Julius Caesar Aranzi

Who was Julius Caesar Aranzi?

Julius Caesar Aranzi was a leading figure in the history of the science of human anatomy.

He was born in Bologna, the son of Ottaviano di Jacopo and Maria Maggi. Owing to the poverty of the family, he studied with his uncle Bartolomeo Maggi, a famous surgeon who was a lecturer at the University of Bologna as well as court physician to Julius III. He held this uncle in such high esteem that he assumed his surname, calling himself Giulio Cesare Aranzio Maggio.

He was admitted to the University of Padua where he made his first discovery in 1548, at the age of nineteen, when he described the elevator muscle of the upper eyelid. Later, at the University of Bologna, he received a doctorate in medicine in 1556 and was appointed a lecturer in medicine and surgery shortly thereafter at the age of twenty-seven. In 1570, surgery and anatomy were separated into separate professorships at his instigation and he held the newly created chair in anatomy for thirty-three years until his death at Bologna in 1589.

From Aranzio came the first correct account of the anatomical peculiarities of the fetus, and he was the first to show that the muscles of the eye do not, as was previously imagined, arise from the dura mater but from the margin of the optic hole. He also, after considering the anatomical relations of the cavities of the heart, the valves and the great vessels, corroborated the views of Realdo Colombo regarding the course which the blood follows in passing from the right to the left side of the heart.