Mondino de Luzzi's Anothomia

Bodies decayed quickly, so dissections at Bologna were held in the coldest weeks, in January or February, and ran for four days and nights. The abdomen, whose organs putrefied first, came on the first day, then the chest, the head and the limbs. Mondino de Luzzi's Anothomia, which he wrote in 1316, follows the same order, from the abdominal cavity to the head. For each organ it gives the position, the relations to neighbouring structures, the shape, size, texture and parts.

Mondino was born in Bologna, probably around 1270, and studied under Taddeo Alderotti. Human dissection may already have been practised there in Alderotti's time, but Mondino made it part of his anatomy course. In 1315 he conducted a public dissection of an executed criminal, probably a woman, before students and townspeople. In his chapter on the womb he mentioned dissections almost every month, of executed criminals and probably of poor people who had died in hospitals, and also of sows. Not every body came through official channels: in 1319 four students were arrested for taking a corpse from a grave to their master, Alberto, a lecturer at the university.

Mondino sat on a raised chair and read aloud from Galen while assistants did the work. A demonstrator cut, and an ostensor pointed out each part with a wand. It is not certain that he ever dissected with his own hands. The book repeats many of Galen's mistakes and adds some of its own. It describes the womb as divided into seven cells, a doctrine falsely attributed to Galen; after reading Galen's On the Use of the Parts in the Latin translation Niccolò da Reggio made in 1317, Mondino dropped the idea in lectures recorded in 1319.

The Anothomia was used in several European universities until the middle of the 16th century. It was first printed at Pavia in 1478 and was soon included in the Fasciculus medicinae, a collection of medical texts. Mondino died in Bologna in 1326, between 17 February, when he made his will while gravely ill, and 15 May, when his heirs listed his goods. The story that Alessandra Giliani of San Giovanni in Persiceto assisted at his dissections was invented by the Bolognese forger Alessandro Macchiavelli in 1739.