This book is an ambitious attempt to study the developments of medicine in Bologna both within and (especially) outside of the formal classroom between the mid-thirteenth and the mid-sixteenth century. It consists of four main chapters. The first discusses the “origins of the medieval medical hierarchy” (16), while the second explores the mechanisms used by professors to perpetuate this hierarchy in later centuries. This second chapter gives special attention to ways in which the city and the College of Arts and Medicine tried to stabilize the workings of the university in their own favor by removing student autonomy, increasingly restricting university hires to Bolognese citizens, “cementing their control over exams and licensures and establishing a system of instruction that created future Bolognese faculty from their students” (49). The third and fourth chapters consider anatomy teaching. First they explore where this kind of instruction took place (particularly in the case of anatomical theaters, which initially were erected in churches such as San Salvatore and San Francesco), and who had access to it. Then they discuss lectures connected with dissections, starting with Mondino de’ Liuzzi's Anothomia (ca. 1316) and then addressing the late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century writings (not necessarily lectures) of Girolamo Manfredi, Alessandro Achillini, Jacopo Berengario da Carpi, and the non-Bolognese Alessandro Benedetti. The work concludes with three appendixes. The first provides a table of graduands in medicine (1369–1505), a list of members of the College of Arts and Medicine (1369–1500), and a prospectus of teachers’ salaries and fines (relative to 1384–88 and 1405). The second refers to pre-1530 figures appearing in Bologna's anatomical theater.

The book's argument is that Bolognese medical education evolved during the long period taken into consideration, not just because of those involved in the subject's teaching, but also because of changes in the places, for instance, in which anatomical dissections took place and the methods used to discuss anatomy. The work's core is chapter 4, which “directly challenges the traditional idea that Mondino's successors were repetitive and non-innovative because their anatomical texts were either modeled after Mondino or did not include any ‘new’ anatomical information” (127). As the conclusion confirms, the book's chronological bookends are meant to question a narrative that places too much emphasis on the “anatomical Renaissance” and the novelty of Andreas Vesalius. Thus it counters “the tendency, especially in medicine and science, to privilege modernity and any historical topic or physician who appears to adumbrate modern scientific practices” (144).

There is much one can agree with in this thesis, and Robison does well to emphasize both the significance of Bologna for medicine (the secondary literature tends to overemphasize Padua in this regard) and the development of medical curricular practices from Mondino to Vesalius. Readers may, however, have questions about the methodology adopted to reach those conclusions. Fascinating as they are, the works discussed in chapter 4, for instance, are not necessarily related to the classroom (as Robison herself concedes). This makes it exceedingly difficult to draw firm conclusions about developments within anatomy teaching. Also hard to rely on are the statutes (whether of the student universitas [1405] or of the College of Arts and Medicine [1410]) on which much of the book is based. Finally, in terms of new perspectives, there is only so much that a book based entirely on published sources (and with a shaky command of Latin) can do.

This book would have been vastly improved had it offered a clear and dependable presentation of the nature of practical medicine (there is a fundamental misunderstanding throughout about what medicina theorica and practica were), the institutional and civic context (it is surprising to read that, by 1410, “Bologna was no longer ruled by a communal constitution, but rather a papal representative” [38]), and a precise analysis of the lecturae universitatis (72–76). It could have made use of known archival documents such as salary records and should have received a thorough copyediting for both English and Latin. As it stands, many of its points are both confused and confusing. Still, it is right to emphasize the centuries-long background in which the work of Vesalius must be placed, and which scholars such as Roger French and Nancy Siraisi have done so much to illuminate.