Gentile da Foligno

Who was Gentile da Foligno?

Gentile Gentili da Foligno was an Italian professor and doctor of medicine, trained at Padua and the University of Bologna, and teaching probably first at Bologna, then at the University of Perugia, Siena, where his annual stipend was 60 gold florins; he was called to Padua by Ubertino I da Carrara, Lord of Padua, then returned to Perugia for the remainder of his career. He was the first European physician to perform a dissection on a human being, a practice long outlawed by the Christian Church as it compromised the completeness of the body awaiting Resurrection. Gentile wrote several widely copied and read texts and commentaries, notably his massive commentary covering all five books of the Canon of Medicine by the 11th-century Persian polymath Avicenna, the comprehensive encyclopedia that, in Latin translation, was fundamental to medieval medicine. Long after his death, Gentile da Foligno was remembered in the Nuremberg Chronicle as Subtilissimus rimator verborum Avicenne, "that most subtle investigator of Avicenna's teachings"

Other works by Gentile were De complexione, proportione et dosi medicinarum; Consilium de temporibus partus; De statu hominum; De lepra; De febribus; De balneis; De divisione librorum Galeni; Tractatus de reductione medicinarum; Regimen preservativum; Among these the Consilium, a compilation of therapeutic advice for many diseases. He made commentaries on two works, Carmina de urinarum iudiciis part of a metrical work, the Carmina medica, that had been composed by Egidius Corbaliensis, and Egidius' De pulsibus. A mark of the respect in which Gentile's work continued to be held, more than a century after his death, was the rapidity with which they appeared in print, from the Italian presses, beginning in the 1470s.