Translating Learned Surgery1.

This essay explores the increasingly visible or strong relationship between educated surgeons and artisans that can be documented in vernacular translations of Latin surgery texts in the sixteenth century. We often consider the vernacular as a tool for broad dissemination, but vernacular translation was used by educated surgeons for more calculated, professional reasons. In vernacular texts, they began to articulate their role and responsibilities in urban settings (rather than military settings). This essay focuses on the Latin and Italian surgery texts of Giovanni Andrea della Croce, a Venetian, educated surgeon, who began to frame (in text and image) his work according to aspects of artisanal traditions.

Civility, comportment, and the anatomy theater: Girolamo Fabrici and his medical students in Renaissance Padua.

Public anatomies have been characterized as carnivalesque events: like the Carnival, they took place in January and February and celebrated bodily existence. However, in late sixteenth-century Padua and its famous anatomy theater, the annual, public anatomy was a formal, ceremonial event. Girolamo Fabrici, the leading anatomist, gave a philosophical presentation of his research, a presentation organized by topic rather than by the gradual dissection of corpses. For medical students, the annual anatomy and the theater itself encouraged silence, obedience, and docility, reinforcing the virtues that permeated the late humanist environment of Renaissance Padua.

A history of anatomy theaters in sixteenth-century Padua.

The history of anatomy includes not only professors and the support of their institutions but also medical students. Because medical students were quick to assess a teacher's pedagogy, their complaints tell us a great deal about the transition from Galenic to Aristotelian projects of anatomy. When Fabricius of Aquapendente instituted a new style of anatomical inquiry, one based on Aristotle and the search for universal principles, students repeatedly complained that his demonstrations did not provide technical education in structural anatomy (as demonstrations employing a hands-on, Galenic pedagogy did). Within the new anatomy theater (the second of its kind in Padua), however, students were persuaded to accept Fabricius's demonstrations. Fabricius's philosophical orientation combined with the formal atmosphere and aesthetic features of the new theater to create anatomy demonstrations that relied on orations and music for their structure (rather than on the progressive stages of human dissection). A place that emphasized a discourse of anatomy as the study of the "secrets of nature," the new theater so effectively publicized a new style of anatomy that a larger, more diverse group of spectators attended subsequent demonstrations and participated in the celebration of leading academic figures as well as the institution of the university.