Dimitrios Mavrokordatos (1811-1839), the eve of the Hellenic School of Anatomy in modern era Greece

Abstract

Dimitrios Alexandrou Mavrokordatos was the first regular professor of Anatomy and Physiology of the Hellenic “Othonian” University of Athens. He had completed his studies in Germany and thus he had been chosen to stimulate the empirical physicians of Greece to awaken. He died young, but his passion was so great that he had published a masterpiece in the new Greece, “On the anatomy of the human body”, and left his fortune for his pupils, even though they had rebelled against him sometime before his death. With his teaching and book he established a kind of Greek “nomina anatomica” which formed the basis for medicine in the newly born country.