Background
Egidio Meneghetti was born on November 14, 1892, Verona, Veneto, Italy to the family of Umberto Meneghetti and Clorinda Stegagno. Both his father and grandfather were physicians.
Via 8 Febbraio 1848, 2, 35122 Padova PD, Italy
Egidio Meneghetti attended a school in Verona, then entered the University of Padua, where from 1913 to 1914 he worked under Luigi Sabbatani, director of the Institute of Pharmacology. He graduated Cum laude in 1916.
Egidio Meneghetti was a member of the Giustizia e Libertà.
educator Pharmacologist physician scientist
Egidio Meneghetti was born on November 14, 1892, Verona, Veneto, Italy to the family of Umberto Meneghetti and Clorinda Stegagno. Both his father and grandfather were physicians.
Egidio Meneghetti attended a school in Verona, then entered the University of Padua, where from 1913 to 1914 he worked under Luigi Sabbatani, director of the Institute of Pharmacology. He graduated Cum laude in 1916.
Meneghetti was named the chief of the pharmacology laboratory in 1919; in 1922 he became a teacher of experimental pharmacology. In 1926 he left Padua to take up a similar post at Camerino. Two years later he accepted an appointment at the University of Palermo, then, in 1932, returned to Padua as professor of pharmacology. He was chosen rector of the university in 1945 after the Liberation, and in 1951 founded the Centro di Studio per la Chemoterapia there.
Meneghetti’s first important scientific work, in 1921, concerned the relationship of the hemolytic and fixative actions of metals to their place in the table of atomic weights. He used the techniques of quantitative biophysics to demonstrate that such actions increase in intensity as the ionic tension of the metallic solution decreases. He was also concerned with technology; in 1925 he improved the apparatus by which artificial circulation could be maintained in the isolated heart of a frog. By 1928, however, he had formulated the basis for his subsequent researches; in his inaugural lecture at the University of Palermo, given on 5 March of that year, Meneghetti stated that experimental biochemistry and cell physiology must constitute the basis of modern pharmacology.
The greatest part of Meneghetti’s pharmacological contributions concerning the occasionally overlapping fields of colloids and toxicology. His first work on colloids was his article über die pharmakologischen Wirkung des kolloidalen Arsensulfids, published in 1921. He developed this line of inquiry in a series of works, written between 1924 and 1934, on the trivalent and pentavalent compounds of antimony and in articles (in 1930 and 1937) on the salts of silver, gold, and copper. He demonstrated that substances that are of limited solubility in water may be introduced into the circulatory system (or injected locally) in the colloidal state.
In a series of researches conducted between 1924 and 1926 Meneghetti showed a specific effect of colloidal sulfur of antimony when it is injected into a vein. He was able to demonstrate that it lodged in the histiocytes of the bone marrow, thereby disrupting erythropoiesis, as is evidenced by the appearance of immature erythrocytes in the blood. (Two conditions are necessary to the observation of this erythroneocytosis - the granules of the colloidal preparation must be extremely fine, and the injection must be made slowly; otherwise, the substance is exhibited more strongly in the macrophagic reticuloendothelial cells of the lungs and liver.) Meneghetti’s proof that erythroblasts can be produced in the blood by the fixation of a toxic substance in the reticuloendothelial cells of the bone marrow was a major contribution toward the understanding of the pathogenesis of blood diseases.
Meneghetti devoted ten works to toxicology between 1928 and 1936. In them, he examined the efficacy of the therapeutic use of sodium thiosulfate and tetrathionate to counter mercury, lead, and cyanide poisoning. In 1936 he also conducted research on the thiazinic dyes, including methylene blue and toluidin blue, two highly dispersed electropositive colloids, and on the action, similar to that of digitalis, of alkaloid substances derived from Erythrophtoeum (work which was developed in 1939 by Meneghetti’s student Renato Santi). In the same year, too, he returned to the study of the reticuloendothelial system to demonstrate the presence of histiocytes in the pulmonary alveoli. In his article “Il polmone come sede di azione e come via di assorbimento di farmaci,” Meneghetti posited a relationship between the activity of these alveolar cells and the absorption of drugs into the lung, a new route for the chemotherapeutic treatment of infectious diseases, He further took up the question of the special conditions that might macrophagically fix such electropositive colloids as the cupric oxide in the lung: in particular he noted the relation of blood coagulability to cell permeability, and therefore to granulopexis.
Meneghetti conducted a long series of investigations of the factors that can modify the relation between the degree of dispersion of colloids and the intensity of their action. In 1939 he drew upon his results to state that such highly stable colloids as the electropositive ones have a rapid and intense action that recommends them for pharmacological use. He thus completed some of his earlier researches; a decade before, he had pronounced the colloidal state to be the “pharmacological” one. In later work (1943 and 1954) he went on to investigate the relationship between the molecular structure and pharmacological action of the sulfa drugs and antibiotics. Meneghetti wrote more than a hundred scientific works.
Being an anti-fascist, Egidio Meneghetti joined the Giustizia e Libertà movement, of which he became one of the leading exponents in the Veneto. Founder of the regional National Liberation Committee, a prominent regional military executive, in January 1945 he was arrested by the Carità gang, heavily interrogated and then handed over to the SS who took him to Bolzano and then sent to the German Camp. Meneghetti was released at the time of the liquidation of the camp, between the end of April and the beginning of May 1945.
Meneghetti was also concerned with the history of medicine and with social problems - his book Biologia rivoluzionaria was published posthumously in 1962. He was a humanist and a patriot.
Egidio Meneghetti was married to a woman named Maria. They had a daughter named Lina. On December 16, 1943, he lost his wife and daughter, who died in the aerial bombardment of the city of Padua. Both had refused to evacuate, despite the danger, to continue helping Egidio in the secret work he had undertaken. Among other things, just the previous evening they had distributed clandestine posters in Padua in the Arcella district. To them, he dedicated the book Scrittiestini.