Botanical Garden: the need for a "garden of the simple"
It was 1533 when the chair ad Lecturam Simplicium was established in the Studium Patavinum, for the first time in Italy, assigned to Francesco Bonafede, Paduan lecturer of ordinary practical medicine in the second place. Previously, the course unit on drugs was not given by special chairs but the readers of practical medicine considered from time to time, depending on the individual diseases, the most appropriate medicines to use.
The new course unit, on the other hand, with a strongly applicative character, provides for the study of pharmacology proper, that is, of the properties of natural, mineral, vegetable and animal products. For this reason, the need was soon felt, especially on the part of Bonafede, to create a place in which to cultivate and study and observe herbs for therapeutic use and where to offer practical demonstrations of the subject taught to schoolchildren.
This need was answered in the resolution, of the summer of July 31, 1545, which authorized the construction of the public Orto dei semplici, a place where medicinal plants (the semplici) could be cultivated from the regions subject to Venetian rule and from the dominions of the Serenissima in the eastern Mediterranean, and to which, as requested by Bonafede, was also attached "an apothecary that would serve the study and authentication of medicinal products".
Medicines, in the past, were distinguished between simple and compound; The former came from the natural kingdoms of plants, animals and minerals, while the latter resulted from the composition of the former. Since plants dominated this category, the Garden is called the simple.
Already in 1546 the Orto dei Semplici, of which Luigi Squalermo was prefect, could already be visited.
Its establishment represents a passage of great importance in the history of modern science because it introduces the demonstrative method also in that part of pharmacology that deals with the study of medicinal substances, especially plant ones, and in botany.