Suchergebnisse

The theme of this paper derives from the unpublished manuscript records of the Registers of Ships arriving in Maltese ports and held in quarantine from 1739 to 1801 i . Clinical case histories from other contemporary hospitals - the Holy Infirmary and the Women's Hospital at Valletta, Santo Spirito Hospital at Rabat (Malta) and the Gozo Hospital - have not been met with. The Lazzaretto case histories are the only ones that have reached us and, wanting as they are in details of their contents, they constitute the only means of improving our knowledge of the pattern of disease III Malta two hundred years ago. They occur in the form of entries written by the attuario dell' Officio della Sanitd di Malta or Registrar of the Sanitary Commissioners whose office was at the Barriera at Valletta2. The attuario was a layman and it is likely that what he wrote was dictated to him by the barberotto (barber-surgeon) or by the physician attending the case; or, occasionally, by the protomedico or Chief Government Physician examining the patient. ; N/A

This study attempts to trace and record the names and the whereabouts of residences of medical and paramedical personnel living in Valletta in 1766 and there social environment. The source of which it is based is a roll or survey drawn up in that year and listing the male population of Valletta and Floriana liable to be called for military service. ; peer-reviewed

We do not know when the academic study of pharmacy had its beginnings in Malta but it is very probable that it began at the Holy infirmary at Valletta in 1676 when the School for Anatomy and Surgery was founded in that hospital by Grand Master Nicola Cotoner. It is certain that the Director of the School - the priest and physician Fra Giuseppe Zammit - was also the teacher of botany and that, in order to further the practical study of this discipline, he founded a botanical garden, out of his own purse, in a ditch of Fort St. Elmo in 1690. In this garden he cultivated medicinal plants. ; N/A

The theoretical and practical progress achieved by the biological sciences in our time contrasts very markedly with the tentative experimental studies in these fields in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Those distant years are of special interest to the historian of medicine as they formed the matrix in which the seeds of our present knowledge were sown and cultured. Malta may take some pride in the fact that it has had a share - albeit a small one· in the series of steps leading towards the elucidation of the chemical, physiological and pathological perplexities of those formative years. This was possible thanks to the investigations and observations of Dr. John Davy carried out at the British General Military Hospital of Valletta- formerly the Holy Infirmary of the Order of St. John - between 1828 and 1835. ; N/A

Towards the end of 1859 we come across a record of a few letters exchanged between the confraternity and the Minor Conventuals. The topic which gave rise to this correspondence was the altar of the confraternity in St. Francis Church, Valletta. Sometime in the first half of the nineteenth century the altar was rebuilt in the form of "a sepulchral urn flanked by two large trunks or rods of Aesculapius entwined by serpents and serving as columns to support the altar slab". These trunks and serpents were meant to symbolise the medical and allied professions but in the view of the Archbishop Bishop Mgr. Publio Maria Sant they were pagan symbols so that one could not say whether "the altar was Christian or pagan or a mixture of both. This medico-ecclesiastical controversy shows how the religious factor has shaped the pattern of the social, political, artistic and intellectual life of Malta in the past. ; peer-reviewed

Since Malta was governed by foreigners for years, laws and legislation among other aspects of life were influenced by multiple cultures. Ever since the 16th century we find printed copies such as Codice di Manoel de Vilhena o Leggi e Costituzioni Prammaticali nel 1724, and Codice de Rohan o Diritto Municipale di Malta. The author studies recorded cases of forensic psychiatry related to criminal matters committed by people suffering from mental illness over a period of 3 centuries ; peer-reviewed

The British Medical Association (Malta Branch) prize in the medical essay competition for 1969 was awarded to Dr. Paul Cassar for this paper. When the French finally capitulated in September 1800 and Great Britain took over the civil and military administration of Malta, the Island was in a very poor shape. Eventually, Malta's connexion with the British Crown led to the growth of the Island into one of the most formidable naval bases of the Mediterranean. This development not only determined the political orientation in world affairs and the economic pattern of the Island but also brought Maltese medicine, for the first time in our history, in close touch with British medical thought and practice. At this period this influence was exerted mainly by the medical personnel of the navy. The medical highlights of the decade 1800-10 are Burnett's clinical description of Undulant Fever; the introduction of vaccination against smallpox; the revival of the University with its Medical Faculty; the initiation of the Government's policy of sending Maltese medical men for postgraduate studies to the United Kingdom and the beginning of the first contacts between British and Maltese medicine. ; peer-reviewed

Cassar unveils the life story of a surgeon from Modena, Italy, called Paolo Fabrizi. He visited Malta twice in the 19th century, performing forty operations as well as being the first on the island to perform plastic surgery. The author discusses the political circumstances under which Fabrizi decided to leave Italy, albeit for a limited amount of time. ; N/A

In the 18th and 19th centuries, preparations for a revolt against the foreign rulers in Malta were mostly planned by pharmacists. A case in point was the pharmacist Pasquale Balzan who with a handful of men succeeded in taking possession of St. James Cavalier in Valletta. The uprising was however quickly quelled by the Grand Master and Knights of St. John, and he was strangled to death. Another pharmacist is Francesco Pisani, the owner of a pharmacy in Senglea who in his pharmacy was alleged to have plotted together with other physicians to assassinate General Vaubois in order to oust the French from Malta. Under the French, another pharmacist was Stanislaus Gatt from Qormi who realised that it was not enough to expel the French from Malta but also to bring the Island under a powerful protecting power. These were the times of social and political unrest in Europe. Pharmacies played an important role, as they served as "clubs" where groups of professional and cultured men discussed the news and political topics of the day. ; peer-reviewed

This article is a continuation from Volume one, page 59. During the 1743 plague precautions, boats were prohibited from approaching part of the Valletta wharf extending from Lascaris Tunnel to the Barriera. Ships from places south of Catania and Palermo were placed in quarantine for twenty-four days. On the 11th June a more vigorous surveillance was imposed along the shores of Malta, a sanitary cordon was stretched from north to south along the eastern seaboard. The Order of St. John took no risks with regard to Malta and it was only on the 23rd February, 1746, that the Grand Master considered that the threat of plague had vanished, that it was safe to call off the extraordinary quarantine restrictions. We are bewildered by the lack of purely medical provisions and by the absence of physicians among the Commissioners. Notwithstanding, we are impressed by the soundness of their principles of public health prophylaxis, the rationality of the methods employed and the welding into an integrated sanitary system of their naval, military and economic resources. ; peer-reviewed

In view of the correspondence about the legal and psychological implications of a late change in the established sex of adults (Journal, 1954, 1, 694, 710, 876, 1040), the following case of pseudo-hermaphroditism recorded in the documents of the old Grand Court of Malta in 1774 may be of interest. The manuscripts, so far unpublished, form part of a collection of legal papers entitled " Bandi 1772-1779 " and are to be found in folios 80 and 81 of MS. 429 at the Royal Malta Library of Valletta. They concern a certain Rosa Mifsud, from the village of Luqa, who was brought up as a girl apparently because from the anatomical configuration of her external genitalia at birth she was thought to be a female. The documents referred to above are not as informative as one would wish them to be. for they leave us in the dark concerning the circumstances which led to the appointment by the Grand Court of two medical experts to examine and report on the sex of Rosa Mifsud when she attained the age of 17 years. It may be noted, in passing, that Malta was then ruled by the Knights Hospitallers of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem. also known as the Knights of Malta, to whose Medical School and Holy Infirmary of Valletta students resorted to learn anatomy and surgery and foreign patients flocked to seek advice and treatment. ; N/A

This book offers a brief sketch of events in chronological sequence that mark the rise of the science of pathology in Malta over the past three hundred years. This development cannot be adequately appreciated without a backward glance over a stretch of time when morbid anatomy and clinical medicine were still interpreted in terms of the ancient theory of the four humours - blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile - according to which an imbalance of these humours was considered to be the root cause of disease. In fact it was not until after 1858 when Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902), Professor of Pathology at Wursburg University, brought out his concept of Cellular Pathology that the humoral theory was abandoned. In fact Virchow pointed out that the cell was the centre of all bodily activity and changes and ultimately the seat of disease. Going through these pages the reader will note the great impact that European medical literature and advances have exercised on the development of pathology in Malta. This is to be expected as Malta, in its central geographical location in the Mediterranean at the southernmost point of Europe has, since ancient times, been a hub in the main stream of the political, maritime, cultural and medical evolution of that continent. ; peer-reviewed