Concept
Marcello Malpighi
Overview
Marcello Malpighi (10 March 1628 – 30 November 1694) was an Italian biologist and physician, who is referred to as the "founder of microscopical anatomy, histology and father of physiology and embryology". Malpighi's name is borne by several physiological features related to the biological excretory system, such as the Malpighian corpuscles and Malpighian pyramids of the kidneys and the Malpighian tubule system of insects. The splenic lymphoid nodules are often called the "Malpighian bodies of the spleen" or Malpighian corpuscles. The botanical family Malpighiaceae is also named after him. He was the first person to see capillaries in animals, and he discovered the link between arteries and veins that had eluded William Harvey. Malpighi was one of the earliest people to observe red blood cells under a microscope, after Jan Swammerdam. His treatise De polypo cordis (1666) was important for understanding blood composition, as well as how blood clots. In it, Malpighi described how the form of a blood clot differed in the right against the left sides of the heart.
The use of the microscope enabled Malpighi to discover that insects do not use lungs to breathe, but small holes in their skin called tracheae. Malpighi also studied the anatomy of the brain and concluded this organ is a gland. In terms of modern endocrinology, this deduction is correct because the hypothalamus of the brain has long been recognized for its hormone-secreting capacity.
Because Malpighi had a wide knowledge of both plants and animals, he made contributions to the scientific study of both. The Royal Society of London published two volumes of his botanical and zoological works in 1675 and 1679. Another edition followed in 1687, and a supplementary volume in 1697. In his autobiography, Malpighi speaks of his Anatome Plantarum, decorated with the engravings of Robert White, as "the most elegant format in the whole literate world."
His study of plants led him to conclude that plants had tubules similar to those he saw in insects like the silkworm (using his microscope, he probably saw the stomata, through which plants exchange carbon dioxide with oxygen). Malpighi observed that when a ring-like portion of bark was removed on a trunk a swelling occurred in the tissues above the ring, and he correctly interpreted this as growth stimulated by food coming down from the leaves, and being blocked above the ring.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
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They are minute bodies, most of which are made individually visible only by the microscope. All of them are extremely simple in structure; and some of them, as the _Rhizopods_, almost structureless. Multiplying, as they ordinarily do, by the spontaneous division of their bodies, they produce halves, which may either become quite separate and move away in different directions, or may continue attached. By the…
Herbert Spencer, Illustrations of Universal Progress
States what Marcello Malpighi is.
In some cases, arbitrary numerical relations are introduced into the definition: thus, a leaf is called _bilobate_, when it is divided into two parts by a notch; but if the notch go to the middle of its length, it is _bifid_; if it go near the base of the leaf, it is _bipartite_; if to the base, it is _bisect_. Thus, too, a pod of a cruciferous plant is a _siliqua_, if it is four times as long as it is broad, but if…
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive
States what Marcello Malpighi is.
2. These veins have their origin in the heart, for they pass completely through the other intestines, and always preserve the character of veins. The heart is, as it were, a part of them, and especially of the more forward and larger one, for these veins are above and below, and the heart is in the middle of them. The heart of all animals contains cavities, but in the heart of very small animals the largest cavity…
Aristotle, Aristotle's History of Animals In Ten Books
States what Marcello Malpighi is.
Philosophers who discussed Marcello Malpighi
Related ideas
- Galen
- London
- Bologna
- Ontogeny
- Medical doctor
- Rome
- Galileo Galilei
- Aristotelianism
- Embryo
- Brain
- Italians
- Royal Society
- Carl Linnaeus
- Peripatetic school
- Accademia del Cimento
Place in the tradition
Part of Vitalism.