Giovanni Battista Morgagni
| Giovanni Battista Morgagni | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
25 February 1682 Forlì |
| Died | 6 December 1771 (aged 89) Padua |
| Nationality | Italian |
| Fields | anatomist |
| Academic advisors | Antonio Maria Valsalva |
| Notable students | Antonio Scarpa |
| Known for | anatomical pathology |
Giovanni Battista Morgagni (25 February 1682 – 6 December 1771) was an Italian anatomist, generally regarded as the father of modern anatomical pathology, who taught thousands of medical students from many countries during his 56 years as Professor of Anatomy at the University of Padua.
His most significant literary contribution, the monumental five-volume On the Seats and Causes of Disease, embodied a lifetime of experience in anatomical dissection and observation, and established the fundamental principle that most diseases are not vaguely dispersed throughout the body, but originate locally, in specific organs and tissues.
His parents were in comfortable circumstances, but not of the nobility; it appears from his letters to Giovanni Maria Lancisi that Morgagni had ambitions to improve his rank. It may be inferred that he succeeded from the fact that he is described on a memorial tablet at Padua as nobilis forolensis, "noble of Forlì", apparently by right of his wife. At the age of eighteen he went to Bologna to study philosophy and medicine, and he graduated with much praise as a doctor in both faculties three years later, in 1701. He acted as prosector to Antonio Maria Valsalva (one of the distinguished pupils of Malpighi), who held the office of demonstrator anatomicus in the Bologna school, and whom he assisted more particularly in preparing his celebrated work on the Anatomy and Diseases of the Ear, published in 1704.
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. At this period he enjoyed a high repute in Bologna; he was made president of the Academia Enquietorum when in his twenty-fourth year, and he is said to have signalized his tenure of the presidential chair by discouraging abstract speculations, and by setting the fashion towards exact anatomical observation and reasoning.
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