Bianchi, John Baptist

a celebrated Italian anatomist, was born at Turin, Sept. 12, 1681, and at the age of seventeen was honoured with a doctor’s degree. He was a long time professor of anatomy at Turin, where the king of Sardinia, in 1715, caused a very commodious amphitheatre to be built for his lectures. In 1718 he also taught pharmacy, chemistry, and the practice of physic, He was offered a professor’s chair in the university of Bologna, but refused it from an attachment to his native place, Turin. He died much esteemed, Jan. 2, 1761. He wrote a great many works; among which were, 1. “Ductus lacrymalis, &c. anatome,” Turin, 1715, 4to, Leyden, 1723. 2. “De lacteorum vasorum positionibus et fabrica,” Turin, 1743, 4to. 3. “Storia del mostro di | due corpi,” Turin, 1719, 8vo. 4. “Lettera sull‘ insensibilita,” Turin, 1755, 3vo, in which he attacks Haller’s notions on sensibility. But Bianchi’s most celebrated works are, 5. His “Histofia hepatica, seu de Hepatis structura, usibus et morbis,” Turin, 1710, 4to. 1716, and again at Geneva, 1725, 2 vols. 4to. with plates, and six anatomical essays. 6. “De natural! in humane corpore, vitiosa, morbosaque generatione historia,” ibid. 1761, 8vo. Manget has some dissertations by Bianchi in his Theatrum Anatomicum, and the collection of fifty-four plates, containing two hundred and seventy anatomical subjects, published at Turin in 1757, was the work of Bianchi. He was unquestionably a man of learning and skill in his profession; but Morgagni, in his Adversaria, has pointed out many of his mistakes, and those which occur in his history of the liver, have been severely animadverted on by that able anatomist in his “Epistolas Anatomicse duse,” printed in 1727, but without his consent, by the friend to whom they were written. In this work Bianchi is charged with bad Latin, want of judgment, care, memory, and honour. These charges, however severe as they seem, were not thought to affect the general merit of Bianchi’s great work. ¹