Antonio Scarpa was an outstanding head in the history of surgery.

Every time we operate on an inguinal hernia and open the superficial fascia of the anterior abdominal wall, we pay a tribute to the scholar who first described this structure, Antonio Scarpa (1752–1832), professor of anatomy and surgery at the University of Pavia. After him are named, among others, the ganglion vestibuli of the acoustic nerve, the postic staphiloma of the bulbus oculi, and the femoral triangle at the root of the lower limb. Scarpa designed the Historical Museum of the University of Pavia in 1785. In the main hall of the museum are many wax anatomic preparations, his own professoral chair, his marble bust, and a niche on top of the northern entrance, hidden by wooden shutters, within which is a casket of crystal glass, filled with pure alcohol, containing the head of Antonio Scarpa in addition to both forefingers and first phalanxes of thumbs as well as the urogenital apparatus fixed in a paraffin mold. After Scarpa’s death from renal failure on the morning of the October 31, 1832, in his house in Pavia, on the street today named “via Scarpa,” two of his disciples and admirers, Carlo Beolchini, MD, and the naturalist Mauro Rusconi, removed the master’s head and fingers. Allegedly the reason was “the idea not to allow the earth to appropriate all of the mortal remains of a man celebrated throughout Europe”. University gossip at that time suggested other reasons.