Ghisi, Martino

(b. Soresina, Italy, 11 November 1715; d. Cremona, Italy, 11 May 1794)

medicine.

Ghisi, who is unjustly forgotten by medical historians and on whom there is very little biographical information, was an obscure provincial doctor to whom we owe one of the first—if not the first—descriptions of diphtheria to be complete and valid both clinically and anatomicopathologically. Probably a handicap to recognition was that his ideas and observations were disseminated not from a university chair but in a small pamphlet with a limited circulation.

After completing his secondary education, Ghisi studied under Paolo Valcarenghi, a doctor of some renown who had founded a practical school of medicine in Cremona; he subsequently moved to Florence, where he graduated from the university. He returned to Cremona to practice and in 1747–1748 combated an epidemic which struck a large number of children and adolescents in the Cremona region. Ghisi made careful clinical and meteorological observations on the epidemic, publishing the results in a pamphlet entitled Lettere mediche del Dottor M. Ghisi. Of particular note is the section entitled “Istoria delle angine epidemiche,” the first truly complete scientific description of diphtheria.

Ghisi began with a precise account of climatic and meteorological conditions prior to and during the epidemic—in accordance, apparently, with the Hippocratic tradition—but his attention was mainly centered on the clinical framework of the illness. He described in particular detail the diphtheric paralysis of the velum palatinum and the tumefaction of the submaxillary glands.

Ghisi was also interested in examining and describing the diphtheric membrane, which some patients would expel in coughing and which Ghisi compared to the fibrous crusts that formed in blood extracted by bleeding. He did not neglect the anatomicopathological aspect of the epidemic, even though he was able to conduct only one autopsy; this, thanks to his great knowledge of normal and pathological anatomy, was sufficient for him to compare accurately the diagnostic features and pathological alterations detected in the lungs and pleura of patients suffering from pneumonia and pleurisy with those found in diphtheria. He showed quite clearly that the bronchial and pulmonary edema caused by diphtheria resulted in a strain of the right side of the heart.

Ghisi limited himself to clinical and anatomicopathological observations that could be made directly and objectively, and deliberately refrained from giving an opinion on the etiologic-pathogenic causes of diphtheria (which would in any case have been impossible to identify at that time). He confined himself to emphasizing the small amount of data that he had been able to collect, at the same time steadily refusing to classify it according to any of the several systems then in vogue.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ghisi’s only publication is Lettere mediche del Dottor M. Ghisi (Cremona, 1749). The first letter deals with various illnesses cured by mercury; the second contains the history of epidemic angina in 1747 and 1748.

Secondary literature includes A. Caccia, Elogio del celebre medico Martino Ghisi (Cremona, 1974); and C. Castellani, “La ’Lettera medica’ di Martino Ghisi relativa alla ’Istoria delle angine epidemiche,’” in Rivista di storia della medicina, 2 (1960), 163–188, which includes the text of the letter.

Carlo Castellani