The book entitled “The medical art. The Paduan School and medicine in Europe and in the world “ edited by Giovanni Silvano – published in the series “Patavina Libertas. A European history of the University of Padua” the highly popular series co-published by Donzelli / Padova University Press – it will be presented on Friday 21 October at 5 pm in the Aula Magna of Palazzo del Bo, via VIII febbraio 2 in Padua. Opens the meeting Giovanni Silvano who will have as interlocutors Angelo Gatta, Francesco Pagano e Rosario Rizzuto moderated by Laura Berti curator of Tg2 Medicina 33. The conclusions will be entrusted to Angelo Paolo Dei Tospresident of the School of Medicine and Surgery.
Considering the evolution of medicine, a symmetry emerges: medical science advances when the whole society takes the path of development. This happened in the past and continues to happen today. And each medical school belongs to the society where it sprouts and grows. The Paduan School took its first steps when the city was an important popular commune until, in 1318, the Carrarese seigniory settled, destined to step aside only to give way to the Venetian dominion from 1405. For four centuries, until 1797, the School prospered free thanks to the discreet protection of Venice. Later, after the annexation to the Kingdom of Italy in 1866 and up to the Great War, the firm cultivated a wide range of scientific and professional relationships with the most prestigious centers of medical research: Paris, Vienna, Berlin. After the war, a future of intense growth and global progress looms on the horizon. Medicine also benefited from this climate of renewed hope, which since the 1950s has undergone such an impetuous advance as never before. The impossible seemed possible, almost at hand: Medical School of the Serenissima, the Austrian Empire, the Kingdom of Italy and the Republic. The Paduan School reflected on each of these moments, interpreting the role that society and the economy of the time were asking for.
Medicine seems to behave like a magnet that attracts to itself what it recognizes as useful: at the table laden with knowledge, it selects and assimilates, forging new knowledge and thus producing new knowledge and, possibly, new therapy. The latter, far from being able to be enclosed in any material or immaterial enclosure, spreads wherever conditions allow it, thus fertilizing a process that makes science and medicine the result of a continuous exchange of ideas, procedures, successes and defeats. This happens in every medical school worthy of the name and this has happened in Padua throughout its history.
“Certainly, a volume on the centuries-old history of the Paduan medical school could not be missing when the University celebrates 800 years of history. The teaching of medicine was present in Padua from the first hour, continuing without interruption until today. An immense knowledge has been handed down from generation to generation and an innumerable number of students have found the place of their training here. Research, care and teaching over the centuries have distinguished the Paduan School in a unity of intent that is now very much alive in the Polyclinic, in the departments of life sciences and in research institutions. Padua has never been isolated in the world, on the contrary, networks of comparison and collaboration have been intertwined until recently, first in Europe, then, also in the United States and, finally, in the world. Scientific research, then as now, does not tolerate borders – says Giovanni Silvano, editor of the volume -. The volume, which attests to this extraordinary scientific and human event at the same time, treats with equal dignity and passion both the golden age of medicine in Padua, from Andrea Vesalio to Giovanni Battista Morgagni, and contemporary medicine from the mid-nineteenth century. till today. The Paduan medical school of the last centuries has always been anchored to the best European and American medical tradition. Our gaze on the past allows us to look to tomorrow on the basis of solid optimism ».
Entrance
To participate, the booking. The event is also broadcast in live streaming on the University’s YouTube channel.
The book
The volume reconstructs a story lasting more than a millennium, if we consider the remote, Eastern origin of Western medicine. This knowledge also landed in the Studio of medieval Padua, where it took root and grew luxuriantly. The Paduan School of Medicine was in the past and still is a forge of excellence. On the occasion of the eight hundred years of the University, which occur in 2022, this volume celebrates Paduan medical art from its distant origins to the present day. In these dense pages, the result of an extraordinary work of synthesis, it is possible to retrace the entire span of developments and advances in medical knowledge.
Mainly political circumstances favored its development, which was able to flourish thanks to the presence of professors and students determined, some to teach, others to learn. An extraordinary group of teachers who made the history of medicine in Padua, destined to spread to the East and West. Just as the goals reached by Paduan anatomy had no boundaries, so also the other disciplines, physiology, pathology, clinic suffered no barriers of any kind.
The medical and scientific knowledge, which constituted and still represents the intangible heritage of the Paduan medical school, was formed through processes of contamination, encounters and clashes with knowledge from other traditions and from other universities. The history of Paduan medicine recalls that of tolerance and freedom of thought, precious ingredients of social progress. If, after the disappearance of the Republic of Venice in 1797, the School had to submit to foreign domination, before becoming Italian, nevertheless it always remained in contact with the effervescent scientific community of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The acquisitions that were rapidly developing between Berlin, Paris, London and the most recent non-European medical schools soon arrived in the San Francesco hospital and in the university classrooms. The reader will find in these pages the story of a composite universe, made up of things and people united by ingenuity and concern for the sick. When medical art fails to prevent disease, it seeks to cure or alleviate it.
Info web
https://www.eventbrite.it/e/biglietti-larte-medica-la-scuola-padovana-e-la-medicina-in-europa-e-nel-mondo-430848237677
https://ilbolive.unipd.it/it/event/larte-medica-scuola-padovana-medicina-europa-mondo
Photo from the press release