Berengario da Carpi was one of the most famous physicians of the 16th century, a recognized master of anatomy and surgery, an emblematic "Renaissance man" who combined his medical experience and engineering knowledge to design new surgical instruments, and effectively used the arts of writing and drawing to describe state-of-the-art medicine and provide illustrations of anatomical structures. His greatest contribution to medicine was to write the most important work on craniocerebral surgery of the 16th century, the Tractatus de Fractura Calvae sive Cranei (Treatise on Fractures of the Calvaria or Cranium), in which he described an entire set of surgical instruments to be used for cranial operations to treat head traumas that became a reference for later generations of physicians. This was a systematic treatise covering the mechanisms, classification, and medical and surgical treatment of head traumas, and can be considered a milestone in the history of neurotraumatology.
Although by 1931 I. Ph. Semmelweis' achievements and the tragedy of his life had been given their due place in the history of mankind, Alexander Fränkel, formerly Theodor Billroth's assistant and later his biographer, critically stated that the discoverer of the causes of puerperal fever should have defended his discovery with facts rather than with fanaticism. It was only a few years after Semmelweis' death, for instance, that Billroth made laborious experiments. Billroth's work on Coccobacteria had important implications and even influenced Robert Koch, although his hypotheses did not really predict the pathogenic and specific nature of microbes. In 1847 Semmelweis postulated his theory; ie, that the pathological-anatomical changes which he observed in the bodies of the women who died in childbed, in their newborn infants, and in the autopsy findings on his friend Jakob Kolletschka were an entity, morphologically and clinically. He summed them up under the concept of pyemia. Even though Semmelweis was continually abhorred by the evident statistics and would have been able to prove his discovery through animal experiments, he primarily took to the pen to defend his opinion vehemently. Only the clinical facts proved him right during his lifetime; the triumph of bacteriology which began after his death made him not only the “savior of mothers” but also a genial ancestor of bacteriology.
I n 1747, Gerhard van Swieten (1700-1772), personal physician to Empress Maria Theresia and reformer of medical education in Austria, founded a bonne école de chirurgie in Vienna. He invited the Florentine Natalis Giuseppe Pallucci (1719-1797), whom he had specially trained in Paris, France, to Vienna to assist him with the school. However, although van Swieten was highly successful as a reformer of the medical curriculum, his attempt to transform surgery from a craft into an academic discipline failed. 1 Emperor Joseph II, son of Empress Maria Theresia and successor to the throne, also attempted to raise the standing of surgery. In 1785, he founded a school for military surgeons later called Joseph's Academy. Joseph II's protochirurgus, Giovanni Alessandro Brambilla (1728-1800), became the first director of the school, which was modeled on the Academie Royale de Chirurgie in Paris. The Josephinum, a building in beautiful classical style, still exists today in Vienna.
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