Background
Ettore Marchiafava was born on January 15, 1847, in Rome, Lazio, Italy to the family of Francesco Marchiafava and Marianna Vercelli. He spent his childhood and most of his life in Rome.
Piazzale Aldo Moro, 5, 00185 Roma RM, Italy
Ettore Marchiafava studied medicine and surgery at the University of Rome (Sapienza Università di Roma) graduating in 1869. He earned a doctor's degree in 1872.
Ettore Marchiafava was a member of the Royal Society of Medicine.
anatomist neurologist pathologist physician Zoologist
Ettore Marchiafava was born on January 15, 1847, in Rome, Lazio, Italy to the family of Francesco Marchiafava and Marianna Vercelli. He spent his childhood and most of his life in Rome.
Ettore Marchiafava studied medicine and surgery at the University of Rome (Sapienza Università di Roma) graduating in 1869. He earned a doctor's degree in 1872.
Early in his career, Ettore Marchiafava made other important studies that showed the bacterial nature of endocardial ulcers. He also did research in angiotic obliteration in interstitial inflammations and particularly in tuberculosis. Marchiafava was especially interested in tuberculosis and examined in detail the structural modifications occurring where the bronchi join the lungs, as well as the clinical epidemiology of the disease. On kidney pathology, he studied and described glomerulonephritis related to infections such as scarlet fever.
Marchiafava’s first research was essentially in parasitology. He spent many years studying morphology and the biological cycle of the malarial parasite. He showed the modifications that the presence of amoeboid bodies causes in the erythrocytes, and demonstrated that these changes were closely related to the growth and multiplication of the parasite. This demonstration derived from the parallel study of microscopic blood data and the clinical pattern of fever peaks. The most important result of the research was Marchiafava’s discovery that malarial infection is transmitted through the blood. He spent the entire period from 1880 to 1891 in this intensive study, which enabled him to distinguish between the agent of the estivoautumnal fever and that of the tertian and quartan fevers.
In 1884 Marchiafava, in collaboration with A. Celli, identified meningococcus as the etiological agent of epidemic cerebral and spinal meningitis. Another of his findings, which bears his name, was Marchiafava’s postpneumonic triad, characterized by the simultaneous presence of a meningitis infection and an endocardial ulcer, which he related to septicemia in the lungs.
His name is also remembered in the Marchiafava-Bignami syndrome, which is a special primitive alteration of nerve fibers caused by chronic alcoholism, affecting, in particular, the corpus callosum and the frontal commissure.
In 1911 Marchiafava described a form of chronic acquired hemolitic jaundice characterized by a hemoglobinemia with hemoglobinuria and progressive anemia, the Marchiafava-Micheli syndrome. He later conducted more detailed studies on this form of the disease, which he named hemolitic anemia with perpetual hemosiderinuria.
In 1872 Ettore Marchiafava was nominated assistant to the professor of pathological anatomy at the University of Rome; he became an associate professor in 1881 and full professor in 1883. Besides his investigative work, Marchiafava was a busy and highly successful practitioner of internal medicine. He was the personal physician of three popes and of the house of Savoy. Of the many honors which Marchiafava received, he valued most his appointment as Senator of the Realm in 1913 and the award of the Manson medal in 1926.
In 1916 Ettore Marchiafava succeeded Baccellis in the chair of clinical medicine in Rome and retired in 1921. After his official retirement in 1922, he continued his research and writing in the department he had helped organize.
Marchiafava was not only a great pathological anatomist but also an outstanding clinician and a faithful follower of Morgagni so that from pathological anatomy and from the data he obtained in studying corpses, he was able to make his clinical interpretations.
Marchiafava began his career at a time of great social and political upheaval. In the scientific world, polemics raged - such as those between Bufalini and Tommasini on the ultimate cause of disease - over the direction that science should take in light of the many major discoveries then being made.
The great prevalence of communicable diseases, especially malaria and tuberculosis, exerted a strong influence in determining Marchiafava’s line of research. After obtaining a degree at the University of Rome in 1869, he went for a short period to Berlin, where Koch was making progress in the study of tuberculosis. The young scientist returned to Italy with a strong interest in bacteriology and parasitology.
As a senator, elected in 1913, and later as hygiene assessor of Rome (1918), he urged the adoption of antimalarial measures.
Marchiafava was a modest, kind and cultured Roman, interested in the classic as well as his contemporaries. One of his later publications was a detailed study of Horace's references to wine.
Ettore Marchiafava had two sons, John and Ricardo.