Suchergebnisse

Following the political unification of Italy, neurology was considered either as a subsection of internal medicine or as a field which was, in part, a "companion" to psychiatry. Indeed it was only at the end of the 19th century that neurology began to develop into a more distinctive field and, accordingly, this paper outlines the various academic roots of Italian neurology and includes a brief description of the scientific activity of some of the most well-known names in this field from the end of the 19th to the first half of the 20th century. Key words: History of Medicine - Neurology/history - Neuroscience - Scientific Biography - Italy

This paper outlines a profile of the history of medicine in Italy after the process of political unification at the beginning of 1860s. During the second half of the Nineteenth century emphasis has been placed on some of the major achievements obtained by the Italian medical doctors, like for example the discovery of the black reaction by Camillo Golgi (1873) which was a breakthrough for brain structure research, the discovery of the mosquito vectors of human malaria by Giovanni Battista Grassi (1898) which provided the scientific basis to fight the disease and the development of microscopy and other experimental and clinical procedures which were at the core of modern medicine. Moreover the article underlines the importance of the international student exchange programs to improve the level of the Italian biomedical community. The paper then follows the development of some important Italian medical schools during the Twentieth century, which were instrumental in shaping the profile of contemporary medicine in Italy, like for example those of Giuseppe Levi in Turin, Adriano Buzzati Traverso in Pavia and Naples, Vittorio Erspamer and Daniel Bovet in Rome and Giuseppe Moruzzi in Pisa. A section of the paper summarizes the difficult relationship between medicine, eugenics and racism during the fascist regime. Adapted from the source document.

In the centennial anniversary of the death of the Italian pathologist, anthropologist and writer Paolo Mantegazza (1910), the University of Pavia planned a commemorative exhibition to show the versatile aspects of his scientific and literary activity. In the course of the research to prepare the exposition, a strange cheratinic horn was found at the Museum for the History of the University of Pavia labeled as 'spur of a cock transplanted into an ear of a cow'. At the end of some historical investigation, we found that this strange object was at the centre of a scientific correspondence between Mantegazza and Charles Darwin, who made reference to it in his book The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication.