Alessandra Giliani

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Italian. (August 2014) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the Italian article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Italian Wikipedia article at [[:it:Alessandra Giliani]]; see its history for attribution. You should also add the template {{Translated|it|Alessandra Giliani}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Alessandra Giliani (1307–1326) was thought to be an Italian natural historian, best known as the first woman to be recorded in historical documents as practicing anatomy and pathology.^[1] However, the historical evidence for her existence is limited. Some scholars consider her to be a fiction invented by  Alessandro Machiavelli (1693–1766)^[2] whilst others hold that the participation of a woman in anatomy at that time was so shocking that she has been edited out of history.^[3]

Giliani is believed to have been born in 1307, in

Giliani is said to have carried out her own anatomical investigations, developing a method of draining the blood from a corpse and replacing it with a hardening coloured dye—and possibly adding to our understanding of the coronary-pulmonary circulatory system. (All evidence of her work was either lost or destroyed.)

Alessandra Giliani's short life was honoured by Otto Angenius, also one of Mondino's assistants and probably her fiancé, with a plaque at the "San Pietro e Marcellino degli Spedolari di Santa Maria di Mareto, o d'Ulmareto"^[4] which describes her work.

Legacy

She is mentioned by the nineteenth-century historian Michele Medici, who published a history of the Bolognese school of anatomy in 1857.

Barbara Quick's novel, A Golden Web, published by HarperTeen in 2010, is a fictional re-imagining of Alessandra Giliani's life and times.

References