CORPORA ET CURA

History of Medicine in Rome
Culture · Care · Science

In six stops and approximately four kilometres through the heart of Rome, this itinerary takes the visitor through two thousand years of the art of healing. It follows the Tiber to the Hospital of Santo Spirito in Sassia, the oldest hospital in Europe still in existence, founded by Innocent III in 1198 to shelter dying pilgrims abandoned on the riverbanks. It visits the Museo Storico dell'Arte Sanitaria, where an eighteenth-century pharmacy has survived intact with its majolica jars and copper alembics. It enters the Biblioteca Lancisiana — one of the finest medical libraries in Europe, founded in 1711 — where the papal physician Lancisi wrote the first systematic treatise on cardiopathology in history. It crosses the courtyard of the Palazzo della Sapienza, where for six centuries Rome's physicians trained and where, in an anatomical theatre now gone, the first public dissections of the human body were performed.