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MALPIGHI, MARCELLO (1628–1694), Italian physiologist,was born at Crevalcuore near Bologna, on the 10th of March1628. At the age of seventeen he began the study of philosophy;it appears that he was also in the habit of amusing himself withthe microscope. In 1649 he started to study medicine; afterfour years at Bologna he graduated there as doctor. He atonce applied to be admitted to lecture in the university, but itwas not till after three years (1656) that his request was granted.A few months later he was appointed to the chair of theoreticalmedicine at Pisa, where he enjoyed the friendship and countenanceof G. A. Borelli. At the end of four years he left Pisa,on the ground of ill-health, and returned to Bologna. A callto be professor primarius at Messina (procured for him throughBorelli, who had in the meantime become professor there)induced him to leave Bologna in 1662. His engagement atMessina was for a term of four years, at an annual stipend of1000 scudi. An attempt was made to retain him at Messinabeyond that period, but his services were secured for his nativeuniversity, and he spent the next twenty-five years there. In1691, being then in his sixty-fourth year, and in failing health,he removed to Rome to become private physician to PopeInnocent XII., and he died there of apoplexy three years later,on the 30th of November 1694. Shortly before his death, hedrew up a long account of his academical and scientific labours,correspondence and controversies, and committed it to the chargeof the Royal Society of London, a body with which he hadbeen in intimate relations for more than twenty years. The autobiography,along with some other posthumous writings, waspublished in London in 1696, at the cost of the Society. Thepersonal details left by Malpighi are few and dry. His narrativeis mainly occupied with a summary of his scientific contributionsand an account of his relations to contemporary anatomists,and is entirely without graces of style or elements of ordinaryhuman interest.
Malpighi was one of the first to apply the microscope to the studyof animal and vegetable structure; and his discoveries were so importantthat he may be considered to be the founder of microscopicanatomy. It was his practice to open animals alive, and some ofhis most striking discoveries were made in those circumstances.Although Harvey had correctly inferred the existence of the capillarycirculation, he had never seen it; it was reserved for Malpighi in 1661(four years after Harvey’s death) to see for the first time the marvellousspectacle of the blood coursing through a network of smalltubes on the surface of the lung and of the distended urinary bladderof the frog. We are enabled to measure the difficulties of microscopicobservation at the time by the fact that it took Malpighifour years longer to reach a clear understanding of the corpuscles inthe frog’s blood, although they are the parts of the blood by whichits movement in the capillaries is made visible. His discovery ofthe capillary circulation was given to the world in the form of twolettersDe Pulmonibus, addressed to Borelli, published at Bolognain 1661 and reprinted at Leiden and other places in the years following;these letters contained also the first account of the vesicularstructure of the human lung, and they made a theory of respirationfor the first time possible. The achievement that comes next bothin importance and in order of time was a demonstration of the planof structure of secreting glands; against the current opinion (revivedby F. Ruysch forty years later) that the glandular structure wasessentially that of a closed vascular coil from which the secretionexuded, he maintained that the secretion was formed in terminalacini standing in open communication with the ducts. The nameof Malpighi is still associated with his discovery of the soft or mucouscharacter of the lower stratum of the epidermis, of the vascular coilsin the cortex of the kidney, and of the follicular bodies in the spleen.He was the first to attempt the finer anatomy of the brain, and hisdescriptions of the distribution of grey matter and of the fibre-tractsin the cord, with their extensions to the cerebrum and cerebellum,are distinguished by accuracy; but his microscopic study ofthe grey matter conducted him to the opinion that it was of glandularstructure and that it secreted the “vital spirits.” At an earlyperiod he applied himself to vegetable histology as an introductionto the more difficult study of the animal tissues, and he was acquaintedwith the spiral vessels of plants in 1662. It was not till1671 that he wrote hisAnatome plantarum and sent it to theRoyal Society, who published it in the following year. An Englishwork under a similar title (Anatomy of Vegetables) had been publishedin London a few months earlier, by Nehemiah Grew; so thatMalpighi’s priority as a vegetable histologist is not so incontestableas it is in animal histology. TheAnatome plantarum contained anappendix,Observations de ovo incubato, which gave an account(with good plates) of the development of the chick (especially of thelater stages) in many points more complete than that of Harvey,although the observations were needlessly lessened in value by beingjoined to the metaphysical notion of “praedelineation” in theundeveloped ovum.
He also wroteEpistolae anatomicae Marc. Malpighii et Car.Fracassati (Amsterdam, 1662) (on the tongue, brain, skin, omentum,&c.);De viscerum structura: exercitatio anatomica (London, 1669);De structura glandularum conglobatarum (London, 1689);Operaposthuma, et vita a seipso scripta (London, 1697; another edition,with preface and additions, was published at Amsterdam in 1700.).An edition containing all his works except the last two was publishedin London in 1687, in 2 vols. folio, with portrait and plates.
