Gabriello Fallopio

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Gabriello Fallopio (1523?-1562), also known as Gabriello Fallopio and Gabriel Fallopius, Italian anatomist, physician, botanist, and surgeon. Born in Modena, Fallopio studied medicine at the University of Ferrara, and after receiving his degree he worked and studied at various European medical schools. Fallopio became professor of anatomy at Ferrara in 1548 and professor of surgery and anatomy at the University of Pisa about a year later. In 1551 Cosimo I dè Medici, grand duke of Tuscany, called him to a similar post at Pisa to succeed Andreas Vesalius, the Belgian anatomist. There he also held the chair of botany and materia medica and was superintendent of the botanical gardens.

Fallopio's work dealt primarily with cranial anatomy and he added considerably to the knowledge of the ear. He was the first to use the ear speculum instrument to diagnose diseases of the ear and the first to show the connection between the mastoid, a part of the skull that houses the ear, and the middle ear.

His discoveries included the sphenoidal sinuses; the chorda tympani; the canal through which the facial nerve passes after it leaves the auditory, called the Fallopian aqueduct; and the ducts leading from the ovaries to the uterus known as the fallopian tubes. He also named the hard palate, the soft palate, the placenta, and the vagina. 

In addition to his work as a surgeon and educator, Fallopio was also a distinguished botanist, and he made important contributions to practical medicine. He was a strong opponent and vocal critic of the theories of Galen, the Greek physician who proposed that the liver is the central organ of the vascular system. His writings included treatises on tumors, ulcers, surgery, the composition of drugs, simple purgatives, thermal waters and baths, a commentary on Wounds in the Head by the Greek physician Hippocrates, and a study on syphilis, De morbo gallico (1564). His best known work was Observationes anatomicae (1561), and his complete works appeared for the first time in Venice in 1584.

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