Morgagni's De Sedibus et Causis Morborum

Giovanni Battista Morgagni was almost 80 when his great book appeared in Venice in 1761. Its Latin title, De sedibus et causis morborum per anatomen indagatis, promised the seats and causes of disease investigated by means of anatomy, and it delivered about 700 cases set out in seventy letters. In each case he set the patient's symptoms in life beside what the dissection had found after death.

Morgagni was born in Forlì in 1682 and published his first book on anatomy at 19. Padua called him in 1711 to teach theoretical medicine, and four years later he took the chair of anatomy, which he held until his death there in December 1771. De sedibus drew on that whole career. Alongside his own cases he worked through almost everything earlier writers had reported, comparing their accounts with what he had seen himself.

The University of Padua credits the book with the first descriptions of several conditions. Among them are a permanently slow pulse with epileptic fits, the disorder now called Morgagni-Adams-Stokes syndrome, as well as cirrhosis of the liver, frontal hyperostosis, aneurysms, gastric ulcer, lobar pneumonia and acute yellow atrophy of the liver.

His method mattered as much as his findings. He looked for the seat of each disease in the organs at autopsy and matched what he found to the symptoms the patient had shown. The University of Pittsburgh's Health Sciences Library credits De sedibus with ending the humoral theory handed down from Hippocrates and Galen, and the work earned Morgagni the title of father of anatomical pathology.