The Dissected Venus

While other people traveled to historical landmarks or sought out local cuisine, Pomona and Hermione liked visiting libraries.

As an ancient institution, the University of Padua was renowned for medicine, psychology, agriculture, and engineering, especially its medical school. It received the second-highest state funding in Italy, with the University of Bologna ranking first. If the Verona campus had not become independent, Padua's medical school would have been even stronger. There was a yellow building in the botanical garden that housed books from the botany department. It was open only to medical students from Padua and Bologna. Inside were wooden books, each devoted to a single plant. They contained not only written material but also plant specimens, all classified with exceptional clarity.

Many books in the medical school were as old as antiques. As a result, someone with the credentials of a doctorate in cultural ancient-book restoration could borrow books from any branch library, including precious handwritten manuscripts. On the cover of Andreas Vesalius's fifteenth-century On the Fabric of the Human Body was a grand hall of classical architecture crowded with people. They whispered among themselves and looked around the hall. A skeleton sat on the railing, gazing at the sky. Strangely, no one seemed to notice it, nor did anyone panic at its presence. Quite a few of them were peering at the woman lying on the dissection table.

Doctors in the Middle Ages had always been curious about women's bodies, yet struggled to understand them. They were elusive and perplexing. From that confusion arose many bizarre theories. Some doctors believed that a woman's body was merely a distorted version of a man's, while others proposed that the uterus was divided into seven small chambers that determined whether a mother gave birth to a boy or a girl.

There was