Enrico Albanese

Enrico Albanese was an Italian surgeon who lived through the Italian Risorgimento and made his name in orthopaedics and traumatology. Born in Palermo on 11 March 1834, he earned his medical degree in 1855, finished his studies in Florence, and then returned to Palermo to study under the anatomist and clinical surgeon Giovanni Gorgone. A friend of Giuseppe Garibaldi, he took part in the Expedition of the Thousand in 1860 and treated Garibaldi's severe foot wound after the battle of Aspromonte in 1862. In 1865 he became director of the Civil Hospital of Palermo, where he founded a paediatric ward and an antiseptic operating room, one of the first to follow Joseph Lister's theories. After Gorgone's death he took the chair of clinical surgery, and in 1873 he helped found the Ospizio Marino for children with rickets, spondylitis and scrofula. His studies covered epidermal transplantation, blood transfusion and preventive haemostasis. He died in Naples on 5 May 1889.