Malpighi, Marcello

In 1665, Robert Hooke examined thin slices of cork under his very simple microscope and discovered small, box-like spaces which he named cells. A few years later the Italian anatomist Marcello Malpighi described similar structures in animal tissues, which he called vesicles or utricles and, in 1672, the English botanist Nehemiah Grew published two extensively illustrated volumes greatly extending Hooke s findings. The concept of the cell as a unit of structure in the plant and animal kingdoms was launched, but it was two centuries later before scientists... 

In 1695 Dr. Nehemiah Grew published a dissertation on the medicinal value of salt from these wells (41). Dr. Grew prepared solid Epsom salt from this well water and recognized it as a unique substance The Purging bitter Salt. . . does differ in its Nature and Species from all other Salts (62, 69). Nehemiah Grew in England and Marcello Malpighi in Italy laid the foundations for the science of plant anatomy (70). 

Arber, Agnes, Nehemiah Grew (1641-1712) and Marcello Malpighi (1628-... 

Almost 2000 years later, around 1660, Marcello Malpighi repeated Aristotle s experiment, but with an important difference. He was the first man to watch a developing embryo under a microscope, and what he saw led him to a very different conclusion. The area where blood vessels are destined to appear, for example, is apparently empty to the naked eye, but under the microscope is full of capillaries. Aristotle had concluded that blood vessels appear ex novo, but according to Malpighi he had been betrayed by his own eyes. Could he have used a microscope, he would have realised that organic structures are present even when they are not yet visible. Malpighi therefore reached the conclusion that an embryo s development is... 

In the early 1600s William Harvey deduced the existence of the microcirculation. Until then it was thought that venous blood and arterial blood made up independent pools. Capillary vessels were first observed later in die century by Marcello Malpighi, verifying the existence of a microcirculation connecting die arterial and venous networks. 

Giglioni, Guido. 1997. The Machines of the Body. In Marcello Malpighi Anatomist and Physician, ed. Domenico Bertolini Meli. Florence Leo S. Olschki, pp. 149-174. 

Harvey had thought that his heretic ideas would cause a lot of hostile criticism, but on the whole they were fairly well received. The great French philosopher Rene Descartes, with his view of the living organism as a very complicated machine, was supportive and considered that Harvey s blood circulation fitted quite nicely into Descartes own thinking. When the Italian anatomist Marcello Malpighi in 1661 could demonstrate a system of fine tubes (capillaries) through which the blood could be seen to flow from the arteries to the veins, Harvey s model of the blood circulation was complete. It is not unreasonable to claim that this discovery is the most revolutionary in the history of medicine. 

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