ABSTRACT
The anatomical studies established at the University of Valencia in 1502 were significant and unique in a number of different ways, and were crucial to the later development of this new practice elsewhere in the Iberian Peninsula. Consequently, the timeframe from 1550 to 1600, which represents the chronological span of later case studies, is here extrapolated back to the early 1500s. University anatomy was not only first practised and formally approved in Valencia half a century before the leading universities of Castile, but numerous Valencian anatomists were also dispatched to universities beyond the Aragonese borders. The first anatomists to establish this practice at the Castilian Universities of Salamanca and Alcalá de Henares were all born and educated in Valencia, a fact celebrated by the Valencian chronicler Caspar Escolano in an early seventeenth-century account of the history of his native city: ‘From our University and medical doctors derive the knowledge of anatomy throughout the rest of Spain. It was unknown in Castile until Valencian Doctors came to teach it in Salamanca and Alcalá.’ 1
