Bartolomeo Panizza

Bartolomeo Panizza was an Italian anatomist, born in Vicenza, who lived from 1785 to 1867 and died in Pavia. He took a medical degree in surgery at Padua and studied further at Bologna and Pavia, where he became a professor in 1809 and was a pupil and associate of the anatomist Antonio Scarpa. In 1833 he described the foramen of Panizza, the opening with a valve that joins the left and right aortas in the crocodilian heart and lets oxygenated and deoxygenated blood mix slightly. He also studied the lymphatic system of reptiles, and the plexuses of lymph vessels in the frenulum of the prepuce carry his name. In an 1855 treatise on the optic nerve he attributed the function of vision to the posterior cortex; his finding was largely ignored at the time and its importance was recognized only years later.