Prof. Guido Baccelli

Abstract

WE are indebted to the British Medical Journal for the following particulars of the career and work of Prof. G. Baccelli, whose death was announced in NATURE of January 13. Prof. Baccelli was born in Rome on November 25, 1832, and took his doctor's degree in the university of his native city in 1852. Four years later he was appointed to the chair of forensic medicine in the University of Rome, but resigned his position after two years, and devoted himself to the study of morbid anatomy. When a chair of that subject was founded in the University Baccelli was appointed the first professor. In that capacity he had a great influence in turning the minds of his pupils in the direction of modern scientific methods. In 1863 he was appointed lecturer on clinical medicine, and in 1870, when Rome became the capital of Italy, he was appointed professor of clinical medicine, a post which he continued to hold until the end of his life. In 1875 he entered the Italian Parliament as one of the deputies for Rome, and soon took a leading place as a politician. In 1881 he became Minister of Public Instruction, and held that portfolio four times in all, doing great service to his country by the promotion of far-reaching reforms, both of primary and university education. To him Rome chiefly owes the Policlinico, a magnificent pile of buildings, fully equipped for the study of disease. He was also once Minister of Agriculture, Industry, and Commerce. He was prominent as a sanitary reformer, and was at one time President of the Board of Health. He took an active part in the sanitary improvement of the Campagna; for his efforts in that direction he received the thanks of the Italian Parliament. He was a Senator of Italy. Prof. Baccelli. was president of the eleventh International Congress of Medicine held in Rome in 1894, and at that congress he made a powerful appeal for the introduction of Latin as a universal spoken language which could be understood all over the world. A little modification in the teaching of Latin in schools as a spoken and not merely as a dead language would give all the advantage of the attempts which have been made to construct a universal language, while it would not disorganise the present curriculum and would render available for general use all the stores of wisdom and knowledge contained in Latin books and at present unavailable for common use. Besides a monograph on Roman malaria, published in 1878, in which his views on the sanitary improvement of the Campagna were embodied, Prof. Baccelli was the author of many contributions to medical literature, among them being a treatise in four volumes on the pathology of the heart and aorta; clinical lectures on malaria; sub-continuous fevers, containing his earliest researches on malaria; and State medicine and clinical medicine in ancient and modern Rome.