shape or distribution of textures or membranes, and then to mention the disorders to which they are subject. The peritoneum he describes under the name of siphac, in imitation of the Arabians, the omentum under that of zirbus, and the mesentery or eucharus as distinct from both. In speaking of the intestines he treats first of the rectum, then the colon, the left or sigmoid flexure of which, as well as the transverse arch and its connection with the stomach, he particularly remarks; then the caecum or monoculus, after this the small intestines in general under the heads of ileum and jejunum, and latterly the duodenum, making in all six bowels. The liver and its vessels are minutely, if not accurately, examined; and the cava, under the name chilis, a corruption from the Greek koile, is trcated at length, with the emulgents and kidneys.

His anatomy of the heart is wonderfully accurate; and it is a remarkable fact, which seems to be omitted by all subsequent authors, that his description contains the rudiments of the circulation of the blood. "Postea vero versus pulmonem est aliud orificium venae arterialis, quae portat sanguinem ad pulmonem a corde; quia cum pulmo deserviat cordi secundum modum dictum, ut ei recompenset, cor ei transmittit sanguinem per hanc venam, quae vocatur vena arterialis; est vena, quia portat sanguinem, et arterialis, quia habet duas tunicas; et habet duas tunicas, primo quia vadit ad membrum quod existit in continuo motu, et secundo quia portat sanguinem valde subtilem et cholericum." The merit of these distinctions, however, he afterwards destroys by repeating the old assertion that the left ventricle ought to contain spirit or air, which it generates from the blood. His osteology of the skull is erroneous. In his account of the cerebral membranes, though short, he notices the principal characters of the dura mater. He describes shortly the lateral ventricles, with their anterior and posterior cornua, and the choroid plexus as a blood-red substance like a long worm. He then speaks of the third or middle ventricle, and one posterior, which seems to correspond with the fourth; and describes the infundibulum under the names of lacuna and emboton. In the base of the organ he remarks, first, two mammillary caruncles, the optic nerves, which he reckons the first pair; the oculomuscular, which he accounts the second; the third, which appears to be sixth of the moderns; the fourth; the fifth, evidently the seventh; a sixth, the nervus vagus; and a seventh, which is the ninth of the moderns. Notwithstanding the misrepresentations into which this early anatomist was betrayed, his book is valuable, and has been illustrated by the successive commentaries of Alessandro Achillini, Jacopo Berengario and Johann Dryander (1500-1560).