Luigi Rolando (1773–1831)

Excerpt

Luigi Rolando was born on the 16th June 1773 in the Piedmontesan town of Torino. When his father died he was raised by an uncle, the priest Antonio Maffei. He studied medicine at his hometown university and took a particular interest in anatomy and zoology. The anatomist Giovanni Francesco Cigna (1734–1790), known for his research on magnetism and electricity in animals regarded him as his most promising disciple. In 1792 Rolando began practising medicine. In 1801/2 he presented a doctoral thesis on comparative anatomy about the structure and function of the lungs [1]. In 1799 the duke of Savoy, Piedmont and Aosta, Vittorio Emanuele I, was forced to emigrate to Sardinia in the wake of the revolutionary wars and in 1804 invited Rolando to come to Sardinia as professor of practical medicine at the University of Sassari. Because of an outbreak of yellow fever in Livorno he had to stop at Florence, where he stayed for three years. Here he got to know the anatomist Paolo Mascagni (1752–1815), then famous for his work on lymphatic vessels, and the physiologist Felice Fontana (1720–1805) who had been commissioned by the Grandduke Peter Leopold of Lorraine to establish the Imperial Royal Museum of Physics and Natural History (“La specola”), well-known for its collection of anatomical wax models. Here Rolando could improve his knowledge of anatomy and especially his proficiency in anatomical drawing – many of the illustrations in his publications originate from his own hand. From 1807 to 1814 Rolando lived in Sardinia and could return to Torino only after the Napoleonic wars. In his hometown he was appointed professor of anatomy, and functioned as physician to the royal family. He travelled to France and Great Britain, getting to know the most famous anatomists and physiologists of the time [2, 3]. From December 1829 he was also professor of anatomy at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Torino; soon afterwards he died, 20 April 1831, of cancer of the pylorus. …