Giovanni Domenico Santorini

Giovanni Domenico Santorini was an Italian physician and anatomist, born in Venice in 1681, the son of an apothecary. He took his medical degree at the University of Pisa in 1701 and gave anatomical demonstrations in Venice from 1705 until 1728, becoming professor of anatomy and obstetrics there. He is remembered for exact, rigorous dissections of the human body and is widely counted among the leading anatomists of his time. His best known work is the 1724 treatise Observationes Anatomicae, which describes structures later named for him, among them Santorini's cartilage of the larynx, the accessory pancreatic duct, the supreme nasal concha and a plexus of veins in the retropubic space. He died in 1737.