Dubini, Angelo

(b. Milan, Italy, 8 December 1813; d. Milan, 28 March 1902)

medicine, helminthology.

Dubini took the M.D. at the University of Pavia in 1837. He began his practice at the Ospedale Maggiore in Milan, then returned to Pavia for the academic biennium 1839–1841 as an assistant at the Clinica Medica, where he gave a free course in auscultation. In November 1841 he began a postgraduate trip to France, England, and Germany; in Paris he attended the courses of Gabriel Andral. At the end of 1842 Dubini returned to Milan and resumed his work as a medical assistant at the Ospedale Maggiore. In 1865 he was nominated as both head physician and director of the newly established dermatology department.

At the Ospedale Maggiore Dubini was the most noteworthy exponent of the médecine d’observation, which, proceeding along the lines indicated by G. B. Morgagni, had been developed in Parisian hospitals by J. N. Corvisart and R. T. H. Laënnec, among others. This new clinical medicine attempted to formulate in the living being a diagnosis that is substantially anatomical, by means of a continuous dialogue—possible only in the hospital—between clinical medicine and anatomical pathology, with a common purpose and subject.

Indeed, Dubini’s most important discovery was precisely the result of his anatomical-pathological work within the hospital and, in particular, of the diligence with which he systematically opened the intestine in accordance with recent studies made by French physicians on typhic and tubercular ulcers. In May 1858 Dubini recorded a “new human intestinal worm” following the dissection of the corpse of a peasant woman who had “died of croupous pneumonia.” He confirmed this discovery in November 1842 and published his description of it in April 1843, describing the new worm as Anchylostoma duodenale, derived from the hooked mouth of the organism and from its habitat in the human host. Dubini’s helminthological description is highly accurate and was further developed in his Entozoografia (1850).

As early as his work of 1843 Dubini had stressed the high frequency of occurrence of the worm, “which, although it had not yet been seen by others, nor described, is nevertheless found in twenty out of one hundred corpses that are dissected with the aim of finding it.” This affirmation—as well as testifying to the high incidence of ancylostomiasis in the countryside around Milan—demonstrates that Dubini (who had also noted that the worm seemed to be hematotrophic) was unwilling to attribute any particular pathogenicity to the duodenal Ancylostoma. (The pathogenicity of Ancylostoma was eventually confirmed in the course of studies on Egyptian chlorosis made by F. Pruner, W. Griesinger, and T. Bilharz and in D. Wucherer’s work on tropical chlorosis; it was proven beyond doubt in 1882 in the research of B. Grassi, C. and E. Parona, E. Perroncito, C. Bozzolo, and L. Pagliani on the serious epidemic of miner’s cachexia that spread among the miners of the St. Gotthard tunnel.)

Dubini’s name is given to the electric chorea that he diagnosed and described, thereby ensuring himself a place in the history of lethargic encephalitis, of which such chorea is a mark.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Dubini’s major work is Entozoografia umana per servire di complemento agli studi d’anatomia patologica (Milan, 1850). His earlier works are “Nuovo verme intestinale umano (Anchylostoma duodenale), costituente un sesto genere di nematoidei proprii dell’uomo,” in Annali universali di medicina, 106 (1843), 4–13; and “Primi cenni sulla corea elettrica,” ibid., 117 (1846), 5–50.

II. Secondary Literature. Works on Dubini are Luigi Belloni, “Per la storia del cuore tigrato,” in L’Ospedale Maggiore, 44 (1956), 252–258; “La medicina a Milano dal settecento al 1915,” in Storia di Milano, XVI (Milan, 1962), 991–997; “La scoperta dell’Ankylostoma duodenale,” in Gesnerus, 19 (1962), 101–118; “Dalla scoperta dell’Ankylostoma duodenale alla vittoria sull’anemia dei minatori,” in Folia medica, 48 (1965), 836–855, and in Minerva medica, 57 (1966), 3215–3233; and Ambrogio Bertarelli, “Angelo Dubini (8 dicembre 1813–28 marzo 1902),” in Bollettino della Associazione Sanitaria Milanese, 4 (1902), 115–119.

Luigi Belloni