Peter Charles Remondino Autobiography (1846-1926)
Transcript of an original document on file at the San Diego Historical Society, Dr. P.C. Remondino Papers, MS-4.
Dr. P. C. Remondino, the subject of this sketch, is a native of Torino, Italy, an ancient Cisalpine-Gaulish stronghold. His father was a member of an old Lombard family of that name, while his mother came from the Ligurian-Gaulish stock, her family belonging to the Valdenses, a people which in the twelfth century was the earliest sect that seceeded from the papal church to form the Italian Presbyterian church. The reason given for this action being, that the papacy in assuming to exercise temporal powers was wilfully departing from and acting against Christian principles and teachings.
The earliest known Remondino is thus mentioned in the third volume of the Florence edition of 1844, of the Dizionario Biografico Universale, which translated into English is as follows:
"Mondino, abbreviation of Remondino, latinized as Mundinus, a celebrated anatomist, a native of Milan, according to some authorities, and of Florence according to others, towards the end of the thirteenth century, died in Bologna in 1326."Then follows a list of the several editions of his anatomical works which were several times re-edited aid republished by Italian and German publishers, the last edition mentioned being that printed in is Marburg in Germany in the year 1541, this being two hundred and fifteen years in which his Anatomy replaced that of Galen in the Italian and other European universities.His work was the first European anatomy made from human dissections, to perform which he was obliged to go to Rome to obtain the Pope's permission. Luckily the latter was a broadminded man, one given to a study of the sciences, something on the order of mind s possessed by Benedict XIII and the late Leo XIII. He and the then reigning pope were old friends so Remondino felt quite confident of obtaining the permit which enabled him to dissect two bodies in his Bologna amphitheatre, these being the first human dissections that had been performed in Europe.
There has been several members of the family who have since held the chair of anatomy in the University of Bologna who have retained the name of Mondino, the last one as far as records show being Carlo or Charles Mondino, who died in Bologna in the early part of the past century. Another Mindinus, of the same family, has occupied a similar professional chair in the University of Padua.
The paternal grand parents of our doctor Remondino left the Lombardo-Venetian states to escape the Austrian tyrannical and benighted domination by removing to Piedmont where there existed a constitutional enlightened and liberal form of government and educational freedom. It is thus that thru heredity he received thru this paternal Lombard ancestry and thru maternal Ligurian-Celtic stock the doctor is thoroughly wedded to republican principles and freedom from all dogmatic governmental as well as from all contentious, dogmatic and sectarian religious rules, not in accord with principles taught by the New Testament. Piedmont was at that time the only state in the whole of Italy living under tolerant laws governing religion and education, and the only state in the peninsula where schools were free to select their teaching methods and subjects for teaching, or permitted to adopt the system of Swiss education which had for some years been devised. From his heredity, studies, and observations, he believes in the greatest freedom and simplicity in education and looks upon all standardizing as mischievous departures from which only great injury to individualism can result.
The elder Remondino had a friend in Genoa who was a ship captain, who had just completed the construction and launching a brig of his own, with which he was about to sail to New York with a cargo of marble to be used in the capitol then in process of construction. Knowing that his friend was preparing to go to America, he invited him to be the first passenger to cross the Atlantic on his new vessel. The offer was gladly accepted and he and his young son, then a lad of eight years, embarked for the journey with the captain.
It was during this sea Journey that the doctor was made acquainted thru actual practical experience with some of the intricacies of physical geography of the Atlantic ocean which were never forgotten. Soon after leaving the Straits of Gibraltar, the captain, not altogether without reason, imagined that the brig was chased by a sloop which the captain believed must have been an Algerian pirate, which somehow managed to keep on the brig's track, even when the latter sailed with all its lights extinguished during two successive nights after which the brig, succeeded in escaping. But in escaping, the ship went way out of its course to the southward which carried it into the calms of the Sargasso Sea where it remained becalmed for many days before it could make its exit from the calm and still waters and thru the heavy beds of cover the surface of that sea in mid-ocean. The doctor has very vivid recollections of that adventure, as all hands went armed to the teeth until the chasing sloop disappeared.
Emerging from the south limits of this still sea full of sea-weeds the brig was found to be nearing the Cuban coast where it accidentally drifted into another calm belt where it remained for some days with flopping sails, under a broiling sun and a great heat which nearly spoiled the drinking water, the containing casks of which were moored on supports on the brig's deck. A sharp breeze from the southeast finally came to its rescue and bowled it along towards the Gulf Stream on the Florida coast from which it was hoped that in a few days it would be able to enter New York Harbor.
But when nearing the harbor entrance a violent southwest wind, which seemed to be having great sport at the skipper's expense, bowled the brig back into the rapid current of the Gulf Stream, which with the violent wind blowing stiffly from the southwest carried it past the latitude of New York and sent it to the northeast at such a rapid rate that next morning on awakening, the brig was found to be escaping out of the Gulf Stream into heavy banks of fog to mark time on the shallow waters of the New Foundland banks. To the surprise of the officers and the crew, it was found that the very cold and foggy air on the Banks had completely done away with the foulness of the water, which had become undrinkable, but which now had suddenly turned into water as pure as the water of the best of mountain springs. Owing to adverse winds and the desire of the captain to avoid again falling into the Gulf Stream which with favoring winds might have landed the brig on the Norwegian coast, it took several days to work back to the latitude of New York where the brig finally came to anchor on a misty Sunday morning.
"I must say that thru this tedious voyage," observed the doctor, "I received more or loss instruction while listening to our dinner table talk between my father and the captain and his first mate, who was also his brother, from which I formed a lasting interest in the study of physical geography whose basis of observation and study in my case, resided in those two extremes into which we had accidentally sailed, these being the Sargasso Sea with its clear tropical sky and burning sun, at one extreme, and the light green waters of the New Foundland bank with its great and enshrouding bank of thick and cold fog at the other."
After some months spent in New York, Mr. Remondino and his son wended their way westward stopping at various places until they finally landed in Minnesota, where in all probabilities the doctor would have remained to this day but for the accidental occurrences which led him to emigrate to California in the fall of 1873. From 1857 to 1861 the subject of our biographic sketch followed up his studies in a typical territorial district schoolhouse of only one room with only one teacher, who, however, had been in his earlier life an educated Baptist minister, having retired from the clerical profession to take up that of teaching. He was a very industrious and busy man, as he alone taught the A, B, C class, and from that on up to the various readers, which then took the place of our present grades, up into the higher mathematics and philological branches, in the latter of which he had classes in Greek and Latin, the doctor being in the Latin class. Besides these he had a night school, which the doctor also attended, in which he taught German to a grown-up class, the doctor being the only small lad in the class.
A large part of the population of the county and town consisted of French Canadians along with the descendants of many of the early French government officials and the many French employees of the fur companies and store keepers, who had intermarried with the daughters of the Sioux chiefs, the results being that more than half of the population spoke French, which he soon learned to speak. Necessarily, the French there spoken contained many of the Breton and Normandy idioms of the Canadian French with not a few Sioux Indian words. Thru this and his daily contact with the Indians, he learned both the Sioux language and the mixed French vernacular there in use.
Luckily his father had brought with him quite a library of Italian and French works, among which was a complete edition of Balzac's Comedie Humaine; an edition of Los Cases' Memorial de Sainte-Helena, in two large quarto volumes, containing about three times the amount of text as is to be found in Ernest Bourdin's edition of the same work, in two large octavo volumes; and General Mathieu Dumas' History of the Napoleonic Campaigns-from 1799-1814 in nineteen volumes.
But the books from which he obtained most enlightenment, by this meaning an education in thinking and reasoning, that went far beyond the immediate texts contained in a work, consisted of a five of Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary and a work by Millhousee entitled Grammatica Inglese, just then published in Milan containing Benjamin Franklin's stories and sayings, a work intended to educate Italians in what, in the middle of the past century, was considered as being true Americanism in all senses.
One book that the doctor personally purchased for himself and from which he derived a broader view of the American nation was a two volume edition, beautifully illustrated, of Lossing's Field-Book of the Revolution, which he later on supplemented with the two works of Weem's, these being the life of Washington and that of Francis Marion. These works on the American Revolution he had completely mastered before finishing his twelfth year, after which he read Thackeray, Dickens, Warren, and Wilkie Collins.
From studying and digesting something from the above works, the doctor converted his Canadian and Sioux philologic combination that composed the French vernacular, then extensively spoken in the northwestern parts of what had been the province of Louisiana, into Parisian or literary French; while from the English works he greatly extended his knowledge and appreciation of differing British ideals, as were later on represented in earlier New England and Virginia, all of which added greatly to his English vocabulary.
It was in this territorial district school -- which might truly have been termed a most decidedly early frontier American university of the period; divested, however, of its ancient New England doctrinal theology, but combining all the elements of a primary, elementary, grammar, and high, and college educational branches, all taught in one room, which might as well have been out of doors under a spreading elm or maple tree in imitation of the ancient Greeks, with only one teacher -- that Dr. Remondino, as a small lad, began what may well be considered as being his American education.
In this school a student enjoyed the presence of all necessary opportunities for practically observing and studying different charactered youthful mental states, abilities, and receptivities. It was in this primitive Comenian order of an humble one-man taught school wherein individualism -- instead of being smothered tend crushed down thru too much modern standardization and having its life pressed out of existence by over-weighty and over-charged curriculi -- was encouraged, taught, and unconsciously cultivated, that as a lad, the future physician laid the foundation of his present ideas that education to be efficient should be freer and more sensible and lose pedantly constrained.
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