Today, we meet the father of pathological anatomy.
The University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
Hippocratic medicine gave us
two ideas. One is that the physician treats the
whole patient. The other is that he must learn to
hear the things his senses tell him.
17th-century physicians had forgotten Hippocratic
empiricism. The cure of disease had turned from
observation into an exercise in logic. Physicians
still believed that treatment must address the
whole body, but they'd let that idea wander
strangely off track. They believed disease was
caused by gross imbalances of body fluxes and
humors, and that's what they tried to treat.
That began changing in Italy during the 1600s.
Italy was the new center of medical science and
anatomy. Her anatomists were learning how the body
worked, but not how to localize disease. They kept
trying to fight it by adjusting body humors.
Giovanni Morgagni entered medical school at Bologna
as the century ended, and he graduated in 1701.
From then on, he worked to make sense of disease
using anatomy and dissection.
Sixty years later he published The Seats and
Causes of Disease Investigated by Anatomy.
That book set the foundations of pathological
anatomy. The key word in its title is
Seats. For it was here that Morgagni
showed that we cannot understand disease until
we've pinned it down within the body.
The book is written in five parts. Four deal with
the head, the belly, the thorax, and generalized
disease. The fifth part is a meticulous index, and
that was the key. By including it, Morgagni kept
sight of the whole body as he led us to seats of
illness in its various parts. The work is more than
a museum of case histories. It provided a road map
at the same time it took us on the trip. When he
was done, clinicians and scientists alike could
trace the symptoms they saw back to common origins.
Morgagni showed beyond any doubt that specific
disorders cause suffering and death. We find a
ruptured appendix, syphilis of the aorta, and
epidural hematoma. A lifetime of compassion and
clear thinking lies behind this chamber of horrors.
A great change in medical thinking unfolds, case by
case, as we read.
Human ingenuity takes many forms. Morgagni's genius
lay in a change of perception. He gave medicine a
new way to see illness. What he did was radical and
revolutionary, but patient and methodical at the
Historians can usually find feet of clay, or a mean
streak, in heroes. But not Morgagni. His powerful
religious and humanitarian convictions drove him to
work without haste and without rest until he was
89. He was still going strong when he died of a
stroke in 1771.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds