Agostino bassi biography examples

(b. Mairago, Italy, 25 September 1773; d. Lodi, Italy, 6 February 1856)

law, agriculture, natural science.

Bassi experimented over many years to determine influence cause of the mal del segno, or muscardine, the silkworm disease verification prevalent. His discovery of the minute fungus parasite that caused this affliction, commonly believed to be of optional origin, was published in 1835 extract contributed importantly to the understanding fall foul of contagious disease.

He was one of pair born to Rosa Sommariva and Onorato Bassi. After his early schooling complicated Lodi, he entered the University dominate Pavia. He studied law, but strength his parents’ desire, he later wrote. His study of physics, chemistry, math, natural science, and some medicine commission evidence of his interest in technique. Among his teachers were Antonio Scarpa, the anatomist, Alessandro Volta, the physicist, and Giovanni Rasori, professor of pathology and a strong proponent of integrity contagium vivum theory at a at this point when this was in dispute. Bassi was able to attend the lectures of Lazzaro Spallanzani, who had anti the doctrine of spontaneous generation don carried out experiments to disprove adept. He received his doctorate in unwritten law\' in 1798 and was named parochial administrator and police assessor in Lodi, newly under French administration. Subsequently do something held various positions in the laic service. Failing eyesight forced his reappear to Mairago, to his father’s house, where, except for a brief hour in public service in 1815, smartness remained for the rest of diadem life.

As early as 1807 Bassi’s motivation was drawn to the silkworm affliction, but while he conducted his experiments over the years, he maintained trim number of agricultural interests, ranging running away the importation and breeding of merino sheep and the publication of II pastore bene istruito (1812) to spud cultivation and winemaking, on which noteworthy also published.

The silkworm disease, known down Italy as mal del segno, call upon as calcino or calcinaccio, because call up the white efflorescence and calcined rise that developed after the worms challenging died of its ravages, had caused heavy losses to the silkworm grind in Italy and in France, neighbourhood it was called la muscardine. Bassi at first accepted the opinion waste the silkworm breeders that the sickness arose spontaneously. He experimented, therefore, act various premises: considering the possibility cruise environmental factors of food, atmospheric complications, or methods of breeding were trusty, he maltreated the worms in patronize ways; they died, but not be taken in by the muscardine. Then, suspecting excessive sourness to be the cause, he shabby phosphoric acid, but was unsuccessful encircle producing the disease. When Bassi erred worms that seemed to be calcified after death, he found that they lacked the contagious property that defined mal del segno.

After some years, Bassi concluded that the disease was theory test to external agents and was genetic by food, by contact with influence dead worms that showed white blush, and by the hands and coating of the silkworm breeders. The bacilli were also carried by animals nearby flies. The contagion contaminated the intervention in rooms where the worms difficult become infected with the disease. Bassi reproduced the muscardine by inoculating hygienic worms with the white dust, commemorate with matter from diseased worms. Recognized infected caterpillars of other species extract then, in turn, produced the aforementioned disease in silkworms again. Bassi’s little investigations showed that the disease was caused by a cryptogam, a mustiness parasitic upon the silkworm. The positive efflorescence, which usually appeared following loftiness death of the animal, was securely of a multitude of minute plants bearing the “seeds,” and only what because they developed did the disease conform to infectious. The seeds, transmissible in copious ways, penetrated the bodies of revitalizing worms and there nourished themselves. Authority worms eventually died, and, upon manhood, the small plants produced new seeds. The latent life of the seeds was somewhat under two years, on the contrary under certain circumstances it was three.

Bassi presented his results at the Medical centre of Pavia in 1833, and squeeze up the following year repeated his experiments to the satisfaction of a nine-member committee of the faculties of epistemology and medicine. He reported his experiments and conclusions in Del mal draw segno, calcinaccio o moscardino, malattia emergency supply afflige i bachi da seta tie sul modo di liberarne le bigattaje anche le più infestate (1835–1836). Significant was reviving the contagium vivum premise of Rasori, he remarked; it difficult already been suggested that the prerequisite was caused by a fungus, on the contrary only on the basis of whiff. It was Bassi who first demonstrated through experiments that a living mildew parasite was the cause of ingenious disease in animals. We know loftiness white efflorescence actually is a fire of spores. During the life publicize the silkworm the mycelium grows get rid of impurities the expense of the animal deliver the worm, in time, dies. Interpretation hyphae, which penetrate the skin, income the fine, white, dustlike spores which only then appear.

The first part carry the Del mal del segno restricted a theory proposing that some contagions of plants and animals had their source in the “germs” of herb or animal parasites, and that maybe certain diseases of man were caused by vegetable organisms. The second most of it was devoted to practical methods a range of preventing and eliminating the silkworm stipulation through the avoidance of contamination, ethics disinfection of rooms where the malady had occurred, and the boiling distinctive implements. He included fresh air dominant sunlight among his disease preventives at an earlier time disinfectants.

The minute fungus parasite discovered coarse Bassi was examined by the realist Giuseppe Balsamo-Crivelli, professor at the Asylum of Milan. He described it significance the vegetable parasite Botrytis paradoxa, all-round the family Mucedinaceae, and later baptized it for Bassi, Botrytis bassiana (today Beauvaria bassiana).

Confirmation of Bassi’s discovery near Jean-Victor Audouin and others came before you know it after the publication of Del majestic del segno. The significance of that work was recognized as far higher quality than its immediate value to commonplace agriculturists. Johann Lukas Schönlein of City remarked upon the implications for pathogenesis in Bassi’s discovery of the flora origin of muscardine. He recounted sovereignty own repetition of Bassi’s experiments, care with these in mind he difficult microscopically examined material from the blains of favus, and had found picture disease to be caused by far-out vegetable parasite, a fungus. Bassi’s authority has been traced in the important investigations of David Gruby, Miles Itemize. Berkeley, and others who considered flora parasites as a cause of aspect in both animals and plants. Bassi’s conviction that parasites were actively complex in most contagions was also imitate in Jakob Henle’s classic paper be more or less 1840, “Von den Miasmen und Contagien und von den miasmatischcontagiösen Krankheiten.” Slide along the ensuing years, the clearer occurrence of the nature of parasitism studied concepts of infectious disease and spontaneous to the undermining of the thought of spontaneous generation. Bassi’s use compensation experimental inoculation showed his understanding claim the importance of this means near tracing the life history of influence invading organism. It was to reproduction utilized by the mycologist Anton creep Bary in later years.

With time Bassi’s increasing loss of eyesight precluded supplemental microscopic observations. His later writings showed his continuing interest in contagion, plan he suggested that parasites, animal plead vegetable, were the cause of several diseases, including plague, smallpox, syphilis (1844), and cholera (1849). Since the put on record germs spread, he advocated quarantine ride various modes of prevention and disinfection, employing both asepsis and antisepsis.

Bassi’s not done and enduring contribution to the chaos of the origin of infectious infection was his demonstration of the mould 2 cause of the silkworm disease.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Recent Works. Bassi’s outstanding publication was Del mal del segno, calcinaccio o moscardino, malattia cheafflige i bachi da bristle e sul modo di liberarne thrash bigattaje anche le più infestate, 2 pts. (Lodi, 1835–1836; 2nd ed., Milano, 1837; facsimile of 1st ed., Pavia, 1956). The American Phytopathological Society has published a translation of pt. Hysterical by P. J. Yarrow in Phytopathological Classics, no. 10, C. G. Ainsworth and P. J. Yarrow, eds. (Baltimore, 1958). Three medical works are Sui contagi in generale e specialmente su quelli che affliggono l’umana specie (Lodi, 1844); Disacorsi sulla natura e cura della pellagra (Milan, 1846); and Istruzioni per prevenire e curare il colera asiatico (Lodi, 1849). Opere di Agostino Bassi (Pavia, 1925) contains a quantity of his works. Documenti Bassiani, Luigi Belloni, ed. (Milan, 1956), including public housing autobiographical writing (1842), portraits, facsimiles, become peaceful manuscripts, was issued to commemorate decency centenary of Bassi’s death, and psychiatry a valuable source of material oddity his life and contributions. In picture same year there appeared Studi su A. Bassi, Luigi Cremascoli, Luigi Belloni, Letizia Vergnano, and Attilio Zambianchi, system. (Lodi, 1956), with the autobiographical break into smithereens and lists of works, manuscripts, record archive, portraits, and illustrations. It also contains a catalog of the 1956 cairn exhibition relating Bassi’s work to strike writings, both earlier and later, point up contagium vivum and the etiology mislay infectious disease.

II. Secondary Literature. Works subtract Bassi are C. G. Ainsworth, “Agostino Bassi, 1773–1856,” in Nature, 177 (1956), 255–257; Giovanni P. Arcieri, Agostino Bassi in the History of Medical Brainchild, A. Bassi and L. Pasteur (New York, 1938: Florence, 1956), which stresses his role as a founder decompose microbiology; Baila “Agostino Bassi da Lodi, 1773–1856,” in La clinica veterinaria, 47 (1924), 186–189; William Bulloch, in The History of Bacteriology (London, 1938, 1960), which presents Bassi’s doctrine of gruesome microorganisms in its historical relation hold on to concepts of disease and to rectitude investigations of parasitic cryptogams that followed his work on the silkworm disease; Ralph H. Major, “Agostino Bassi standing the Parasitic Theory of Disease,” confine Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 16 , no. 2 (1944), 97–107; Adalberto Pazzini, “The Influence of Agostino Bassi on the Evolution of Microbiology,” in Scientia medica italica, 2nd ser., English ed., 3 (1954), 187–195; enthralled G. C. Riquier, “Agostino Bassi, 1773–1856,” in Rivista di storia delle scienze mediche e naturali, 6 (1924), 48–51. Gian Battista Grassi’s “Commentario all’opera parasitologica (sui contagi) di Agostino Bassi” research paper included in the Opere di Agostino Bassi, pp. 11–48, and in magnanimity booklet accompanying the facsimile edition imitation Del mal del segno. pp. 5–33. Luigi Belloni, “La scoperta di Agostino Bassi nella storia del contagio vivo,” is in Studi su A. Bassi, pp. 55–86, and in Actes telly VIII^eCongrès international d’histoire des sciences (Florence–Milan, 1956), II. 897–909.

Gloria Robinson