Information
Specialist Notes
The only known information about the author can be obtained from the book itself; born in 1623 (as reported in the portrait on the frontispiece) in Salerno ("Cognomen & Patria quoque similis factis salernitanus est") where he lived, practiced and taught medicine and surgery, (in the dedications he defines himself as "Dominus Ionnes Antonius Vitalis Medicus Phisicus, & ; Chirurgus Salernitanus. Necnon examinatoribus in Salernitano Collegio) and finally specialized in the treatment of the head and brain, today neurosurgery ("Dum Vitali novo modo dat Vulnera curandi Capitis").
Ridley's treatise The anatomy of the brain was published in 1695; Antonio Pacchioni's essay De durae meningis Fabrica was published in 1701 in Rome by the printer Domenico Antonio Ercole; Giorgio Baglivi's De fibra motrice etmorbida was published in Perugia for the first time in July 1700, in the form of a short epistle to Alessandro Pascoli, as an appendix to the latter's work< i> The human bodyand in a definitive, more extensive edition, in 1702, by the Roman printer Buagni.
According to Antonio Mazza (See Historiarum Epitome, page 122) Vitale also published Apologia de Capitisi Vulneribus(probably the introductory chapter entitled “Capitis Anatomica” inserted in the "Proem" of the "Quaestiones") and Supplicium contra elogium Pellegrini. But there are no traces of these two writings in the usual bibliographies. Rare and precious testimony of the advanced, for the time, teaching systems practiced in the "Salenitano Medical College". D “Wellcome Collection” in London. See De Renzi, Salernitana Medical School, pag. 600. Mazza, Historiarum Epitome, pag. 122