Bartolomeo Maggi (Latinized as Bartholomeus Maggius) (August 1477 – 7 April 1552) was an Italian military surgeon who spent several years of his life on the battlefields treating, soothing, and healing the most desperate wounds. The experience he gained in this field lead him to write a work on surgeries in wartime De Vulnerum Sclopetorum, et Bombardarum Curatione Tractatus (1552) which was the first to deal with gunshot wounds. The Latin term Vulnus sclopetarium referring to gunshot wounds was first used by him. His work was published posthumously by his brother Giovanni Battista.
Maggi was born in Bologna where he trained in surgery. He joined the papal army as a doctor at Rome under Pope Julius III. He served at the sieges of Parma and Mirandola and described treatments for bullet wounds and the management of amputations. Maggi noted that gunshot wounds damaged not by gunpowder toxicity as was then held but through damage to tissue. One of his nephews Julius Caesar Arantius (1530–1589) also became a notable surgeon.
Life
According to Gaetano Marini, Bartolomeo Maggi was born in Bologna, presumably in 1476 and died in his native city in 1552, at the age of 76. There are not much certain information on his biography, in fact there remain many doubts about his life, starting with his date of birth of which we have very little and contradictory information.
Register Issue
Giovanni Nicolò Pasquali Aidosi reported the alleged inscription of Bartolomeo Maggi’s tombstone, located in the church of S. Francesco in Bologna, in his book ‘I dottori bolognesi di Teologia , Filosofia, Medicina e d’Arti liberali. Dall’anno 1000 per tutto Marzo del 1623’. Apparently the tombstone states that he ‘lived seventy-five years, seven months and twenty-two days’, having died on 26 March 1552, and whose date of birth would therefore be the fourth/fifth of August. This inscription is also found in the influential work of Giovanni Alessandro Brambilla. Nicolas Eloy, a Belgian writer and physician, wrote in ‘Dizionario storico della Medicina’ that Maggi would have been born in 1477, which would coincide with the inscription of the tombstone reported by Pasquali Aidosi.
In 1858 unknown sources went directly to the site of the tombstone to verify the truthfulness of these assumptions and partly confirmed the information by the Bolognese baptismal books and wrote as follows:‘All the most famous historians, Alidosi, Bumaldi, Orlandi, Mandosio, Astruc, Portal, Eloy and Fantuzzi, speaking of Bartolomeo Maggi, say that he was born in 1477 and died in April 1552 at the age of 75 years; and instead it has been discovered that he was baptised [in] St. Peter’s Cathedral on 26th August 1516, and since the time of his death is not in doubt, it emerges that he lived only a little over 35 years. This is […] more amply confirmed by the inscription on the grandiose sarcophagus that was erected for Maggi in the church of San Francesco, which clearly reads: qui vixit an[ni] XXXV mens[es] VII dies XXII and not an[ni] LXXV as reported by Portal, Brambilla and Fantuzzi; hence the error derived from the wrong copry of the inscription.’Thus the shift of the birth date forward to 1517 implies that Maggi had lived just a bit more than 35 years, and would also explain the lack of information about the doctor until 1541.
The Roman Period
According to Giovanni Fantuzzi, Bolognese historian, Bartolomeo Maggi 'had been appointed to the reading of surgery in the year 1541 and held this office until the year 1552, year in which he died'''.
Most of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century biographers stated that Maggi sojourned in Rome at the papal court, for a relatively short period of time. During this time Maggi 'acquired such a great reputation that Pope Julius the third' who made him his doctor, and was praised by Henry II, King of France.
As already mentioned Maggi's roman sojourn was apparently very short due to a future illness; it is indeed known that the physician 'was the doctor of Julius III, raised to the papacy in 1550 and died in his home town in 1552.
In addition to being the pope's physician, Maggi met and treated Johannes Baptista Montanus during the siege of Parma. The man was leading the papal army and was the pope's nephew. Even if we are not convinced that Maggi was the pope's personal physician, we are certain that he was in contact with the papal familia.