July 6, 2023
Alessandra Giliani: 14th-century Italian anatomist
Episode Description
There’s a persistent myth in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy about Alessandra Giliani, a 14th century girl who defied the laws of church and state to attend medical school. The only hard evidence comes in the form of illuminated manuscripts depicting an assistant to anatomist Mondino de Luzzi who appears to be a cross-dressed woman. In this episode, associate producer Mackenzie Tatananni speaks with author Barbara Quick about Alessandra’s pursuit of anatomical research.
Katie is co-founder and co-executive producer of The Lost Women of Science Initiative. She is the author of six non-fiction books and one novel, and was a longtime reporter for The New York Times. She is at work on her second novel.
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Mackenzie is a Northwestern University Merit Scholar who is currently pursuing her master’s degree at the Medill School of Journalism. She graduated summa cum laude from Tufts University in 2022 with a B.A. in English and Biopsychology, and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa the same year. Mackenzie comes to Lost Women of Science from Paradiso Media, where she worked with the Development team to diversify operations in the United States.
Barbara Quick, a novelist and poet, is the author of the 2007 international favorite Vivaldi’s Virgins, still in print, translated into 13 languages and currently in development as a television mini-series. Quick was awarded the 2020 Blue Light Press Poetry Prize for her debut chapbook, The Light on Sifnos. Quick’s fourth novel, What Disappears, was published by Regal House in May 2022. One of her poems, “The Algorithm,” was published in the May 2022 issue of Scientific American. Her 2010 novel from HarperTeen, A Golden Web—about the 14th century teenage anatomist Alessandra Giliani—continues to attract fans of historical fiction.
Further Reading:
Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (1978: Knopf). A fascinating and detailed look into the day-to-day perils and joys of people who lived in medieval Europe.
Thomas Cahill, Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science, and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe (2006: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday). For nearly 1,000 years, the learning of the ancient Greeks, Romans and Arabs was locked away in the religious cloisters of Medieval Europe. And yet within those monasteries and nunneries, certain brave individuals tended the embers of art, science and social change that flamed to life during the Renaissance.
Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (1990: University of Chicago Press) For those who want to take a deeper dive, this book shines a light on Western medicine’s earliest day. What’s surprising is how much–and how little–knowledge and practice have changed! Visit the anatomical theater at the University of Padova Medical School and you’ll see a very familiar collection of surgical tools.
Episode Transcript
EPISODE 1: Alessandra Giliani: 14th-century Italian anatomist
BARBARA QUICK: There was a widely circulated story about this young girl, and the only way she could attend medical school in Italy at the time was to dress as a man.
KATIE HAFNER: I'm Katie Hafner, and this is Lost Women of Science From Our Inbox, a brand new series of mini episodes that you'll be hearing from now until, I'm not sure, maybe 2050. Because our list of women lost to history is long. On a regular basis, we're going to give you a brief burst of one woman's story that came to us from you, our listeners.
We're kicking off the series with an intriguing tip we received recently from Barbara Quick, a poet and novelist in the San Francisco Bay area. She wanted to tell us about Alessandra Giliani, a young woman who lived in Italy in the 14th century doing something unheard of: studying medicine.
If you don't find that stunning, consider this: most medical schools in the United States didn't start admitting women until 500 years later, around 1900, and Harvard Medical School had its first female graduates soon after World War II. So when the story of Alessandra Giliani floated into our inbox, we took notice.
Alessandra was thought to be an anatomist, dissecting human cadavers to better understand the body's internal systems and organs, and she did it in disguise. Quick's novel, A Golden Web, is a fictional account of Alessandra's life and work. Lost Women of Science associate producer Mackenzie Tatananni spoke with Barbara.
BARBARA QUICK: Alessandra was just 19 years old when she died, and it just makes me realize what a brief life this was, how consequential and how difficult to be someone as brilliant and precocious and determined as Alessandra was.
MACKENZIE TATANANNI: That's Barbara, telling the story as far as she knows it.
BARBARA QUICK: She lived, reputedly, 700 years ago, in San Giovanni in Persiceto, and also in Bologna.
MACKENZIE TATANANNI: Barbara tells me that she stumbled upon Alessandra's story serendipitously.
BARBARA QUICK: I found her by accident in the course of looking into the life and work of another female anatomist who lived in Bologna 400 years later. But what happened when I turned up in Bologna and started doing my library research there was that I found evidence of another female anatomist, Alessandra Giliani, who died in the 1320s.
MACKENZIE TATANANNI: Barbara found evidence of Giliani's existence during a visit to a library in the town of San Giovanni in Persiceto in Northern Italy.
BARBARA QUICK: This librarian was able to let me examine these fantastic illuminated manuscripts of the time. And part of what they showed was the anatomy lessons given by Mondino de Luzzi.
And I saw clearly a young woman who was cross-dressed, who was assisting at the lessons. And as I looked into it more, I found that there was a widely circulated story that was written in the 18th century about this young girl who pursued medical school, and the only way she could attend medical school in Italy at the time was to dress as a man.
MACKENZIE TATANANNI: Dressed as a man. Giliani was believed to be a prosector, the person who does the cutting up of a cadaver during lecture demonstrations. Using a method of her own invention, she also challenged commonly held beliefs about the circulatory system.
BARBARA QUICK: For centuries, it was accepted as fact that blood passes from the right ventricle to the left ventricle of the heart through, quote unquote, “invisible pores in the septum.”
Everyone believed that the heart itself was not a muscle and did not have a pumping function. The thought was that blood simply passed through it, which, of course, is completely wrong. The 17th century British medical researcher William Harvey, also at the University of Padua, is credited with finally setting the record straight about how the pulmonary circulatory system actually works.
MACKENZIE TATANANNI: But–
BARBARA QUICK: Written records from the 18th century chronicle the life and accomplishments of Alessandra Giliani, who reputedly carried out anatomical research that anticipated William Harvey's discoveries by some 300 years.
She developed a special system of making melted wax that was dyed. She used two colors, red and blue, to model the circulatory system. If it hadn't been against the laws of the Church and the government at the time for women to work in this capacity, many things would've changed and science would have progressed more quickly than it did.
MACKENZIE TATANANNI: Barbara Quick has reason to believe that the Church burned Giliani's work following her death, destroying nearly all traces of the young anatomist.
BARBARA QUICK: Somehow, if we had a time machine and could go back and give some kind of cloak of protection to Alessandra in her work, you know, who knows what she would've accomplished?
MACKENZIE TATANANNI: Yet one question continues to nag at historians. Did Giliani actually exist? Barbara Quick says, it's all a matter of choosing whose version of history you want to believe.
BARBARA QUICK: Well, you know, the most strident naysayers that I encountered in Italy in the medical historical community were all males. And I just think it's just that, you know, standard line about, oh, a woman couldn't have possibly done this.
MACKENZIE TATANANNI: But as we've learned, it is more than possible that a woman did this. And we'll just keep on researching and digging up their stories because there are plenty to tell. As we like to say at Lost Women of Science, we're not mad. We're curious.
KATIE HAFNER: And if you know of a female scientist who's been lost to history, go to our website to send us an email at lost women of science dot org. You'll also find the phone number to our tip line. We love getting calls to the tip line.
This episode of Lost Women of Science From Our Inbox was produced by Mackenzie Tatananni. Our sound engineer was Alex Sugiura. Lizzy Younan composes our music. We get our funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and Schmidt Futures. PRX distributes us and our publishing partner is Scientific American. This is Lost Women of Science. And I'm Katie Hafner.
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