Physician, born in Forli, NEC Italy. He studied at Bologna, worked as an anatomical demonstrator, and became professor of medicine at Padua in 1711. In his writings, he correlated pathological lesions with symptoms in over 700 cases, and is traditionally considered to be the founder of the science of pathological anatomy, the father of morbid anatomy.
Giovanni Battista Morgagni (February 25, 1682 - December 6, 1771), Italian anatomist, was born on at Forlì and he is celebrated as the father of the modern anatomical pathology.
Education
His parents were in comfortable circumstances, but not of the nobility; Lancisi that Morgagni was ambitious of gaining admission into that rank, and it may be inferred that he succeeded from the fact that he is described on a memorial tablet at Padua as nobilis forolensis. At the age of sixteen he went to Bologna to study philosophy and medicine, and he graduated with much éclat as doctor in both faculties three years later, in 1701.
Professional
Early career
Many years after, in 1740, Morgagni edited a collected edition of Valsalva's writings, with important additions to the treatise on the ear, and with a memoir of the author. When Valsalva was transferred to Parma Morgagni succeeded to his anatomical demonstratorship.
He published the substance of his communications to the Academy in 1706 under the title of Adversaria anatomica, the first of a series by which he became favorably known throughout Europe as an accurate anatomist; After a time he gave up his post at Bologna, and occupied himself for the next two or three years at Padua, where he had a friend in Domenico Guglielmini (1655-1710), professor of medicine, but better-known as a writer on physics and mathematics, whose works he afterwards edited (1719) with a biography. Guglielmini desired to see him settled as a teacher at Padua, and the unexpected death of Guglielmini himself made the project feasible, Antonio Vallisneri (1661-1730) being transferred to the vacant chair, and Morgagni succeeding to the chair of theoretical medicine. He came to Padua in the spring of 1712, being then in his thirty-first year, and he taught medicine there with the most brilliant success until his death on the 6th of December 1771.
Middle career
When he had been three years in Padua an opportunity occurred for his promotion (by the Venetian senate) to the chair of anatomy, in which he became, the successor of an illustrious line of scholars, including Vesalius, Gabriele Falloppio, Geronimo Fabrizio, Gasserius, and Adrianus Spigelius, and in which he enjoyed a stipend that was increased from time to time by vote of the senate until it reached twelve hundred gold ducats.
Morgagni enjoyed an unequalled popularity among all classes.
Before he had been long in Padua the students of the German nation, of all the faculties there, elected him their patron, and he advised and assisted them in the purchase of a house to be a German library and club, for all time. Among his more celebrated pupils were Antonio Scarpa (who died in 1832, connecting the school of Morgagni with the modern era), Domenico Cotugno (1736-1822), and Caldani (1725-1813), the author of the magnificent atlas of anatomical plates published in 2 volumes at Venice in 1801-1814.
In his earlier years at Padua, Morgagni brought out (1717-1719) five more series of the Adversaria anatomica, these his strictly medical publications were few and casual (on gallstones, varices of the Venae cavae, cases of stone, and several memoranda on medico-legal points, drawn up at the request of the curia).
Late career
It was not until 1761, when he was in his eightieth year, that he brought out the great work which, once for all, made pathological anatomy a science, and diverted the course of medicine into new channels of exactness or precision--the De Sedibus et causis morborum per anatomem indagatis, which during the succeeding ten years, notwithstanding its bulk, was reprinted several times (thrice in four years) in its original Latin, and was translated into French (1765), English (1769), and German (1771).
The only special treatise on pathological anatomy previous to that of Morgagni was the work of Théophile Bonet of Neuchâtel, Sepulchretum: sive anatomia practica ex cadaveribus morbo denalis, first published (Geneva, 2 vols. folio) in 1679, three years before Morgagni was born; Although the normal anatomy of the body had been comprehensively, and in some parts exhaustively, written by Vesalius and Fallopius, it had not occurred to any one to examine and describe systematically the anatomy of diseased organs and parts.
Francis Glisson indeed (1597-1677) shows in a passage quoted by Bonet in the preface to the Sepulchretum, that he was familiar with the idea, at least, of systematically comparing the state of the organs in a series of bodies, and of noting those conditions which invariably accompanied a given set of symptoms.
Morgagni, in the preface to his own work, discusses the defects and merits of the Sepulchrelum: it was largely a compilation of other men's cases, well and ill authenticated; it was prolix, often inaccurate and misleading from ignorance of the normal anatomy, and it was wanting in what would now be called objective impartiality a quality which was introduced as decisively into morbid anatomy by Morgagni as it had been introduced two centuries earlier into normal human anatomy by Vesalius.
Morgagni has narrated the circumstances under which the De Sedibus took origin. The conversation turned upon the Sepulchretum of Bonet, and it was suggested to Morgagni by his dilettante friend that he should put on record his own observations. Those seventy letters constitute the De sedibus et causis morborum, which was given to the world as a systematic treatise in 2 vols., folio (Venice, 1761), twenty years after the task of epistolary instruction was begun.
The letters are arranged in five books, treating of the morbid conditions of the body a capite ad calcem, and together containing the records of some 646 dissections. Many of the cases are taken from Morgagni's early experiences at Bologna, and from the records of his teachers Valsalva and HF Albertini not elsewhere published.
Legacy
The range of Morgagni's scholarship, as evidenced by his references to early and contemporary literature, is astonishing.
Although Morgagni was the first to understand and to demonstrate the absolute necessity of basing diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment on an exact and comprehensive knowledge of anatomical conditions, he made no attempt (like that of the Vienna school sixty years later) to exalt pathological anatomy into a science disconnected from clinical medicine and remote from practical experience with the scalpel, his precision, his exhaustiveness, and his freedom from bias are his essentially modern or scientific qualities;
His treatise was the commencement of the era of steady, or cumulative progress in pathology and in practical medicine.
A biography of Morgagni by Mosca was published at Naples in 1768.
Reference
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
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