ANATOMICAL ILLUSTRATION 951 
body should be dissected annually; William of Salicit, Richardus 
and others had dissected before Mundinus. 
The purpose of his book was to simplify the teaching of anatomy 
and it was designed primarily for his students. (As he says: 
‘“‘proposui meis scholaribus in Medicina quoddam opus com- 
ponere.’’) It was so highly esteemed that it had a general use for 
upwards of two centuries and often was used as an introduction to 
Galen or in connection with his anatomical writings. It came to 
be prescribed by legislation as the required textbook of anatomy 
in Italy. Before the invention of printing it was copied and exten- 
sively circulated among medical students. Mundinus was a 
great favorite with the students who came under his instruction. 
He seems to have been a man of engaging personality gifted with 
powers of clear exposition. His book is well arranged and terse 
in description. Although he states that prior to its composition 
he had dissected three human bodies, it is too much to say that 
it was an original treatise based on personal observation. He 
merely brings into systematic form the teachings of Galen with 
some modifications of his own. Roth and others have pointed 
out that in his compilation he did not make use of a pure text 
of Galen in the Greek, but, on the contrary, employed impure 
Latin and Arabic translations. He does not succeed in over- 
coming the influence of tradition and of dialectic compilation. 
With Galen he enumerates five lobes in the liver and perpetuates 
other errors that observation on the human body should have 
corrected. His book is also burdened with the terminology 
of the foreign texts; the stomach, for illustration, is designated 
the myrach, the peritoneum as the cyphach (siphac), the omentum 
as zirbus, the mesentery as eurachus, ete., etc. The key to the 
influence of the book of Mundinus is not its originality but its 
wide circulation; it 1s conspicuously lacking in evidences of inde- 
pendent observation. 
The book was first printed in small folio form in Padua, in 1478, 
and, between that date and 1580, when the last edition was 
published, not less than twenty-five editions are known. These 
are usually annotated and commonly in quarto form. The thir- 
teen editions of Mundinus examined, excepting those in Ketam, 
