Antonio Benivieni

Antonio Benivieni (1443-1502) was a Florentine physician who pioneered the use of the autopsy, a postmortum dissection of a deceased patient's body used to understand the cause of death. Benivieni published a treatise entitled De Abditis Morborum Causis ("The Hidden Causes of Disease") which is now considered one of the first works in the science of Pathology. Some of the protocols developed by Benivieni are similar to those used in autopsies to this day, and he has been referred to as the "father of pathologic anatomy."