Giorgio Baglivi

Giorgio Baglivi was a Croatian-Italian physician and scientist of Armenian origin, born in Ragusa, now Dubrovnik, in 1668. Orphaned as a small child, he was taken to Lecce by his adoptive father, a physician, studied at Salerno, Padua and Bologna, and travelled to the Dutch Republic and England. He became an assistant to Marcello Malpighi and followed him to Rome. Baglivi made important contributions to clinical education grounded in his own practice, and in De Fibra Motrice he advanced a solidist theory that the solid parts of organs matter more than their fluids. His microscopic studies distinguished smooth from striated muscle. He urged doctors to rely on careful observation rather than on general theory, and he died in 1707.