ABSTRACT
While anatomical studies had been known in the Aragonese cities of Lleida, Valencia, Zaragoza and Barcelona since the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, there is no evidence of similar practices at the University of Salamanca until the mid-sixteenth century. Yet despite lacking previous experience in the teaching and research of anatomy, this institution, the most prominent of the Castilian universities, launched a series of extensive reforms and initiatives in the 1550s and 1560s, which aimed to integrate anatomy and surgery into its medical faculty. The University of Salamanca was at that time perhaps the largest university in Europe, with 70 permanent chairs and almost 7,000 students during its peak in the 1580s. 1 The documentary source material from the university archive provides useful details regarding the initial phases of the establishment of chairs in anatomy, and later in surgery, and of the statutory and architectural alterations which enabled the incorporation of the new practices into the curriculum. The university’s detailed administrative sources contrast with the surprisingly few publications produced by its first teachers and students of anatomy.
