the mesentery in a young woman who suffered from violent pains in the abdomen; narrowing of the intestine with enlargement and hardening of its walls (possibly a cancer) in a woman subject to colic and constipation; a cancer of a pylorus, described as scirrhous and constricted in a man prone to chronic vomiting. Benivieni also saw intestinal perforations in chronic dysentery (it recalls the amoebic dysentery); a megacolon in a child who died of colic; a bristly, hairy-looking heart in an executed man. The importance of Benivieni's work The great importance of Benivieni's work, for which he obtained the appellant of "father of pathological anatomy", consists in the association of observations carried out during clinical cases and necropsy. He was looking for the causes of death and he endeavoured to establish a parallelism between the symptoms reported in life and anatomical lesions. The anatomical-clinical method started by Benivieni, will slowly develop in the following centuries and culminates with Giovanni Battista Morgagni. His work is also a valuable testimony of the importance already attributed to the autopsy at the time. Notes Bibliography • • • • • • • 1443 births 1502 deaths 15th-century Italian physicians Italian pathologists 15th-century Italian writers