[A doctoral thesis on occupational diseases from 1816: workers' diseases in the post-Ramazzinian era]

No medical "classical" work has been in any way as successful as Ramazzini's De Morbis Artificum Diatriba. The book's success is confirmed by the constantly increasing number of new editions, emulations, translations and quotations and corresponding dissemination. As is proven by web access, our contemporaries continue to contemplate Ramazzini with admiration and wonder, confidence, devotion and curiosity and also as a means of seeking confirmation of the concepts that are variously presented. It is possible to describe a temporal phenomenon of "differential impact" of Ramazzini's work. Throughout the twentieth century, and especially on "celebrated" anniversaries (1900, 1913, 1914, 1933, 1964, 2000), many "tributes" to the author were recorded. During the nineteenth century in major European countries, but less so in Italy, Ramazzini's lesson was recorded as superseded "on an objective basis". The context had completely changed, as did both work and workers after a century-old continuity. Between the 1700's and the early 1800's Ramazzini dominated the field like a mountain in the desert; with editions of De Morbis in Latin and in translations following one on the other, with a positive cultural and popularizing impact on a public consisting of the international scientific and professional avant-garde. The means of dissemination consisted first and foremost of including all or part of the corpus of the Diatriba in "dictionaries" or "encyclopaedias" of medicine. Another means that was widely used, efficacious and typically academic, was through the doctoral theses discussed in all major European universities. Among these contributions was the thesis discussed in 1816 in Paris, by Louis-André Gosse of Geneva (1791-1873), which is presented in the previous pages in the translation from the French.