Giovanni Battista Mazzini

Giovanni Battista Mazzini, also written Mazini (1677 to 1743), was an Italian physician and mathematician born in Brescia and one of the most committed advocates of the iatromechanical school, which tried to explain health and disease through the mechanics of the body's fluids and solids. After taking his doctorate in philosophy and medicine at Padua in 1701 and practising in Brescia, he was appointed in 1726 to a chair of practical medicine at the University of Padua. His writings include a 1714 study of the shapes of the particles that make up iron, the multi-part Mechanices morborum (from 1723), which derives a mechanical theory of disease, and Mechanica medicamentorum (1734), which explains drug action through the shape of the minute particles drugs give off. He also wrote on the respiration of the fetus, and his collected works appeared in 1743, the year he died.