L’Arte Medica

Description

“The eight-hundredth anniversary is an opportunity to reconsider the role of the University in the creation and dissemination of knowledge and to enhance the international dimension that has been intrinsic to it since its foundation in 1222. A narrative spanning eight centuries that we entrust to the new generations, in the hope that the university will continue to preserve its central role in building a healthy, free, democratic, and sustainable world.”

From the presentation of the work by Daniela Mapelli and Annalisa Oboe

This volume reconstructs a story spanning more than a millennium, if one considers the remote, Eastern origins of Western medicine. This body of knowledge also reached the medieval Studium of Padua, where it took root and flourished. The Paduan School of Medicine has been, in the past and still is today, a forge of excellence. On the occasion of the eight hundred years of the University, celebrated in 2022, this volume pays tribute to the medical art of Padua from its distant origins to the present day.

In these dense pages, the result of an extraordinary work of synthesis, it is possible to retrace the entire arc of developments and advances in medical knowledge. Predominantly political circumstances favored its growth, which was able to flourish thanks to the presence of professors and students — the former determined to teach, the latter to learn. An extraordinary group of scholars who, in Padua, made the history of medicine, destined to spread both eastward and westward. Just as the achievements of Paduan anatomy knew no boundaries, so too did the other disciplines — physiology, pathology, and clinical practice — suffer no barriers of any kind.

Medical and scientific knowledge, which constituted and still represents the intangible heritage of the Paduan School of Medicine, was formed through processes of cross-fertilization, encounters and clashes with knowledge from other traditions and other universities. The history of medicine in Padua evokes that of tolerance and freedom of thought, precious ingredients of social progress. If, after the fall of the Republic of Venice in 1797, the School had to submit to foreign dominations before becoming Italian, it nonetheless always remained in contact with the vibrant scientific community of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At San Francesco Hospital and in university lecture halls, the advances developing rapidly between Berlin, Paris, London, and the more recent non-European medical schools soon arrived.

In these pages, the reader will find the story of a complex universe, made up of things and people united by ingenuity and care for the patient. Medical art, when it cannot prevent illness, seeks to cure it or to relieve it.

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Perfect for...

For those eager to discover the scientific wonders that the city of Padua has to offer.