Giovanni da Vigo

Giovanni da Vigo (1450 to 1525) was an Italian surgeon of the Renaissance. He studied under Battista di Rapallo, surgeon to the Marquis of Saluzzo, and spent his early years of practice in Genoa, where a statue of him stands before the old civic hospital in Rapallo. In 1495 he moved to Savona and met Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, who after becoming Pope Julius II in 1503 took him to Rome as his official surgeon. In 1514 Vigo published Practica in arte chirurgica copiosa, a nine book work in Latin covering anatomy, medications, ulcers, wounds, fractures and dislocations, and the disease then called the French disease, generally equated with syphilis. It contained one of the earliest discussions of gunshot wounds, which he wrongly held to be poisoned by gunpowder and so treated with boiling oil, a practice Ambroise Paré later showed to be harmful. A condensed version, Practica compendiosa, followed in 1517. The work was translated into English, Italian, Spanish and French and reprinted dozens of times.