The new dissecting room, 7 centuries old

Abstract

After a thirty-year gap, the Bologna University Anatomy School has resumed cadaver dissection as part of its anatomy teaching and research programme. The School is equipped with a modern dissecting room named after expert anatomist professor Giovanni Mazzotti, and boasts a rigorous body donor project. Anatomic dissection on human cadavers was the hallmark of Bologna’s Medical School in the early XIV century and paved the way to modern anatomy as it is known today. Human cadaver dissection was also the key feature in the second half of the XVIII century when the Bologna School made a major contribution to what was to become the conceptual framework of medical practice, the paradigm of anatomic pathology. This concept was to transform anatomy from a preparatory and subsidiary discipline into the cornerstone and foundation of the medical profession. Bologna’s “Luigi Cattaneo” Anatomical Wax Museum (part of the University Museum System), home to the “Cesare Taruffi” Pathological Anatomy Collection since 2002, plans to narrate the historical developments marking the 700 years linking the University’s worldwide renown to human cadaver anatomical dissection.