Health Dictionary
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Antonio Benivieni
Introduction
Antonio Benivieni (1443-1502) was a Florentine physician who pioneered the use of the autopsy, a postmortum dissection of a deceased patient’s body used to understand the cause of death. Benivieni published a treatise entitled De Abditis Morborum Causis (“The Hidden Causes of Disease”) which is now considered one of the first works in the science of Pathology.[1] Some of the protocols developed by Benivieni are similar to those used in autopsies to this day, and he has been referred to as the “father of pathologic anatomy.”[2]