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                  The Lesion   by Dr. Ian Carr
Giovanni Batista Morgagni (1682-1771)

Giovanni Batista Morgagni was born at Forli in Italy, and
trained in medicine at the University of Bologna. He became
Professor of Practical Medicine at Padua in 1711, and later
Professor of Anatomy. His professional life was spent on the
practice of medicine, and the study of normal and pathologic
anatomy by the post mortem dissection of patients whose disease
he had often followed in life. His great book was published
when he was 79 years of age.

     De Sedibus Causis Morborum......Venetia 1761 [large
     image]

     A man of about fifty-four years of age , had begun ,
     five or six months before, to be somewhat emaciated,
     in his whole body....a troublesome vomiting came on
     of a fluid which resembled water tinctured with soot.

     In the stomach, towards the pylorus, was an ulcerated
     cancerous tumour, and this seem'd to be made up of
     congeries of glands which being pressed , discharged
     a kind of humour like the male semen. And the stomach
     contained three pints of a matter, almost of the same
     nature with that , which was thrown up by vomiting.

     Betwixt the stomach and the spleen were two glandular
     bodies, of the bigness of a bean, and in their colour
     and substance, not much unlike that tumour which I
     have described in the stomach.

Morgagni described lesions and related them to the course of
the disease.
                                                       

                            

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