Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/436

 mass of useful extracts from the writings of the best authors. In 1684 he was assigned to the duty of teaching anatomy at the Sapienza, and for thirteen years he filled this post with great credit to himself; Malpighi being one of those who took pleasure in following his lectures. He had scarcely attained his thirtieth year when he was honored by being appointed Physician-in-Chief and Privy Councilor to Pope Innocent the Eleventh; and soon afterward he was made a Canon of the Church of Saint Lawrence, the main purpose of which appointment was to provide him with a suitable income. On the death of the Pope in 1689 he resigned the latter office, in order that he might have more leisure and freedom to pursue his professional duties. Subsequently he became the regular medical attendant, first of Pope Innocent the Twelfth and afterward of Pope Clement the Eleventh. He died on January 21, 1720.

Von Haller speaks of Lancisi as "a physician who was most highly esteemed by Pope Clement the Eleventh, who was very learned and very philanthropic, and who loved to give aid to the afflicted and to prevent litigation by wise counsels." It was Lancisi also, as I have stated on a previous page, who discovered at Rome, in the possession of the heirs of the artist Pini who made the original drawings, the copper plates which Eustachius had ordered nearly two hundred years earlier, and which were to have been used by this celebrated anatomist in the production of a most beautiful set of anatomical illustrations.

The two most important original treatises published by Lancisi bear the following titles: "De motu cordis et aneurysmatibus" (on the movements of the heart and on aneurysms), Rome, 1728 (a later edition in 1745); and "De subitaneis mortibus Libri II" (on sudden deaths), Rome, 1707 (also later editions).

Botany and Botanical Gardens.—The Egyptians, the Persians, the inhabitants of India and China, and the ancient Greeks accumulated a great mass of information