Santorio Santorio: Father of Quantitative Medicine

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Padua and the Scientific Circle

Santorio Santorio was born in 1561 in Justinopolis, a Venetian coastal town in present-day Slovenia. He studied medicine at the University of Padua — the most progressive medical school in Europe — where he became a close friend and colleague of Galileo Galilei. Galileo was revolutionising physics by measuring the natural world; Santorio would do the same for the human body. The two men shared a conviction that nature obeyed mathematical laws that could be discovered by careful observation and measurement.