Bartolomeo Maggi

Bartolomeo Maggi (Latinized as Bartholomeus Maggius) (August 1477 – 7 April 1552) was an Italian military surgeon who spent several years of his life on the battlefields treating, soothing, and healing the most desperate wounds.

[1] The experience he gained in this field lead him to write a work on surgeries in wartime De Vulnerum Sclopetorum, et Bombardarum Curatione Tractatus (1552) which was the first to deal with gunshot wounds.

[5] Giovanni Nicolò Pasquali Aidosi reported the alleged inscription of Bartolomeo Maggi’s tombstone, located in the church of S. Francesco in Bologna, in his book ‘I dottori bolognesi di Teologia , Filosofia, Medicina e d’Arti liberali.

Nicolas Eloy, a Belgian writer and physician, wrote in ‘Dizionario storico della Medicina’ that Maggi would have been born in 1477, which would coincide with the inscription of the tombstone reported by Pasquali Aidosi.

In 1858 unknown sources went directly to the site of the tombstone to verify the truthfulness of these assumptions and partly confirmed the information by the Bolognese baptismal books and wrote as follows:‘All the most famous historians, Alidosi, Bumaldi, Orlandi, Mandosio, Astruc, Portal, Eloy and Fantuzzi, speaking of Bartolomeo Maggi, say that he was born in 1477 and died in April 1552 at the age of 75 years; and instead it has been discovered that he was baptised [in] St. Peter’s Cathedral on 26th August 1516, and since the time of his death is not in doubt, it emerges that he lived only a little over 35 years.

This is […] more amply confirmed by the inscription on the grandiose sarcophagus that was erected for Maggi in the church of San Francesco, which clearly reads: qui vixit an[ni] XXXV mens[es] VII dies XXII and not an[ni] LXXV as reported by Portal, Brambilla and Fantuzzi; hence the error derived from the wrong copry of the inscription.’[7]Thus the shift of the birth date forward to 1517 implies that Maggi had lived just a bit more than 35 years, and would also explain the lack of information about the doctor until 1541.

[9] As already mentioned Maggi's roman sojourn was apparently very short due to a future illness; it is indeed known that the physician 'was the doctor of Julius III, raised to the papacy in 1550 and died in his home town in 1552'.

The only work attributable to the Bolognese physician is the De Vulnerum Sclopetorum et Bombardarum curatione Tractatus, published posthumously in Bologna by his brother Giovanni Battista.

With the complete novelty of gunpowder on the European military scene, the medicine of the time had to carefully analyse the actual nature of wounds caused by firearms in order to formulate a hypothesis for treatment.

The danger of these wounds was, however, to be found in the bruises and accumulations of dead flesh that could cause gangrene or putrefaction, altering (according to the Hippocratic-Galenic assumption) the balance of the body's internal humours.