Plant anatomy
It was in the late 1600s that plant anatomy became refined into a modern science. Italian doctor and microscopist, Marcello Malpighi, was one of the two founders of plant anatomy. In 1671 he published his "Anatomia Plantarum", the first major advance in plant physiogamy since Aristotle. The other founder was the British doctor Nehemiah Grew. He published "An Idea of a Philosophical History of Plants" in 1672 and "The Anatomy of Plants" in 1682. Grew is credited with the recognition of plant cells, although he called them 'vesicles' and 'bladders'. He correctly identified and described the sexual organs of plants (flowers) and their parts.
Alessandra Giliani
Alessandra Giliani (1307-1326) was thought to be an Italian natural historian, best known as the first woman to be recorded in historical documents as practicing anatomy and pathology. However, the historical evidence for her existence is limited. Some scholars consider her to be a fiction invented by  Alessandro Machiavelli (1693-1766) . whilst others hold that the participation of a woman in anatomy at that time was so shocking that she has been edited out of history .
Giliani is believed to have been born in 1307, in San Giovanni in Persiceto, in the Italian province of Emilia-Romagna. The chronicle of her life holds that she died in 1326, possibly from a septic wound, at the age of 19. Celebrated as the first female anatomist of the Western World, she is reputed to have been a brilliant prosector (preparer of corpses for anatomical dissection). She is said to have worked as the surgical assistant to Mondino de' Liuzzi (d. 1326), a world-renowned professor at the medical school of the University of Bologna. (Credited with being the father of modern anatomy, de' Liuzzi published a seminal text on the subject in 1316.)