Fabio Zampieri

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at University of Padua Medical School

The history of the conceptions of evolution of virulence is well known. However, in this period following the Covid-19 pandemic, it may be useful to recap such a current topic. In the public debate, it has often been heard that the Covid-19 was destined to evolve into a less virulent form, because it would be in the virus’s interest to coexist with...

My main research activities concerns: 1) the history of medical sciences from prehistory to the present day, with particular attention to traditional medicine from east to west and to the so-called dawn of modern medicine from the Renaissance, to the Paris anatomo-clinical school, to cell and germ theory, to contemporary technological and laborator...

The use of the term “irrational”, when interpreting ancient and contemporary medical systems, is generally based on a bipolar, perhaps two-party, ideological systematization. This is a perspective behind which there is a reifying ideology that defines medical knowledge based on divination and symbolic practices as “irrational”. Moreover, they are s...

History of cardiology starts scientifically in 1628, when William Harvey (1578-1657) published his revolutionary book Extercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus, where he described "general" circulation , movements and functions of heart, heart valves, veins and arteries [1]. Consequently, all theories and practices of ancient...

Lodovico Brunetti (1813–1899), professor of pathological anatomy at the University of Padua and founder of the Museum of Pathological Anatomy, believed that anatomical preparations were essential for the practice and teaching of pathological anatomy. At his arrival in Padua in 1855, there were around 300 made by other professors of medicine, includ...

The University of Padua (Italy) preserves the skull of Santorio Santorio, father of the modern clinical experimental physiology. A recent study performed with modern anthropological methods and medical instruments (CT scan) revealed the presence of a lobular formation in the left temporal bone, with an irregular morphology, internal bone sequestrum...

One of the most challenging issues with the sources of ancient medicine is to be able to identify the correspondence between the diseases we know today and those reported in ancient medical texts. Ancient diseases' definitions rarely help us, and the symptoms described often correspond to more than one disease. This is especially true about tubercu...

Throughout history, medicine has been considered a superior and even sacred activity. The modern concept of medical malpractice was almost inconceivable for much of history as doctors enjoyed great immunity. This chapter examines the history of medical liability through two paradigmatic cases from Padua. The figure of Gabriele Zerbi, the author of...

Lodovico Brunetti (1813-1899) was the first professor of pathological anatomy at the University of Padua (1855) and the founder of the current Morgagni Museum of Pathological Anatomy. His interest in the renewal of rachiotomy techniques through the development of new instruments, still in use today, is well known. Brunetti was also famous for his s...

In its 800-year history, the University of Padova (Padua, Italy) has come to play an important role in the development of animal science in Italy and Europe. Having founded the oldest university botanical garden (1545; UNESCO World Heritage Site) and anatomical theatre (1595), and awarded the first university degree to a woman (Elena-Lucrezia Corna...

Giovanni Alfonso Borelli (1608–1679) is considered the father of the so-called iatromechanic school, an approach based on geometry and mathematics for studying and understanding living beings. Borelli advocated and extensively practiced the experimental approach, but he coupled it also with a theoretical analysis which framed all his empirical work...

The term fibra was originally equivalent to the present term “lobe” (from the Latin lobus). The modern use of fibra, as an elongated and thin structure, applied to muscle, nerves, ligaments, tendons, and small vessels, begins with Andreas Vesalius (1514–64) and Gabriele Falloppia (1523–62). Marie François Xavier Bichat (1771–1802) was the first to...

Fibrotic diseases were all first clearly described between the late 18th and the 19th century. Noël Retz (1758–1810) in 1790 gave the earliest recognizable description of a keloid. “Dupuytren disease” was thoroughly described by Guillaume Dupuytren (1777–1835) in 1831. A first case of myocardial fibrosis was reported by Giovanni Battista Morgagni (...

The first description of myofibroblast dated to 1971, and it was based on the presence of microfilament bundles in granulation tissue fibroblasts.

A Mesopotamian clay tablet that dates to 2200 BC describes, perhaps for the first time, a 4-step approach to wound care. John Hunter (1728–93) understood the importance of granulation tissue formation in the repair process and that granulating was the consequence of inflammation. Franz Joseph Lang (1894–1975) advanced that macrophages arise from lo...

The cremation has been documented since prehistoric times and it was a common funerary custom until the advent of Catholicism. Falling into disuse, during XVII–XVIII centuries there were new movements to bring it back according to modern criteria, mainly due to hygienic reasons and cemeteries overcrowding. This also led to the prototyping of new cr...

A unique specimen of argyria is preserved in the Morgagni Museum of Pathological Anatomy at the University of Padua (Italy). It is a stuffed head belonging to a man who decided to cure his syphilis by himself with the so-called infernal stone (silver nitrate) every day for years, thus developing argyria in the second half of the nineteenth century....

Giovanni Battista Morgagni is considered the father of pathological anatomy. His contribution can be contextualized in the extraordinary development of anatomy between the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, because along this period anatomy became the most important among the natural sciences. A new pathology based on anatomy was possible th...

This review starts describing traditional Mediterranean, Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine systems. Then, the “psycho-neuro-endocrine-immunology” paradigm is examined and reasons for its increasing popularity in biological and medical scientific sciences. In particular, we focus on how this paradigm helps to understand and integrate in a modern view s...

The fetal circulatory system bypasses the lungs and liver with three shunts. The foramen ovale allows the transfer of the blood from the right to the left atrium, and the ductus arteriosus permits the transfer of the blood from the pulmonary artery to the aorta. The ductus venosus is the continuation of the umbilical vein, allowing a large part of...

Leonardo Botallo (1530–c. 1587) is widely known for the eponymous “foramen Botalli” and “ductus Botalli”. The first, most commonly named “foramen ovale”, allows blood in the fetal heart to enter the left atrium from the right atrium. The second, named “ductus arteriosus”, consists of a blood vessel in the developing fetus connecting the trunk of th...

It is well known that Padua Medical School, Italy, played a fundamental role in shaping modern medicine. Its golden age lasted from the late XV to the late XVIII century, thanks in particular to its extraordinary anatomical school. One of the last fundamental achievements of the Padua Medical School was the founding of the anatomo-clinical method a...

Hieronymus Fabricius ab Acquapendente, famous anatomist of the medical school of Padua, Italy, marked a further step not only in the morphological studies, but also in anatomical illustration and physiology. His researches were inspired by the work of Aristotle which was focused on the understanding of biological “functions” in an anatomo-comparati...

Objective: To analyse own set of molar pregnancies and to develop clinically relevant procedures. Type of study: Historical article based on the analysis of Greek classic medicine. Settings: History of Medicine Unit; Department of Medico-Surgical Sciences and Biotechnologies; Sapienza-University of Rome, Italy; Unit of Medical Humanities; Depa...

In early nineteenth century medicine, the concepts of organic evolution and natural selection emerged in different contexts, partly anticipating Darwinian revolution. In particular, the anatomical concept of disease favored the perception that men and animals were very similar from a morphological, physiological and pathological point of view, and...

Tullio Terni (1888–1946) was a pioneer of neuroanatomy at the University of Padua. He gave milestone contributions in the knowledge of cardiac innervation with the discovery of the “Terni column”, a preganglionic autonomous nervous center. Due to “racial laws” introduced in Italy in 1938 by the Fascist government, he, being Jewish, was expelled fro...

The primary purpose of this study was to assess the relationship between prenatal exposure to sex hormones, as measured by digit ratio (2D:4D), and psychopathic personality traits while controlling for the confounding effect of life history strategy. The secondary purpose was to confirm the hypothesis that primary and secondary psychopathy reflect...

The third sentence from the beginning in our article.

An international research group, from the Brighton (UK), São Paulo (Brazil), and Durham (UK) universities, has recently developed a versatile method for sex definition in human bioarchaeological remains by analysing the sex-specific isoforms of amelogenin drawn from dental enamel.

Vincenzo Malacarne, professor of medicine, surgery, and obstetrics in Turin, Pavia, and Padua, Italy, represented a perfect example of an eighteenth century Bletterato^, combining interests in humanities, sciences, and politics, embodying the ideal of an encyclopedic and universal culture. He made important contributions in anatomy and surgery, ter...

The scientific museology began in Padua with the Museum of Natural Philosophy of Vallisneri. The purpose of this museum was to educate students and demonstrate what Vallisneri called “philosophical curiosity.” The Padua medical museology started with the anatomical museum of Morgagni in 1756. Morgagni planned the creation of a museum of anatomical...

It has been believed for a long time that the Paduan scholar Antonio Vallisneri (1661–1730) described the second historical case of the frontal sinus osteoma in 1733. By historico-medically reexamining this case, we conclude that the brain concretions he described were not a case of frontal sinus osteoma, while they appear to have been pathological...

Morgagni is considered the father of pathological anatomy. He died in 1771, 89 years old, and was buried in Saint Maxim church in Padua, where his wife and five of his 15 children were already buried. In 2011, an anthropological analysis confirmed that one of the skulls belonged to the oldest individuals among those found in Morgagni's tomb. A gene...

Achille de Giovanni (1838-1916), Italian clinician and pathologist, developed a constitutional method for clinical investigations based on the morphology of the human body. He was the first to use anthropometry with living patients with the aim of evaluating the relationship between form and function, between organic structures, physiology and path...

In 2016, during the restoration of San Michele Palace in Vicenza, several human bones were found in two types of different burials: the first is a mass grave with more than 1100 bone elements arranged chaotically, while the second burial concerns an isolated hole with inside skulls with clear signs of craniectomy. Anthropological and historical...

[first paragraph of article]Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), professor of mathematics at the University of Padua from 1592 to 1610, was a pillar in the history of our University and a symbol of freedom for research and teaching, well stated in the university motto ‘‘Universa Universis Patavina Libertas’’ (Total freedom in Padua, open to all the world)....

The Medical Faculties of the University of Padua (Italy) and the University of Vienna (Austria) preserved two series of wax models, made by the Austrian Johann Nepomuk Hoffmayr at the beginning of the 19th century. These models were created in a period of evolution of both medical specialties and organ pathology, which brought morbid organs at the...

Medicine is a scientific practice that affects human evolution by contributing to the human niche construction. It is a science which deals with material substrates of disease, from organs to DNA, and environmental threats, such as germs and chemicals, and tries to modify those elements that are also factors of natural selection. However, eugenics...

Frutto di sei anni di ricerca e vincitore del Bando Giovani Studiosi, il presente volume è opera di Fabio Zampieri, Ricercatore in storia della medicina presso il Dipartimento di Scienze Cardiologiche, Toraciche e Vascolari dell’Università di Padova. Con questo volume si inaugura la collana di “Storia della medicina” dell’Erma di Bretschneider, del...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Q_fHfwEig8

The University of Padua has many legends about its cultural heritage. One of these concerns a collection of eight skulls still preserved in the Hall of Medicine at Bo Palace, near the old anatomy theatre built in 1545. It is said that some famous professors of the University donated their bodies to medical science, and the skulls were from these bo...

The most significant cardiovascular anatomo-clinical observations from Morgagni's masterpiece De sedibus et causis morborum per anatomen indagatis (1761) are herein reported, divided into the current taxonomy according to cardiac structure: A) aorta and pulmonary artery; B) pericardium, C) coronary arteries, D) myocardium, E) endocardium, F) congen...

Following the birth of modern opera in Italy in 1600, the demand for soprano voices grew up and the prepuberal castration was carried out to preserve the young male voice into adult life. Among the castrati, Gaspare Pacchierotti was probably one of the most famous. The remains of Pacchierotti were exhumed for the first time in 2013, for a research...

Walter Cannon and Richard Cabot inaugurated the clinico-pathological conference (CPC) at Harvard Medical School at the beginning of the twentieth century, but this approach to anatomo-clinical correlation was first introduced by Giovanni Battista Morgagni at the University of Padua in the eighteenth century. The CPC consists of the presentation of...

The year 2014 has marked the tercentenary from the death of Bernardino Ramazzini (1633-1714), universally credited as the founder of Occupational Health (5, 9, 10, 11). Indeed, the renowned physician died on November 5th 1714 in Padua, where he had been appointed as Professor of Practical Medicine at the local prestigious University from the year 1...

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) complained of several disorders during his life, the most important of which were chronic arthritic pains and bilateral blindness. These symptoms might result from an immune rheumatic disease, namely reactive arthritis (urethritis, uveitis, arthritis), when Galileo started suffering with an episode of fever in June 1593....

The annular tendon is commonly named ‘annulus of Zinn’, from the German anatomist and botanist Johann Gottfried Zinn (1727–1759) who described this structure in his Descriptio anatomica oculi humani (Anatomical Description of the Human Eye, 1755). This structure, however, had been previously discovered not by Zinn, but by Antonio Maria Valsalva (16...

Here we discuss how the concept and the name of cytoskeleton were generated and started to evolve over the last two centuries into what is presently a basic topic of modern biology. We also attempt to describe some facets of the emergence of cytoskeleton component characterization in which our laboratory was in part involved. © 2014 Wiley Periodica...

Morgagni died on December 5, 1771, 89 years old, and was buried in Saint Maxim Church in Padua, where his wife and five of his 15 children, four daughters, and one son were already buried. In 1868 and 1900, the tomb was opened to identify Morgagni. Among the remains of several adult individuals, two skulls considered of very old persons were identi...

In his quest to comprehend his existence, Man has long been exploring his outer world (macro-cosmos), as well as his inner world (micro-cosmos). In modern times, monmental advances in the fields of physics, chemistry, and other natural sciences have reflected on how we understand the anatomy and physiology of the human body and circulation. Yet, hu...

A mummy of a young woman, who died due to tuberculous peritonitis and salpingitis, is conserved in the Pathological Anatomy Museum of the University of Padua. It was found at autopsy to have situs inversus of viscera with dextrocardia, apparently in the absence of other congenital defects. A 64-section scanner computed tomography (CT) on the specim...

Médecine et darwinisme : aperçu historiographique par Fabio Zampieri Médecine et darwinisme semblent avoir deux statuts épistémologiques inconciliables. La médecine est avant tout une praxis, autrement dit une clinique, fondée sur la physiologie et la pathologie, qui s'intéresse aux individus et qui étudie les causes prochaines des phénomènes patho...

Pietro Gradenigo (1831-1904) represents one of the greatest eras of cultural and scientific activity in Italian ophthalmology. Padua's Vincenzo Pinali Medico-historical Library preserves 2 series of ophthalmologic wax models. Made by Pietro Gradenigo in 1884-1889, the first consists of 18 waxes and shows different eyes diseases, such as neoplasm an...

The fresco by Diego Rivera (1886 to 1957) on the history of cardiology was displayed at the "Instituto Nacional de Cardiología" of Mexico City at the time of inauguration on April 14, 1944. Some of the most important masters of the Padua Medical School were depicted, namely Vesalius, Harvey, and Morgagni. There is a vivid description of the anatomo...

For the Morgagnian anniversaries of 2011 to 2012, the University of Padua organized a wide research project, trying to understand Morgagni's contribution in his historical context and why he is still considered the father of a new way of thinking in medicine, based on anatomoclinical correlations. Calling his masterpiece De sedibus et causis morbor...

This chapter looks at the nature of medical responsibility through the examination of four emblematic “case studies” involving the experiences of the renowned Padovan physicians Gabriele Zerbi, Melchiorre Guilandino, Girolamo Mercuriale, Alessandro Knips Macoppe, and Gilberto Forti. The chapter’s introduction provides a brief overview of the nature...

Gli studi che qui presentiamo sono il frutto di un progetto di ricerca che ha avuto come obiettivo principale la collaborazione fra compe-tenze diverse, dalla storia della medicina a quella degli enti assisten-ziali. Questo dialogo ha focalizzato la propria attenzione sul profilo istituzionale e finanziario dell'ospedale di Padova, dalla fondazione...

Giovanni Battista Morgagni is considered the father of pathological anatomy. His contribution can be contextualized within the sphere of the extraordinary development of anatomy between the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the period in which this discipline became the "queen" of the natural sciences. A new pathology based upon anatomy became po...

Il progetto del Museo di Storia della Medicina e della Salute a Padova, che ci auguriamo sarà presto realizzato nella magnifica cornice dell'ex Ospedale di San Francesco restaurato a questo scopo, dovrà necessariamente identificarsi con la storia degli Ospedali del Padovano e della Scuola Medica Patavina. In questo senso sicuramente una copia digit...