Turisanus

Turisanus de Turisanis[1] was the Latin name of Pietro Torrigiano de' Torrigiani (died c. 1320), a theoretical physician[2] from a well-known Florentine family[3] who taught medicine in Paris, c. 1305–19,[4] and wrote an elaborated and influential[5] series of commentaries on Galen's Microtechni, Plusquam commentum in Microtechni Galenii and a shorter De hypostasi urine Galeni. The two commentaries, all that survives of Torrigiani's output, were printed together by Ugo Rugerius[6] in 1489, and in several later editions, both incunabula and 16th-century printings. The work took the conventional form of the set of quaestiones disputatae familiar in Scholasticism.

Generic portrait of "Trusianus medicus plusq[a]m com[m]entator", woodcut from the Nuremberg Chronicle

He was trained in the famed medical school of Bologna as a pupil of the Florentine Taddeo Alderotti (Thaddeus Florentinus). In his old age he retired to a Carthusian monastery, thus he is referred to a Monachus.[7]

He was the first medieval physician to propose an original theory about blood and its role in the human system.

Notes
  1. He is also known as Turisanus Monac[h]us ("Torrigiano the Monk"), Drusianus or Trusianus.
  2. Brian Lawn, Rise and decline of the scholastic Quaestio disputata (Brill, 1993), p. 72, doubts he ever practiced.
  3. He is Turisanus Florentinus in the printed edition under the title Plusquam commentum in parvam Galeni artem (Venice, 1557), noted by Roger Kenneth French, Ancients and Moderns in the Medical Sciences: from Hippocrates to Harvey, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 75.4, Winter 2001 p. 450, note 15).
  4. Lawn 1993, p 72, noting Ottosson, p. 45ff.
  5. Lawn (1993 p. 73) notes that Gentile da Foligno wrote a set of Quaestiones simply to criticize Torrigiani's teachings on certain points.
  6. Ugo Rugerius (Ugo Ruggeri) was a peripatetic printer from Reggio di Modena in the first age of printed books: according to his title pages, he printed at Venice at various dates from 1474-93, at Reggio di Modena (1478), Pisa (1494) and Bologna 1495-99; a single work is dated from San Cesario, 1499 (Frederick John Norton, Italian printers, 1501-1520: an annotated list).
  7. The Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. "Medicine".
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