Abstract
For centuries the Roman “Campagna” was a hotbed of malaria, and the part played by this scourge is well recognized in the “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”. It is not surprising to find, therefore, that Italian malariologists have enriched our knowledge of its etiology and prevention. Before 1880, medical men and patients attributed the ‘shivering ague’ to an enigmatic nocturnal ‘miasm’. In that year Laveran described the malaria parasite. His discovery was confirmed and amplified by Marchiafava and Celli of Rome, who observed amceboid movements of the plasmodium within the red blood corpuscles and recorded an instance of the experimental transmission of malaria in man. A translation of Marchiafava and Bignami's researches on “Summer-autumn malarial fevers” was published by the New Sydenham Society in 1894, Born in Rome on January 3, 1847, Ettore Marchiafava in 1883 became professor of morbid anatomy and in 1916 of clinical medicine, remaining actively interested in medical research until his death on October 22, 1935, at the age of eighty-eight. He was the grand old man of Italian medicine, a leader of international science, and founder of the first Italian anti-tuberculosis sanatorium at Rome. Marchiafava was elected an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine in the year of its centenary, and one of his last publications was a communication in 1933 to its Section of Neurology on degeneration of the brain in chronic alcoholism. Distinguished in appearance and most approachable, he was a fascinating lecturer who made the dead live again as he recounted their clinical story and correlated it with the post-mortem findings.
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Ettore Marchiafava (1847–1935). Nature 158, 938–939 (1946). https://doi.org/10.1038/158938d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/158938d0