building up of a city, though their
motives were probably much higher than that, and their enlightened
policy had its reward in the rapid growth of Bologna until, very
probably at the end of the thirteenth century, it had more students than
any university of the modern time. The number was not less than fifteen
thousand, and may have been twenty thousand.

To this great university success Taddeo and his medical school
contributed not a little. The especially attractive feature of his
teaching seems to have been its eminent practicalness. He himself had
made an immense success of the practice of medicine, and accumulated a
great fortune, so much so that Dante, in his "Paradiso," when he wishes
to find a figure that would represent exactly the opposite to what St.
Dominic, the founder of the Dominicans, did for the love of wisdom and
humanity, he takes that of Taddeo, who had accomplished so much for
personal reputation and wealth.

This might easily lead to the impression that Taddeo's teaching was
unscientific, or merely empiric, or that he himself was a narrow-minded
maker of money, intent only on his immediate influence, and hampered by
exclusive devotion to practical medicine. Nothing could be farther from
the truth than any such impression. Taddeo was not only the head of a
great medical school, a great teacher whom his students almost
worshipped, a physician to whom patients flocked because of his
marvellous success, a fine citizen of a great city, whom his fellow
citizens honored, but he was a broad-minded scholar, a philosopher, and
even an author in branches apart from medicine.

In that older time it was the custom to combine the study of philosophy
and medicine. For centuries after that period in Italy it was the custom
for men to take both degrees, the doctorate in philosophy and in
medicine at the same time. Indeed, most of those whose work has made
them famous, down to and including Galvani, did so. Taddeo wrote
commentaries on the works of Hippocrates and Galen, but he also
translated the ethics of Aristotle, and did much to make the learning of
the Arabs easily available for his students. His was a broad, liberal
scholarship. Dr. Lewis Pilcher, in his article on "The Mondino
Myth,"[14] does not hesitate to say that "to the spirit which, from his
professorial chair, Taddeo infused into the teaching and study of
medicine undoubtedly is due the high position which for many generations
thereafter the schoo