Giovanni Battista Morgagni - Legacy

Legacy

The range of Morgagni's scholarship, as evidenced by his references to early and contemporary literature, is astonishing. It has been contended that he was himself not free from prolixity, the besetting sin of the learned; and certainly the form and arrangement of his treatise are such as to make it difficult to use in the present day, notwithstanding that it is well indexed in the original edition, in that of Tissot (3 vols., 4to, Yverdon, 1779), and in more recent editions. It differs from modern treatises insofar as the symptoms determine the order and manner of presenting the anatomical facts.

His 1769 work described the post mortem findings of air in cerebral circulation and surmised this was the cause of death. Although Morgagni's cases resulted from gas embolism due to damage to the bowel, the same pathology is seen in decompression illness.

Although Morgagni was the first to understand and to demonstrate the absolute necessity of basing diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment on an exact and comprehensive knowledge of anatomical conditions, he made no attempt (like that of the Vienna school sixty years later) to exalt pathological anatomy into a science disconnected from clinical medicine and remote from practical experience with the scalpel, his precision, his exhaustiveness, and his freedom from bias are his essentially modern or scientific qualities; his scholarship and high consideration for classical and foreign work, his sense of practical ends (or his common sense), and the breadth of his intellectual horizon prove him to have lived before medical science had become largely technical or mechanical.

His treatise was the commencement of the era of steady, or cumulative progress in pathology and in practical medicine. From that time on, symptoms ceased to be made up into more or less conventional groups, each of which was a disease; on the other hand, they began to be viewed as the cry of the suffering organs, and it became possible to develop Thomas Sydenham's grand conception of a natural history of disease in a catholic or scientific spirit.