Background
Felice Fontana was born on April 15, 1730, in Pomarolo, Italy.
Via 8 Febbraio 1848, 2, 35122 Padova PD, Italy
Fontana was educated at the University of Padua.
Italy
Felice Fontana
Italy
Felice Fontana
anatomist educator physicist scientist
Felice Fontana was born on April 15, 1730, in Pomarolo, Italy.
Fontana was educated in Rovereto, where he was a student of G. Tartarotti, and at Verona, Parma, and the University of Padua.
Toward the end of 1755 Felice went to Bologna, where he collaborated with L. M. A. Caldani in research on the irritability and sensitivity of the parts of the animal body, an advanced subject proposed to scholars in 1752 by Albrecht von Haller. In 1757 Fontana defended Haller’s position in an epistolary dissertation which, published in the collection Mémoires sur les parties sensibles et irritables du corps animal, marked the beginning of his fame. From Bologna, Fontana returned for a brief time to the Trentino and then moved to Rome, from there he went to Tuscany, which became his permanent residence until the time of his death.
In 1765 Felice was appointed to the chair of logic and, in 1766, to the chair of physics at the University of Pisa. Also in 1766, Leopold I, grand duke of Tuscany, who was very interested in natural sciences, summoned Fontana to Florence to organize and develop the court’s physics laboratory, which was then located in the Pitti Palace. Fontana reorganized the surviving instruments of the Medici collection - including the relics of Galileo and of the Accademia del Cimento now in the Museum of the History of Science in Florence - and notably increased the collection through the acquisition of scientific instruments and natural objects, as well as by the production of wax models of the human anatomy, prepared under his supervision in an expressly established workshop. In 1775 the Museum of Physics and Natural History, with its important collection of wax models, was opened to the public. It is preserved in a building that was acquired in 1772 to house the growing material. The collection was greatly expanded under Fontana’s supervision and during the course of the nineteenth century. In 1786 a duplicate of the collection was sent to Vienna to equip the Austrian medical-surgical military academy, which had been established the preceding year. After the museum had been inaugurated, Fontana was able to begin a long-planned trip in the autumn of 1775 to France and England, to observe, study, and make outstanding acquisitions. This trip, which lasted until January 1780, enabled him to make direct contact with the most significant scientists of the era.
The quality of Fontana’s scientific accomplishment is evident from his first work, on irritability and sensitivity, a subject that he continued to pursue so intensely. Initially unwilling to accept the idea of an identification of the nervous flux with electricity, Fontana gradually changed his mind in the course of his research so that finally he thought in terms of an electric fluid and said the nerves would be the organs destined to conduct this electric fluid and perhaps even to excite it. This is, perhaps, the first suggestion that the production of electricity might be excited by the nerves rather than merely conducted by them as by wires.
The research on the movements of the iris and on viper venom is strictly tied to irritability. Fontana observed that the reflex response to light of the pupil of one eye also occurs in the other eye, although it is not exposed to light; in a frightened or excited animal the pupil is dilated and remains so, even if the eye is struck by light; and the pupil of the animal eye is strongly contracted during sleep.
After a series of impressive and ingenious experiments, Fontana retraced the action of the bite of the viper to an alteration in the irritability of the fibers, which he maintained was mediated by the blood: in other words, the viper’s poison directly alters the blood, coagulating it, and this in turn alters all parts of the organism - especially the nerve fibers - that the blood would normally nourish. Fontana extended his toxicological experiments to other substances, especially to curare.
Fontana also took advantage of microscopic investigations to complete the characterizations of the parts of the animal body which Haller had based upon irritability and sensitivity. The use of the microscope was at that time especially difficult, because of the illusory images abundantly produced by contemporary instruments. Although Fontana was unable to do away with these images, he nonetheless belongs, together with L. Spallanzani, among the major microscopists of the eighteenth century. In the nerve fibers he not only distinguished the axone with myelin sheath and endoneural sheath, but also recognized the fluidity of the axoplasm through accurate research of micromanipulation in which he took advantage of the use of the coverglass. Thanks to the microscope, Fontana was able to demonstrate in 1778 that the restoration of an interrupted nerve trunk may be traced to a real and actual regeneration of primitive nerve cylinders, or rather, of nerve fibers. Since 1776 Fontana had studied microscopically the “little red globes of the blood” and, discarding the illusory images observed by G. M. della Torre, he attributed to them a spheroidal configuration, modifiable with extreme ease under certain physiological conditions. In fact, the red corpuscles become noticeably elongated when they cross a blood vessel: the corpuscles assume a cylindrical configuration and retain it as long as the canal remains narrow. But as soon as the canal increases in width, the corpuscles immediately contract and resume their original shape.
In 1766 Fontana demonstrated that the blight which had devastated the Tuscan countryside was caused by parasitic plants that feed on grain and that reproduce by means of spores. Again with the aid of the microscope, he studied the reproduction of cereal Anguillula and its anabiosis. In certain cellular elements he observed a nucleus equipped with nucleoli. Also noteworthy are Fontana’s model of the eudiometer, an apparatus for oxygen therapy, and his studies on the absorbent powers of coal.