ABSTRACT
The extent to which post-mortems had a place in early modern medical education and were perceived as relevant for medical practice has hardly received historians’ attention, partly because of the widespread assumption that autopsies had no use in the context of humoral pathology. This however clashes with the growing practice of dissections as documented by a variety of medical texts. Drawing on the notebooks produced in mid- and late sixteenth-century Padua by medical students and on published collections of medical cases, this chapter argues that post-mortem observations were much valued by students and medical practitioners and were frequently discussed even in anatomical lectures by teachers such as Gabriele Falloppia and Girolamo Fabrici d’Acquapendente. Post-mortems promised to help identify the – often localised – pathological processes hidden inside the body and thus to make a ‘radical’ cure possible in similar future cases, a cure, that is, that attacked the disease at its very roots. The chapter presents a range of post-mortem findings from medical observations and student notes and explains how they were taken to make sense within the framework of humoral pathology.</abstract>
