FAMOUS CROATS 2007 - ĐURO BAGLIVI (1668. – 1707.)

ĐURO BAGLIVI (1668 – 1707) Đuro Baglivi was born on 8 September 1668 in Dubrovnik. His parents were Vlaho Armeno and Anica Vuković de Lupis. When he was two years old his parents died and Đuro and his younger brother were taken into care by the Jesuits following the mediation of their uncle, Canon Andrija. He received his basic elementary education in the Jesuit College in Dubrovnik. At the age of 14 he went to the city of Lecce in the south of Italy where he was adopted by the eminent local physician Pier Angelo Baglivi whose name Đuro had taken over and kept it for the rest of his short life. He attended medical studies in Naples and graduated in Salerno. His brilliant medical, academic and scientific career started after his talent was noticed by the most famous physician of that time, Marcello Malpighi. The culmination of his academic career was being elected to the professorship of anatomy and theoretical medicine at the University La Sapienza in Rome, and the acknowledgment of his superior medical practice was evident when he was chosen to be the chief physician of two popes, Pope Innocent XII and Pope Clement XI. The works that brought him world fame were De praxi medica (1696) and De fibra motrice et morbosa (1700). In 1704 his collected works (Opera omnia) were printed for the first time in Rome. In the following years new reprints were published in Lyon, Antwerp, Venice and Leipzig, some of them posthumously. The last but one edition from the year 1788 published in Paris had a preface with notes written by the famous Phillippe Pinel. Baglivi was member of the most eminent European societies and academies like the English Royal Society, German Accademie Caesareo-Leopoldina Naturae Curiosorum and the Italian Accademie dei Fisiocratici. His works were translated into all world languages. According to our knowledge, from 1717 all through to the year 2000 there were some 150 biographical notes, tractates and reviews published in the Latin, Italian, English, German, French, Croatian and Armenian languages. Baglivi’s comprehensive correspondence with the most eminent physicians and intellectuals of his time has been preserved in the library of Willian Osler in Montreal, Waller’s collection in the Caroline library in Uppsala and Magliabecchi’s collection in the National library in Florence. What can be recognized from this correspondence is the fact, already pointed out by his biographers, that Baglivi as an erudite and poly-historian had been one of the leading intellectuals of his era, particularly in Rome that was at that time the world centre of the Papal State (Stato pontificio). Among other issues he was also engaged in writing poetry and interested in numismatics. In the history of medical science he had been registered as a neo-Hippocratic and outstanding representative of the so called iatro-physical ideology. In contrast to Hippocrates he opted for the pathology of solid parts and not for Hippocrates’s concept of humoral pathology. The hypothesis that the membranous system has sensory abilities opens the way to the teaching of Albert von Haller about the sensitiveness (sensibilitas) and irritability (iritabilitas). The recent researches of his opus indicate that our perceptions about his contribution to the development of medical science are not final. For instance, M.D. Grmek in his work First biological revolution thinks that Baglivi’s work De fibra motrice et morbosa is one of the most important events in the history of bio-structuralism and that the theory of fibrillative pathology laid out there is the forerunner of Virchow’s cellular pathology. As an excellent clinical specialist Baglivi linked all the results of his research in animal experiments and autopsy of the dead with the clinical practice. He discovered the significance of the lengthened bone marrow as the centre of the vital functions control, and he experimented to prove the influence of the vagus on the intestine peristaltic. He proved that the injuries of one brain hemisphere lead to paralysis on the counter-lateral parts of the body. He was among the first who have clearly recognized the autonomous function of the vegetative neural system and separated it from the somatic neural system. He was probably the first to describe the neural regulation of vaso-motoric functions and thus anticipated the discovery of the vaso-motoric nerves. Baglivi died in Rome on 14 June 1707, aged thirty nine. He was buried in the very centre of Rome, in St. Marcel’s church where the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts put up a bilingual memorial tablet in 1995.