Reconstructing Bernardino Genga's Chronology From Newly Uncovered Archival Records

Abstract

Bernardino Genga was among the most renowned anatomists and surgeons of seventeenth-century Rome, where he practised, taught, and authored influential works on anatomy and surgery. Yet the chronology of his life has long remained unsettled because of conflicting accounts of his birth and death years. Research in Roman archives was undertaken to resolve this uncertainty. Consultation of parochial and state registers uncovered detailed records of Genga's professional, personal, and residential history in Rome, from his early career as an attendant to the sick at the Ospedale di Santo Spirito in Sassia to his later years as a chief surgeon and head of a household with several children. The newly identified documents demonstrate that Genga died in 1695, rather than in 1690 as commonly reported; provide strong evidence, based on his recorded age, that he was born in 1636; and link him genealogically to an ancestral Genga family from his town of origin, Mondolfo. These findings shed new light on the chronology of an early modern anatomist and surgeon and reveal that his late works, characterized as posthumous in several online reference sources, were in fact published during his lifetime.