EUSTA'CHIUS. BARTOLOMEO EITSTACHIO, or atm./moms, was one of the distinguished band of Italian professors to whom we owe the restoration of anatomy and much of its advancement in modern times. He was born in the early part of the 16th century at San Severino, in the marquisate of Ancona. Having accomplished himself in the classical and Arabic he studied medicine at Rome, and afterwards settled there with a view to practise as a physician, under the patronage of the celebrated Cardinal Borromeo. The interest he could thus command, and his unusual talents, were sufficient to elevate him to the chair of medicine in the Collegio della Sapienza; yet he never obtained any degree of professional success, and after a long struggle with poverty and sickness, died in great indigence about 1574.
It is not surprising that Eustachius should have failed as a practical physician, for the exclusive devotion with which he pursued his favourite study must have left him little time for the cultivation of the lucrative branches of his art; but the complete failure as a teacher, of a man of so much genius and enthusiasm, is remarkable. It may be attributed perhaps to the ascendancy of the rival school of Padua, snpported by the wealth of Venice, and illustrated by the established fame of Vesalius and his successors ; and may be due in part to a defective temper, of which some indications may be observed in his writings, and to the jealousy with which he concealed his discoveries. Eustachius published little in his lifetime, though he lived long and laboured much ; yet his treatises, short and few as they are, and composed when anatomy was yet an infant science, are of high authority even at the present day, and bear witness to the accuracy and extent of his researches. They are all in Latin, and are nearly all
collected in his Opuscula Anatomica ' published in 4to at Venice in 1564 by himself, and again by Boerhaave, Leyden, 1707, in 8vo. He also published an edition, with annotations, of Erotian'a ' Lexicon Hippocraticum.' His principal work, On the Disputed Points of Anatomy,' upon which he evidently intended to rest his fame, was unpublished to the time of his death, although announced in the ' Opuscula,' probably for want of means ; it was then lost, and has never been recovered; but thirty-nine copper-plates, engraved as early as 1552, and intended to illustrate the text of this work, were found at Urbino in 1712, and given to the world two years afterwards by Lancisi, with the aid of Morgagni, Pacchioni, and other anatomists of distinction. Several editions of them have since appeared with voluminous commentaries ; the best is that of Albinus, published at Leyden in 1744 in folio, and reprinted in 1762. The importance attached to these plates, after so long an interval of oblivion, shows how much Eustachius must have preceded his age; and they prove that many facts of great Importance in anatomy were accurately known to him, the partial re-discovery of which had shed lustre on a century and a half of subsequent inquiry.
Haller declares it to be impossible, without writing a treatise on the subject, to particularise the discoveries and corrections that Eustachius introduced into anatomy. The tube leading from the ear-drum to the throat, and a certain valvular membrane in the heart, which bear his name, are among the former.