Marcello Malpighi (1628-1694): the forgotten ancestor of surgical pathology

In a 1994 paper, Marcello Malpighi was considered to be the founding father of modern pathology. The foundations of such a suggestion appeared to be shaky, because the use of the microscope to study pathological lesions does not clearly emerge from Malpighi’s records. In the years to follow, a review of Goethe’s scientific papers 2 showed the importance of Malpighi’s rediscovery as a fundamental cause of the 19th century second great revolution in microscopy, preluding to the discovery of the cell and to the foundation of cell pathology by Robert Remak (1849). On the other hand, a recent revisitation of Morgagni’s anatomic papers, showed the role of that great scholar in removing Malpighi an the microscope from medical research and practice for more than a century. In this report, Malpighi’s role in natural sciences and medicine is summarized. Moreover, his ideas antedating Morgagni’s classical definition of pathology are stressed.