Groundbreaking Anatomist
Giorgio Baglivi was a renowned anatomist and physician in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
Baglivi was born Giorgio Armeno in the Republic of Ragusa, part of modern-day Croatia. He took the last name of his adoptive father, Pietro Angelo Baglivi. Taking after Pietro Angelo, a physician, in the course of his education Giorgio chose the profession of medicine and received a medical degree. He was fascinated by anatomy and avidly performed experimental dissections of animals. Upon becoming the assistant to Marcello Malpighi, the era’s most renowned anatomist, he continued exploratory dissections of animals and corpses.
During his research, Baglivi came to reject the unthinking devotion of many physicians of his time to systems and procedures that had not been tested. He insisted on using observation and reason as the means to establish knowledge and procedure, invoking a soon-to-be widespread principle of the nascent Enlightenment.
When Malpighi was called to Rome to serve as the physician to Pope Innocent XII, Baglivi followed him and effectively became the Pope’s second physician. After his mentor’s death and the death of the Pope, Baglivi was given a position at court by the new pope, Clement XI, and was appointed professor of theoretical medicine at Sapienza University in Rome.
Works
Baglivi’s writings bear strong similarities to Santorio Santorio and defend biomechanicism, making him one of the iatrophysicists. Being inclined towards mathematics and quantification in medicine, Baglivi viewed the physiological processes in mechanical terms, behaving like the parts of a machine. A collection of his Latin writings were published in quarto in 1704. Subsequently, his collected works were reprinted in more than 20 editions (including an octavo edition in 1788) and were translated into Italian, French, German, and English. His personal correspondence in Latin and Italian is held at the National Central Library in Florence, Italy; the Waller Collection at the university library in Uppsala, Sweden; and at McGill University’s Osler Library in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
- De praxi medica ad priscam observandi rationem ravocanda (Rome, 1696; trans. as The Practice of Physick at London, 1704)
- De fibra motrice, et morbosa, nec non de experimentis, ac morbis salivae, bilis, et sanguinis (Perugia, 1700)
- Specimen quatuor libroum de fibra motrice et morbosa (Rome, 1702)
- Canones de medicina solidorum ad rectum statices usum (Rome, 1704)
- Opera omnia medico-practica et anatomica (Lyons, 1704; new enlarged ed., 1710; ed. by C.G. Kuhn at Leipzig, 1827-1828)
