EUSTACHI, Bartolomeo

(c. 1500-1574)

Bartolomeo Eustachi edited and translated medical works from ancient Greek and Arabic authors, practiced medicine, and served as a professor of anatomy. His early works included defenses of Galen, but he is best known for his treatises and anatomical illustrations of various organs, including the ear, one part of which still bears his name.

The son of a physician and well trained in classical languages, Eustachi is believed to have studied medicine at Rome, but it is not known when. He served as the personal physician to the duke of Urbino and Cardinal Giulio della Rovere before joining the medical faculty at the Archiginnasio della Sapienza in Rome in 1549. Because Eustachi was affiliated with two hospitals, he was able to procure and dissect cadavers of adults, infants, and fetuses. In 1552, with the help of the artist Pier Matteo Pini, Eustachi prepared a series of anatomical illustrations for a book that was never published. Most of these illustrations were lost from the time of his death until the early eighteenth century, a loss that probably slowed the development of the science of anatomy, given the quality of the engravings and the accuracy of his observations. In 1561 Eustachi published two works that attempted to refute the attacks made upon the medical theories of the classical Greek anatomist Galen. Between 1562 and 1564 Eus-tachi published a series of treatises on the kidney, the ear, the venous system, and the teeth. In each of these, his precise observations added to contemporary understanding of human anatomy. His important contributions include his de­scriptions of the suprarenal gland, the eustachian tube, the azygos vein, the thoracic duct, and the sympathetic nervous system, as well as detailed accounts of the hard and soft structures of teeth.

Bibliography

C. D. O'Malley, in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. C. Gillespie, vol. 4, 1981: 486-88.

Tim McGee