Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/299

 by his ecclesiastical foes, largely due perhaps to his open and courageous defense of the Averroism which they so much hated. There is very little doubt that he would have been burned at the stake about this time if the friendly disposition of the Popes and the mighty influence possessed by the city of Padua had not shielded him from this danger. In 1314 the newly founded school of Treviso invited Pietro d'Abano to occupy the Chair of Medicine and Physics, and he accepted; but he was taken ill and died during the following year. Shortly before the occurrence of this event he was placed on trial for heresy by the Inquisition, and the proceedings were continued even after his death. Indeed, according to one account of this famous trial, not only was the charge sustained, but the prescribed penalty was inflicted either upon the disinterred corpse or upon an effigy of the condemned man. One century later, the city of Padua erected a permanent memorial in Pietro d'Abano's honor.

The principal work of this remarkable physician—viz., the "Conciliator differentiarium philosophorum et praecipue medicorum"—was first printed at Venice in 1471. (It is said to be one of the earliest printed books known.) It was a most popular treatise, as is shown by the fact that between the year last mentioned and 1621 it passed through a number of editions. Of the other treatises which he wrote—some seven or eight in all—it will be sufficient to mention here that one alone to which reference has already been made in the preceding account, viz., the work entitled "Expositio problematum Aristotelis" (Mantua, 1475, and Paris, 1520).

At this early period in the history of the Padua Medical School there were one or two other men who attained a considerable degree of celebrity for the excellence of the work which they did, either as authors or as class-room teachers. A brief account of one of these, Aegidius Corboliensis, has already been given on a preceding page, and it seems only fair that I should furnish here similar brief accounts of some of the others—Gentile da Foligno, Massilio and Galeazzo de St. Sophia, Giacomo and Giovanni