Marcello Malpighi: the nervous system under a microscope

Abstract

The longstanding study of gross anatomy experienced a considerable improvement with the advent of the microscope in the early 17th century. The representative personality of this new era certainly was Marcello Malpighi, seen as “founder of microscopic anatomy”. He studied, with a rudimentary compound microscope, numerous tissues and organs of several classes of animals, as well as plants. He described, for the first time, the microscopic structure of the nervous system, identifying in the gray matter of its various levels minute elements he took as “glands”. It should be reminded that the concept of “cell” (and “nerve cell”) was unknown at his time. Many researchers followed, performing microscopic studies, but without better results, and Malpighi’s view was maintained until the beginning of the 19th century, when new histological processing and staining techniques appeared, as well as improved microscopes.

Nursing Education of Lateral Oblique Complications of Neurosurgery under Microscope

“…The method of iterative updating is adopted: in each iteration, k clusters are formed according to the sample points around k cluster centers, and the centroid of each cluster obtained by recalculation (namely, the average value of all points in the cluster, namely, the set center) will be used as the reference point of the next iteration [ 12 , 13 ]. The reference points selected iteratively are closer and closer to the real center of mass of the cluster, so the objective function is smaller and smaller, and the clustering effect is better and better [ 14 ].…”

DESCARTES and his project of a fantasized brain

“…More than three decades after Descartes' description, and fifteen years after his death, the microscopic structure of the brain was revealed by Marcello Malpighi, first in letters (1665), and then in his Viscerum Structura (1666), with its deep structures, and an external layer, the cerebral cortex, constituted by packed small elements (neurons). [20][21][22][23] Interest in the minute structure of natural objects appears to have especially developed towards the end of the 16 th and during the beginning of the 17 th century. In this period, a number of scientists projected or constructed instruments to see the amplified structure of plants and animals.…”