ABSTRACT
Taking the biographical data which Favaro, Di Pietro, and others have assembled in their extensive research in the relevant archives as its starting point, this chapter traces the different stations of Falloppia’s life, his humanistic education and clerical position in Modena, his years in Ferrara, first as a student and then as a lecturer, his sojourn in Pisa (1548–1551), and his final appointment, in 1551, as a lecturer of anatomy, surgery, and materia medica in Padua. It devotes particular attention to the unresolved issues such as Falloppia’s year of birth (1522 or 1523) and how he acquired the considerable anatomical and medical skills he possessed already by the end of 1544, when he performed a public anatomy in Modena, allegedly without any previous training. It is certain that he never studied with Vesalius but it seems quite likely that he studied medicine in Ferrara already in the early 1540s.
