Vincenzo Colucci’s 1886 memoir, Intorno alla rigenerazione degli arti e della coda nei tritoni, annotated and translated into English as: Concerning regeneration of the limbs and tail in salamanders

Abstract

Vincenzo Colucci taught and did research in several Italian veterinary schools during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Although he usually dealt with normal and pathological histology of domestic animals, he was also interested in regeneration. His 1886 description of limb and tail regeneration in salamanders was one of the earliest studies of events at the cellular level during body part regeneration in any animal. Although he was sometimes incorrect (for example, he believed that white blood cells gave rise to a large part of the regenerating tissues), his work represents a striking advance over the gross anatomical studies of the subject published by Spallanzani in 1768. Unfortunately, Colucci’s memoir is in an issue of a journal that had become almost unobtainable by the turn of the twentieth century. Recently, however, a digitized version of his work has become available online. The chief purpose of the present contribution is to supply an English translation of the original Italian text and figure captions. In addition, the translation is annotated to help modern readers understand some of Colucci’s now outdated assumptions. A discussion of his sometimes disconcerting notions affords an interesting glimpse of an era when some biological ideas now taken for granted were still only dimly understood. For example, in those times: there were several different (and rapidly changing) concepts of the blastema; not everyone accepted all the tenets of cell theory; the possibility of cell division without mitosis was seriously entertained; and some rather baroque ideas about vasculogenesis and angiogenesis were in play. An English translation will make Colucci’s 1886 memoir more widely accessible and, one hopes, help rescue him from his long and undeserved oblivion.