[Marcello Malpighi's theory of medicine]

Marcello Malpighi (1628-94) was the most important anatomist of Seventeenth-Century Italy. He investigated chiefly the minute structures of living things with the microscope, as his discovery of the capillary vessels of the lung, and his description of the Malpighi-corpuscle of the kidney has showed. Malpighi discusses the role of anatomy in medicine in the "Risposta" to G.G. Sbaraglia's "De recentiorum medicorum" in which it was insisted that anatomical study with the microscope makes no contribution to practical cure. Malpighi's argument for the anatomical study is based on the mechanistic view of nature. He considers living things analogous to machines made up of minute parts, and believes that the cure of diseases must be done as the repair of broken machines. He insists that by the dissection of the bodies of dead patients we should get knowledge of the relation between the change of tissues and the symptom of disease. Naturally it is impossible to explain the cause of disease only by the mechanistic explanation as Malpighi insisted, but his mechanistic view largely influenced the methodology of Morgagni, the father of modern pathological anatomy in the eighteenth century.