Mariano Santo

Mariano Santo (1488 to 1577) was a surgeon of the sixteenth century, born in Barletta in southern Italy. He went to Rome in 1510 to study medicine, became a practising surgeon and taught at the University of Bologna. After returning to Barletta in 1520 on the death of his father, he married, moved with his family through Milan to Ragusa, now Dubrovnik, operated on battlefields during the wars between Austria and the Ottomans, and finally went to Venice. He is remembered for a method of removing bladder stones, the sectio mariana, which used a new instrument he called the esploratorium, and for writing on the extraction of stones from the bladder and the kidneys, notably the Libellus Aureus de lapide a vesica per incisionem extrahendo and De lapide renum. He died in Rome in 1577 and is buried in the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. The source article is brief and gives no further detail on his training or teachers.