Background
Julius Caesar Aranzi was born around 1529/1530 in Bologna, Italy to Ottaviano di Jacopo and Maria Maggi.
Giulio Cesare Aranzi, 1530–1589
Aranzio was admitted to the University of Padua where he made his first discovery in 1548.
Aranzio became Professor of Anatomy and Surgery at the University of Bologna in 1556.
Giulio Cesare Aranzi, 1530–1589
Nodules of Aranzio. Aortic valve tubercles with Arantio nodes.
Giulio Cesare Aranzio, from Bologna (illustration from Brambilla , 1781).
Aranzio was admitted to the University of Padua where he made his first discovery in 1548.
Aranzio became Professor of Anatomy and Surgery at the University of Bologna in 1556.
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anatomist physician scientist Surgeon
Julius Caesar Aranzi was born around 1529/1530 in Bologna, Italy to Ottaviano di Jacopo and Maria Maggi.
Since Aranzio’s family was poor, he was aided in his medical education by his maternal uncle, Bartolomeo Maggi (1477-1552), lecturer in surgery at the University of Bologna and principal court physician of Julius III.
He studied at the University of Padua, where in 1548, at nineteen, he made his first anatomical discovery: the elevator muscle of the upper eyelid. Aranzio became Professor of Anatomy and Surgery at the University of Bologna in 1556.
After receiving his degree at Bologna on 20 May 1556, shortly thereafter, at the age of twenty-seven, Aranzio became lecturer in medicine and surgery at the same university.
The excellent scientific and practical preparation Aranzio had received from his uncle immediately brought him fame. He discovered the pedes hippocamp, the cerebellum cistern; and the fourth ventricle, the arterial duct between the aorta and the pulmonary duct, which discovery was erroneously attributed to Leonardo Botallo.
In 1564 Aranzio published De humano foetu opusculum, and fifteen years later his Observationes anatomicae appeared. In these he presented the new direction of anatomy, based not merely on simple description of the organs of the body but also on experimental investigations of their functions.
Aranzio was the first lecturer at the University of Bologna to hold a separate professorship of anatomy; prior to him, instruction was given by lecturers in surgery. In 1570, surgery and anatomy were separated into separate professorships at his instigation and he held the newly created chair in anatomy for thirty-three years until his death at Bologna in 1589.
Aranzio’s De tumoribus secundum locus affectum (1571) is devoted to surgical subjects and gives a very good idea of the quality of his surgical lectures. He performed rhinoplastic surgery several years before Gaspare Tagliacozzi, but he wrote nothing on these operations.
One of his pupils, Oczok Wojciech, who graduated from Bologna in 1569, did publish Przymiot (Cracow, 1581), a treatise on syphilis, however. In this treatise, in discussing the loss of the nose as the result of an attack of syphilis, he mentions rhinoplastic surgery and then states that in Bologna he frequently saw Aranzio perform such surgery successfully by using the “skin of the arm.” It was Tagliacozzi, though, who gave the first scientific description of facial plastic surgery, illustrating the account with splendid charts.
Aranzi was a meticulous and unprejudiced observer to whom anatomy owes several discoveries. He was the one who established anatomy as a distinguished branch of medicine for the first time in medical history. The excellent scientific and practical preparation he had received from his uncle immediately brought him fame. Besides the musculus levator palpebrae superioris, which he had discovered in his first year of study, he discovered the pedes hippocamp, the cerebellum cistern, first described the ammon horns, and the fourth ventricle, the arterial duct - ductus arteriosus - which discovery was erroneously attributed to Leonardo Botallo (1530-1600), as well as the ductus venosus (Arantii). Contrary to Vesalius he maintained the impermeability of the dividing walls of the heart. He also discovered that the blood of mother and foetus is kept separate during pregnancy.
In 1564 Arantius was the first to describe a structure he named “hippocampus” or “white silkworm”. Despite numerous controversies and alternate designations, the term hippocampus has prevailed until this day as the most widely used term. Considering the definition of the hippocampal formation as comprising the hippocampus proper, dentate gyrus and subiculum, Arantius and Duvernoy apparently described the gross anatomy of this complex. The pioneering studies of Arantius revealed a relatively small hidden formation that would become one of the most valued brain structures. Arantius published his description of the hippocampus in 1587, in the first chapter of his work titled De Humano Foetu Liber.
He is also noted for his anatomical books Observationes Anatomicas, and De Humano Foetu Opusculum and surgical books De Tumoribus Secundum Locos Affectos and Hippocratis librum de vulneribus capitis commentarius brevis printed in Latin.
Aranzi combined anatomy with a description of pathological processes, based largely on his own research, Galen, and the work of his contemporary Italians. He had an extensive knowledge in surgery and anatomy based in part on the ancient Greek and his contemporaries in the 16th century but essentially on his personal experience and practice.
He was a famous surgeon who was a lecturer at the University of Bologna as well as court physician to Julius III. Aranzio held this uncle in such high esteem that he assumed his surname, calling himself Giulio Cesare Aranzio Maggio.
