ABSTRACT
This chapter first presents Falloppia’s general approach to the diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment of diseases, based on the advice he gave to his students on how to proceed when they were consulted about a specific case. Drawing, in particular, on student notes on the opinions Falloppia expressed orally in the Paduan collegia, where one professor after the other gave his judgment on a patient’s disease, it then sketches the basic medical concepts that guided Falloppia’s practice. They show that, like his colleagues, he heavily relied on the notion of a peccant, morbid matter, which often settled in certain parts of the body with more or less specific pathological effects and therefore had to be evacuated. Only two somewhat peculiar characteristics of Falloppia’s approach can be identified, namely the prominent place of thermal springs in his therapeutic advice and his stress on the precise anatomical location of the pathological process in the body.
