Giovanni Andrea della Croce

Surgical drill from Della Croce's Chirurgiae libri septem

Giovanni Andrea della Croce , also Crucejus and Cruce , (* 1514 in Venice ; † 1575 ibid) was a Venetian surgeon .

His father was not a surgeon, just a barber surgeon who came to Venice from Parma, his mother a Venetian. However, his grandfather was a surgeon in the service of the Duke of Milan. Della Croce grew up in Venice and received practical lessons in surgery from his father, but also studied the Greek and Arabic classics of medicine. But he does not seem to have studied medicine in Padua.

At a young age in 1532, Croce was admitted to the College of Surgeons in Venice, one of the most prestigious societies of doctors of its time. He held a prominent position in the college, lecturing (even while away from Venice) and performing operations (some in other parts of Italy such as Rome), and in 1537 was commissioned to reform the college's statutes. He practiced in Feltre from 1538 to 1546 , where he was officially appointed as a doctor. He also married two of his sisters there. When his youngest sister, whom he was very fond of, was raped by a nobleman, he managed to arrest him, but he was able to escape and married a rich woman, which led Croce to leave Feltre. From 1547 he was in Venice, where he became a doctor of the Venetian fleet and in a committee of doctors in Venice for the fight against the plague. In 1542 and again in 1548, 1550 and 1555 he was chairman of the college. In 1559 he took a leave of absence from the college for health reasons, but continued his surgical-anatomical research.

His book Chirurgiae libri septem , published in Venice in 1573, dealt with neurosurgical procedures for the first time, and this extensive manual of surgery established its fame in the rest of Europe. He improved the instruments for trepanation and other surgical instruments (pictured in his book as syringe-like instruments for drawing blood). In his presentation of surgery, which consisted of seven books , he treated gunshot wounds, abscesses, ulcers and tumors, broken bones, bloodletting and leeches, syphilis treatment, stone cutting, cauterization and other procedures, antidotes to toxins and various head and chest injuries. He gave many practical examples, precise and careful descriptions of the procedure and for the first time created a list of synonyms for the names of diseases in Greek, Arabic and Latin. In his recommendations, he also deviated from the practice handed down from antiquity, so he did not recommend opening the skull like Hippocrates at the skull suture. There was also a German edition (Officina aurea, that is the Guldene Werkstatt der Chirurgy or Wundt Artzney, Frankfurt am Mein 1607, translated by P. Uffenbach). The chapter on gunshot wounds had been published as early as 1560 and his account of the treatment of war wounds showed that he was very experienced in it. Della Croce's biographer Davide Giordano called him a Venetian Ambroise Paré and believed that the 1560 preprint influenced Paré himself in his treatment of war wounds.

He also translated Averroes into Italian (Trattato sulla teriaca, in an Aristotle edition published in Venice in 1562).

He probably died of the plague with his family in 1575 (they did not want to leave the city at that time) and was buried in S. Maria dell'Umiltà. On his return to Venice he had married Lucrezia Donati, the widow of Zamaria Pin.

A bridge in Venice was named after him on the island of Giudecca.

Fonts

• De morbo gallico. Venice 1532.
• Chirurgiae Ioannis Andreae a Cruce Veneti Medici Libri septem. [...]. Giordano Ziletti, Venice 1573 ( digitized) .
  • Chirurgiae universalis opus absolutum, Venice 1573, 1587, 1596 (Italian edition: Chirurgia universale e perfetta di tutte le parti pertinenti all'ottimo chirurgo, Venice 1574, 1583, 1603, 1605) -

literature

• Davide Giordano: GA Della Croce, Venice 1939
• Barbara Tshisuaka: Croce, Giovannia Andrea della, in: Werner Gerabek u. a. (Ed.), Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine, Volume 1, De Gruyter 2007
• B. Di Matteo et al. a .: The Renaissance and the universal surgeon: Giovanni Andrea Della Croce, a master of traumatology, Int. Orthop., Volume 37, 2013, pp. 2523-2528, PMID 24173678
• Della Croce (Dalla Croce, de Cruce Crucejus), in: Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, 1988, Treccani

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Biographical data from Tshisuaka, article Giovanni Andrea della Croce in: Gerabek u. a. Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine, 2007. Other years of birth are also mentioned, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani 1509 or 1515.
2. ↑ In Venice they had the monopoly on the treatment of the wounded and organized lectures on anatomy and surgery