Laura Bassi, born in Bologna into a…

Laura Bassi, born in Bologna into a wealthy family with a lawyer as a father, had beeb privately educated and tutored for seven years in her teens by Gaetano Tacconi, a University teacher of Biology, Natural History and Medicine.

She had came to the attention of Cardinal Prospero Lambertini, who has encouraged her scientific work.

She was appointed professor of anatomy in 1731 at the University of Bologna at the age of twenty-one, becoming the first woman to officially teach at a university in Europe.