Vincenzo Malacarne, professor of medicine, surgery, and obstetrics in Turin, Pavia, and Padua, Italy, represented a perfect example of an eighteenth century "letterato", combining interests in humanities, sciences, and politics, embodying the ideal of an encyclopedic and universal culture. He made important contributions in anatomy and surgery, teratology, obstetrics, neurology, and history of medicine, adopting a interdisciplinary approach based on the correlation between anatomy, surgery, and clinics. He deserves a special place in the history of neurology because of the first complete description of the human cerebellum. He quantified the units of the cerebellar internal structures, the lamellae being numbered for a systematic description of the human cerebellum. He thought the mental faculties depended on their number, considering a relation between the number of cerebellar lamellae and the expression of intellectual faculties. In this way, he made first statistics on human faculties. He advanced the concept that the number of cerebellar folia was influenced by the environment, thus providing the first nature-nurture hypothesis made on the basis of observations, and the concept of neuroplasticity in the scientific literature. Finally, he also contributed to the emergence of a new science, namely electrophysiology, because he laid down experimental foundations of a project on the recording of brain electricity, comparing the structure of the human brain with Volta's galvanic pillar.
In his brief report on the structure of the gray matter of the central nervous system (1873), in which he described the "black reaction", Golgi noted the ramifications of the axon. This discovery prompted the French histologist Louis Antoine Ranvier, one of the first to try the black reaction outside Italy, to propose an ingenious theory of referred pain in his Traité technique d'histologie. Ranvier suggested that the nerve fibers originating from the irritated area and those coming from the region to which the sensation is referred converge on the same axon and thus the same cell body, causing the spatial dislocation of sensation. This theory of referred pain is a powerful example of the extraordinary clinical-physiological impact of the first of Golgi's neurocytological discoveries.
Agostino Bassi was the first to translate aetiological ideas on the microbiological genesis of diseases into an actual research programme. Dedicated to his own, private naturalistic researches, Bassi demonstrated experimentally that a type of silkworm disease was due to a ‘parasitic fungus.’ He successfully isolated the parasite and used it to infect a healthy animal. He was also responsible for intuitions on the concepts of immunity, healthy carriers, predisposal to contracting infections and the dynamics of epidemics. He understood that all infections are a product of parasitic beings that invade other living organic beings. This led to the microbiological theory of infectious diseases that would make enormous developments with the German, Robert Koch, and Frenchman, Louis Pasteur.
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