Pius VI (1775-99).--Among the physicians who treated Pius VI during the severe physical trials of a stormy pontificate was Professor Cotugno of Naples, to whom we owe a number of important discoveries in medicine. He was the first to point out the presence of the cerebro-spinal fluid and ably supplemented the investigations of Valsalva on the ear which did so much to clear up many problems in connection with that organ, most of whose anatomy we owe to Italians. He made a careful study of sciatica, De Ischiada Nervosa, Vienna, 1770, which is the classic foundation of our modern knowledge of that affection. He made a series of post-mortem observations on typhoid fever in which he demonstrated very clearly the intestinal lesions of that affection and came very near solving the important problem of the pathological basis of the disease. Like a number of others about the middle of [{466}] the eighteenth century, in spite of acute observations on intestinal lesions, he could not get away from the theory of fevers being constitutional and so was unable to separate abdominal typhus from dysentery on the one hand, nor true typhus on the other. The constitutional nature of the disease we have come to recognize to some extent again after the pendulum had swung very far in the direction of the declaration of its local character.
Pius VII (1800-23).--One of the physicians of Pope Pius VII was Professor Giambattista Bomba, who was professor of physiology at the Sapienza or Roman University of that time. One of the surgeons in attendance at the Papal Court was Antonio Baccelli, the father of Professor Guido Baccelli, the distinguished Italian scientist and statesman of the modern time.
Another of the physicians of Pius VII was Flajani, to whom we owe the first description of the affection known as Graves' Disease in English-speaking countries, and often as Basedow's Disease on the Continent, though the English physician Parry anticipated both of these in 1822. Graves' description did not come until 1835, Flajani's had been published in 1802; Basedow did not write the more complete description in which he called attention not only to the goitre and the rapid heart action as his Irish and Italian predecessors had done, but also to the exophthalmos, which is so common an accompaniment, until 1850. Flajani was distinguished for his ability as a clinical observer as his priority in this matter would well suggest.
Gregory XVI (1831-46).--The two of Gregory XVI's physicians who were best known were Professor Paolo Baroni, the distinguished Professor of Surgery, the University of Bologna, and Pier Luigi Valentini, Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine at the Roman University. At the conclave which followed his death for the election of his successor, Professor Giusseppe Constantini, the Professor of the Institutes of Surgery at the Roman University, was in attendance. [Footnote 53]
[Footnote 63: When the material of the famous Challenger expedition was being assigned for investigation to those who were expected to use it to the best advantage of science, the diatoms were handed over to the study of Francesco Castracane degli Anteminelli. He discovered in the material submitted to him three new genera of diatoms, 225 new species and some thirty varieties. Altogether he had written some 112 papers on the biology of his favorite microscopic plants. Castracane was a Catholic priest living at Rome in high favor with the ecclesiastical authorities and directly encouraged by the Pope in his work.]
Leo XIII (1878-1903) was so situated in his relations to the Italian government that it would have been almost impossible for him to have selected one of the distinguished professors at the [{467}] University at Rome, which was, after all, a government institution. His physician then was chosen from distant Ancona and proved to be a man of distinct intellectual capacity, who impressed himself upon the science of Rome in certain ways. This was Dr. Joseph Lapponi, whom those of us who had the privilege of meeting remember with special pleasure. He was professor of practical anthropology at the Academy of the Historico-Juridical Conferences of Rome and the author of a book on "Hypnotism and Spiritism; A Critical and Medical Study," which ran through two or more editions in the original Italian and was translated into several foreign languages. The English edition published by Longmans is well known.
Pius X (1903-14).--Dr. Lapponi continued as the Papal Physician of Leo XIII's successor until his death. Political conditions in Rome having been modified somewhat Professor Marchiafava of the Roman University, now in the hands of the Italian government, became the consultant Papal Physician, the latest of a long line of distinguished men. Marchiafava has done some excellent work with regard to malaria, working out the life cycle of the malarial parasite and demonstrating that the organisms of pernicious malaria and the tertian and quartan malarial fevers are quite different. In recent years Marchiafava has been particularly interested in the pathology of alcoholism, being a prominent factor in that movement in Europe which during our time has made it very clear that alcohol is never a stimulant but only a narcotic and that in practically all cases where it is used regularly, even though not consumed to excess, it produces definite pathological changes in human tissues.
With this list before him, the reader will have all the material necessary to understand the declaration that there is no series of men whose names are connected together by any bond in the history of medicine, even as members of the faculty of our oldest medical schools, that represent so much achievement and original investigation in medical matters as the Papal Physicians. With these men beside them as advisers and very often as intimate friends, it would have been quite impossible for the Popes to have been deliberate opponents of scientific progress. We all know that by a curious irony of fate physicians are sometimes found ranged against the line of advance in medical science, but this is inevitable with human frailty and the incidents of opposition have not done nearly so much harm as their conservative refusal to listen to enthusiastic discoverers, whose discovery was of no significance, has done of [{468}] good. No medical society in the world has an unblemished record of constant readiness to accept genuine new discoveries and all of them have sometime or other been in opposition to what proved eventually to be significant scientific progress. There are no striking incidents in the lives of the Papal Physicians in this regard though their admiration for Aristotle, Hippocrates and Galen sometimes kept them over conservative. As a rule, however, they were ready to welcome every new step in medical advance that was made.
We all know how much a man's physician usually means in influencing him with regard to the attitude that he shall assume towards scientific advances generally and particularly announced progress in the biological sciences. The Popes could scarcely have had better advisers in this matter than the men who were actually chosen as Papal Physicians. They came from every part of Italy and sometimes even from other countries. A library consisting of their works alone would contain an extremely valuable collection of books illustrating nearly every phase of advance in medicine.