Alessandra Giliani

Alessandra Giliani (1307 – 26 March 1326) is best known as the first woman to be recorded in historical documents as practicing anatomy and pathology, and is thought to be an Italian natural historian. Historical evidence for her existence is limited. All evidence of her work was either lost or destroyed.

Giliani is believed to have been born in 1307, in San Giovanni in Persiceto, in the Italian province of Emilia-Romagna. The chronicle of her life holds that she died in 1326, possibly from a septic wound, at the age of 19. Celebrated as the first recorded female anatomist of the Western World, she is reputed to have been a brilliant prosector (preparer of corpses for anatomical dissection).

She is said to have worked as the surgical assistant to Mondino de' Liuzzi (d. 1326), a world-renowned professor at the medical school of the University of Bologna. Credited with being the father of modern anatomy. In 1316, de' Liuzzi published a seminal text on the subject entitled, Anathomia corporis humani. The earliest edition of the work was printed in Padua between 1475 and 1478.

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 scientific understanding of the coronary-pulmonary circulatory system.

Otto Angenius, an assistant to Mondino de' Liuzzi, honoured Alessandra Giliani with a plaque that describes her work. The plaque was erected at the "San Pietro e Marcellino degli Spedolari di Santa Maria di Mareto, o d'Ulmareto". He may have been her fiancé.

The nineteenth-century historian Michele Medici, who published a history of the Bolognese school of anatomy in 1857, mentions Alessandra Giliani.

Legacy
Some scholars consider her to be a fiction invented in the sixteenth century by Alessandro Machiavelli (1693–1766) whilst others hold that the participation of a woman in anatomy at that time caused her to be edited out of history.

Barbara Quick's novel, A Golden Web, published by HarperTeen in 2010, is historical fiction based on the life and times of Alessandra Giliani.