Between text and practice : the anatomical injections of Berengario da Carpi

In 1521, the surgeon, Berengario da Carpi, published a commentary on a fourteenth-century anatomical text. In his commentary, Berengario made reference to injections that he made in the study of the kidney and of fetal urination. Berengario's work predates the standard account of the development of anatomical injections by nearly a century, and it is my goal to provide the context for them. I describe how the injection procedures can be linked to medical practices of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries while the purpose to which Berengario put them arose from debated topics found in the anatomical texts he was consulting. Berengario's injections therefore demonstrate that medical scientiae in the early sixteenth century combined practical experience and bookish, theoretical knowledge. [Publisher's text]