Amatus Lusitanus

Amatus Lusitanus, born Joao Rodrigues de Castelo Branco, was a Portuguese Jewish physician of the sixteenth century. He was born in 1511 in Castelo Branco and took his medical degree at the University of Salamanca. Fear of the Inquisition kept him from returning to Portugal, so he practised in Antwerp, the Netherlands, France and then Italy, where his reputation brought him patients at the papal court. At Ferrara he taught anatomy and lectured on medicinal plants, and he later lived in Ancona, Pesaro and Ragusa before settling in Thessaloniki, where he died in 1568. His best known work is the Curationum Medicinalium Centuriae Septem, seven volumes of case histories with the treatments used. He is credited with observing the valves in the azygos vein, a finding which was for a time wrongly attributed to Giambattista Canano, and some historians therefore place him among the early contributors to the understanding of blood circulation.