[Bernardino Ramazzini and "Medicina del Lavoro"]

Three hundred years after the first edition of Ramazzini's "De Morbis Artificum Diatriba", this paper reviews all the articles on the work of the great Master of Carpi that have been published over a century in the ninety volumes of "La Medicina del Lavoro". Since the first issue of the journal in 1901, many authors have submitted papers which revisited and commented on the work of Ramazzini, particularly in anniversary years (1914, the anniversary of his death, 1933 and 1983, anniversaries of his birth), but only Luigi Devoto was capable of fully understanding the methodology introduced by Ramazzini, transforming it into practical applications which he listed in ten fundamental actions. Mainly for this reason and considering that Ramazzini had been practically ignored for two centuries, it was decided to consider the Devoto period as the "true Ramazzini era". The death of the founder of the journal in 1935 marked the unexpected beginning of a long silence, lasting up to 1983, during which not one paper on Ramazzini was published in "La Medicina del Lavoro". It is concluded that a comparison between the diseases described by Ramazzini and those of to-day is of no practical use and that a tribute to Ramazzini is simply necessary in recognition of his contribution to the birth and development of occupational medicine, but is nonetheless insufficient. What is also needed, following in the footsteps of the founder of this journal and of the Clinica del Lavoro of Milan, is to reinterpret Ramazzini's methods in modern terms in the perspective of the ten actions he proposed, bearing in mind that possibilities exist to-day whereby his efforts can be completed and further enlarged in terms of practical applications.