Alessandra Giliani

Template:Short description Template:Expand Italian Alessandra Giliani (1307 – 26 March 1326) is best known as the first woman to be recorded in historical documents as practicing anatomy and pathology. She's reputed to have worked as a prosector, preparing corpses for anatomical study, under the famed anatomist Mondino de' Liuizzi at the University of Bologna. However, all evidence of her work has been either lost or destroyed. Giliani is mentioned in Michele Medici's 1857 history of the Bolognese school of anatomy, but some argue she was invented by the writer Alessandro Macchiavelli in the 18th century. Her purported contributions to anatomy are significant nonetheless.

Early Life and Education

Giliani is believed to have been born in 1307, in San Giovanni in Persiceto, in the Italian province of Emilia-Romagna. She is said to have served as an assistant to de' Liuizzi specializing in dissection demonstrations as a prosector, an anatomist who prepares corpses for dissection in academic settings. Given her reported death at the age of 19, her involvement in anatomical studies would have occurred during her late teens. In 1316, de' Liuizzi published a seminal text on the subject entitled, Anathomia corporis humani. The earliest edition of the work was printed in Padua between 1475 and 1478.

File:Mondino - Anathomia, 1541 - 3022668.tif

Anathomia illustration, Mondino dei Liuzzi, published in 1541

Evidence of Giliani's activities at the University of Bologna is scarce. Aside from her mention in Michele Medici's 1857 text, there are no contemporary records documenting her life or work. Some historians speculate that she may have disguised herself as a man to circumvent legal restrictions against women in medicine and academia. Eighteenth-century images of Mondino de' Liuizzi's anatomy lessons depict him accompanied by a young person who appears to be a female dressed in men's clothing, whom some believe might represent Giliani. There is also speculation that records of her work were destroyed by the church after her death, removing all traces of her accomplishments.

Research and Career

Despite the aura of mystery surrounding her existence, Giliani is credited with being a brilliant prosector, preparing bodies for anatomical analysis. She reportedly developed a method of injecting colored dye, possibly made from melted wax, into the vessels of cadavers to better visualize their structure. This technique provided a more detailed understanding of blood circulation, prefiguring William Harvey's work 300 years later.

During Giliani's time, medical understanding of blood circulation was limited. Many researchers believed that blood diffused from the right to left ventricle through "invisible pores in the septum." If the accounts of Giliani's work are accurate, she may have helped document the circulatory pathways centuries before Harvey formally described the heart as a pump circulating blood throughout the body.

Personal Life

According to some accounts, Giliani may have been engaged to Otto Angenius before her death at the age of 19.

Legacy

Some scholars consider her to be a fiction invented in the sixteenth century by  Alessandro Machiavelli (1693–1766) whilst others hold that the participation of a woman in anatomy at that time caused her to be edited out of history.

Barbara Quick's novel, A Golden Web, published by HarperTeen in 2010, is historical fiction based on the life and times of Alessandra Giliani. Giliani is among the 1,038 women honored in Judy Chicago's renowned art installation The Dinner Party.