Puccinotti, FRANCESCO

Puccinotti, FRANCESCO, author of the Storia della Medicina and of other works which give him a high place in medical literature, was born at Urbino in 1794, and, thanks to the Scolopian Fathers, was already an accomplished classical scholar when in 1811 he repaired to Pavia for a thorough course of mathematics, physics, and natural science, in which metaphysics, ethics, and civil history were not neglected. From these studies he passed on to that of medicine at the Roman University, and graduated with much distinction in 1816. The local malaria first engaged his attention. A work ardently opposing the prevalent Brunonian doctrine, and advocating a return to the rational medicine of Hippocrates, produced a salutary effect on his contemporaries, and was followed up by his able treatises on Pernicious Fever (1821) and on Inductive Pathology (1828). Academic honours now fell thick on him, and he passed from one medical chair to another, till, compromised in the patriotic movement of 1831, he was deposed from the professorship of Pathology in the university of Macerata. Excluded from academic, he redoubled his literary activity, which bore fruit in his still classic treatises on medical jurisprudence and on nervous maladies. In 1835-37 he made a special study of the cholera epidemic at Leghorn, at the same time giving to the world his masterly translation of Aretæus. In 1838 the Tuscan Archduke appointed him professor of Medical Jurisprudence in Pisa University, and there he published his Lezioni Speciali sui Malì Nervosi, his work on the Cachexie, and on the maladies induced by the rice-culture (Risauie), and, above all, his masterpiece, the Storia della Medicina, in three volumes, representing the labour of twenty years. He died, 8th October 1872, in Florence, and, by special decree of the municipality, was buried in the 'Westminster Abbey of Tuscany,' the church of Santa Croce.