Giovanni Maria Lancisi

Giovanni Maria Lancisi (Latin name: Johannes Maria Lancisius) was educated at the Collegio Romano and the University of Rome, where he qualified in medicine aged 18. He was physician to Popes Innocent XI, Clement XI and Innocent XII. He was given the lost anatomical plates of Bartolomeo Eustachius by Pope Clement XI; these were made in 1562 and had been forgotten in the Vatican Library. Lancisi edited and published them in 1714 as the Tabulae anatomicae.[1] He studied epidemiology, describing malaria and influenza epidemics. He published De Noxiis Paludum Effluviis (On the Noxious Effluvia of Marshes) in 1717, in which he recognized that mosquito-infested swamps are the breeding ground for malaria and recommended drainage of these areas to prevent it. He also published extensively on cardiology, describing vegetations on heart valves, cardiac syphilis, aneurysms and the classification of heart disease. His landmark De Motu Cordis et Aneurysmatibus was published posthumously in 1728.[2]

Early in the 18th century, Lancisi had protested the medieval approaches to containing rinderpest in cattle by stating that "it is better to kill all sick and suspect animals, instead of allowing the disease to spread in order to have enough time and the honour to discover a specific treatment that is often searched for without any success" (Mantovani and Zanetti, 1993). Lancisi who made the first breakthrough in the control of rinderpest (Lancisi, 1715), a procedure that was later adopted by Thomas Bates (Bates, 1718).

However, Lancisi also erred, as he disputed the work of Giovanni Cosimo Bonomo (1663-1696), his contemporary, who had correctly identified the cause of scabies as a parasite.[3] Lancisi however felt scabies was of humoral origin. Because of Lancisi’s powerful position and, because previous scientists like Galileo Galilei had fallen into disgrace, Bonomo was silenced and his discovery was forgotten until the modern era.

Lancisi described the corpus callosum as the "seat of the soul, which imagines, deliberates and judges."[4] His Dissertatio Physiognomica provided the supporting argument in 1713. He opposed alternative locations of the soul as hypothesized by others, such as the centrum ovale, by Andreas Vesalius, and the pineal gland, by René Descartes. He hypothesized that the longitudinal striae (later named in his honor as the "striae lancisi" or "nerves of Lancisi") were the conduit between the anterior location of the soul, and the posterior location of sensory organ functions, both within the corpus callosum.[5]

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• (in Latin) Dissertatio historica de bovilla peste, ex Campaniae finibus anno 1713, Rome, 1715.