Alessandra Giliani was the first woman to be recorded in historical documents as practicing anatomy (which today would be called pathology)
Giliani is said to have carried out her own anatomical investigations, developing a method of draining the blood from a corpse and replacing it with a hardening coloured dye—and possibly adding to our understanding of the coronary-pulmonary circulatory system. (All evidence of her work was either lost or destroyed.)
Alessandra Giliani's short life was honoured by Otto Angenius, also one of Mondino's assistants and probably her fiance, with a plaque at the Church of San Pietro e Marcellino[disambiguation needed] in Rome which describes her work.
She is mentioned by the nineteenth-century historian Michele Medici, who published a history of the Bolognese school of anatomy in 1857.
Barbara Quick's novel, A Golden Web, published by HarperTeen in 2010, is a fictional re-imagining of Alessandra Giliani's life and times.
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