FABRI7.10, GERO'NIMO, commonly called FABRICIUS AB ACQUAPENDENTE, was born in 1537 at Acquapendente in Italy, a city near Orvieto, in the Papal States. His parents, although poor, contrived to furnish him with the means of obtaining an excellent education at Patina, which was then rapidly approaching the eminence it long held, especially as a school of medicine, among the universities of Europe. He became at an early age a pupil of Fallopius, who then held the chair of anatomy and surgery at Padua, and speedily attracted the attention and goodwill of his instructor ; and so well did he avail himself of the advantages thus opened to him, that he was appointed on the death of Fallopins in 1562 to succeed him in the direction of the anatomical studies of the university, and three years later to the full emoluments of the professorship. The growing perception of the importance of anatomical knowledge led in 1584 to the institution of a separate chair for the teaching of that branch of medicine, which however Fabricius appears to have still held in conjunction with that of surgery up to a late period of his life, with the able assistance of Casserius.
His reputation as a teacher drew students from all parts of Europe, till at length the theatre of anatomy, built originally by himself, became so crowded, that the Venetian senate provided him in 1593 with another of ample dimensions at the public expense ; and at the same time added largely to his salary, and granted him many exclusive privileges and titles of honour. The fame and wealth he derived from his practice as a surgeon was even more than equal to that which he enjoyed as an anatomist,and after upwards of fifty years of uninterrupted prosperity he retired from public life the possessor of an enormous fortune and the object of universal esteem. Yet he does not appear to have found the contentment he sought iu his retirement. His
latter years were embittered by domestic dissensions and the unfeeling conduct of those who expected to become his heirs, nud he died in 1619, at the age of eighty-two, not without the suspicion of poison, at his country-seat on the banks of the Brenta, still known as the Montagnuola d'Acquapendente.
The name of Fabricius is endeared to the cultivators of his science by the circumstance of his having been the tutor of William Harvey, whose discovery of the circulation of the blood (by far the most important yet achieved in physiology) was suggested, according to his own statement, by the remarks of Fabricius on the valvular structure of the veins. The title of Fabricius to the minor discovery has been disputed, though strongly asserted by some anatomists. The truth is, that his merit did not so much consist in original discovery as in the systematic arrangement and dissemination of the knowledge acquired by his predecessors. It is as a practical surgeon that he is now chiefly remembered : the observations recorded in his works having however been sines wrought up in the general body of surgical knowledge, are now seldom consulted or quoted specifically as derived from himself.
Fabricius published many tracts both in anatomy and surgery. Those on anatomy and physiology, often referred to, but not with unmixed praise, by Harvey and the miters of the period immediately subsequent to his own, were collected in one volume folio, and repub lished, with a biographical memoir of the author, by Albinus at Leyden in 1738. The beat edition of his surgical works, the tweuty-fifth, was printed, also in one folio volume, at Padua in 1666. His writings are all in Latin, and display a considerable knowledge of the literature, general and medical, of that language and of the Greek.