c. 1223-1295

Italian Physician

Founder of a medical school in Bologna, Italy, Taddeo Alderotti was an early advocate of serious medical study and practice. It was because of his efforts that the city authorities extended to medical teachers and students the same legal status as that of their counterparts in law school.

Alderotti was born in Florence, perhaps in 1223, though estimates of his birth year vary from 1215 to 1233. In 1260, he began teaching medicine at Bologna, which during the preceding century had emerged as a center of learning for all of Europe. There Holy Roman emperor Frederick I Barbarossa (1123-1190) had established the first Western university in 1158, by which time the town had begun to develop a community of medical students.

Years later, Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) would describe Alderotti in his Divine Comedy as a "Hippocratist," or follower of Hippocrates (c. 460-c. 377 B.C.). The Greek "father...