The_Invention_of_Surgery

must go. Frustrated, I walk across the street to the Caffé Pedrocchi, one of
the oldest coffee shops in Europe, to plot my next move.
After some deliberation over a scrumptious espresso, I cross the street
again, plead my case, and sense my insistence is becoming quite annoying
to the Polize. Again, with the wave of his hand, he insists the Palazzo is
closed and no one may enter.
Leaving the constabulary obstruction behind, I meander away,
examining the locked metal gates at the bottom of a stairway leading up to
the Palazzo classrooms above me. Tantalizingly close, I imagine the
ancient exam rooms up there somewhere, and heaven only knows where the
glorious anatomy dissection theater is.
“Sir—are you the American surgeon who wanted to see our
classrooms?” I turn and see a young curator who speaks with a strong
Italian accent.
“Yes!” I exclaim, realizing the barriers have come crumbling down at
once. And with that, Francesca swings her large ring of skeleton keys up to
my face, and with a smile, turns to the venerable gates and skillfully
unlocks the aged mechanism with a heavy key, and we march up the steps
to the first level of the Palazzo del Bo.
Half a millennium old, the largest classroom is adorned with the family
and nation coats of arms of scholars who have been here for centuries.
Francesca points out the names I have studied for years, legends of
anatomy, medicine, and science. Alone in the grand hall where Galileo
instructed, I respectfully approach the lectern and look out across it.
Hundreds and hundreds of years later, there is still magic in the air in this
place where some of the greatest minds in the history of thought presented
their ideas.
In the next room, a timber-ceilinged classroom reserved for final oral
examination for the medical degree (to this day), a U-shaped
configuration of tables surrounds a small wooden chair. All of the green
leathered chairs behind the tables face the simple, lone wooden chair
where the candidate faces a barrage of questions testing her worthiness of
a degree from Padua. Hanging on the cream-colored plaster walls are the
aged paintings of the cognoscenti, no doubt adding to the anxiety of the
applicant. I inspect Eustachi’s expression, detecting an aura of supreme
shrewdness; I wish he could know what he and his fratelli started.