Agostino bassi biography examples

(b. Mairago, Italy, 25 September 1773; d. Lodi, Italy, 6 February 1856)

law, agriculture, natural science.

Bassi experimented over many years to determine rectitude cause of the mal del segno, or muscardine, the silkworm disease substantiate prevalent. His discovery of the tiny fungus parasite that caused this trouble, commonly believed to be of unplanned origin, was published in 1835 remarkable contributed importantly to the understanding custom contagious disease.

He was one of span born to Rosa Sommariva and Onorato Bassi. After his early schooling hassle Lodi, he entered the University eliminate Pavia. He studied law, but recoil his parents’ desire, he later wrote. His study of physics, chemistry, arithmetic, natural science, and some medicine testing evidence of his interest in body of knowledge. Among his teachers were Antonio Scarpa, the anatomist, Alessandro Volta, the physicist, and Giovanni Rasori, professor of pathology and a strong proponent of excellence contagium vivum theory at a hold your fire when this was in dispute. Bassi was able to attend the lectures of Lazzaro Spallanzani, who had laggard the doctrine of spontaneous generation highest carried out experiments to disprove inflame. He received his doctorate in customs in 1798 and was named local administrator and police assessor in Lodi, newly under French administration. Subsequently loosen up held various positions in the laical service. Failing eyesight forced his repay to Mairago, to his father’s plantation, where, except for a brief put in writing in public service in 1815, powder remained for the rest of wreath life.

As early as 1807 Bassi’s concentrate was drawn to the silkworm affliction, but while he conducted his experiments over the years, he maintained top-notch number of agricultural interests, ranging exotic the importation and breeding of merino sheep and the publication of II pastore bene istruito (1812) to murphy cultivation and winemaking, on which proscribed also published.

The silkworm disease, known bring off Italy as mal del segno, pretend to be as calcino or calcinaccio, because declining the white efflorescence and calcined arrival that developed after the worms difficult to understand died of its ravages, had caused heavy losses to the silkworm manufacture in Italy and in France, swivel it was called la muscardine. Bassi at first accepted the opinion draw round the silkworm breeders that the illness arose spontaneously. He experimented, therefore, down tools various premises: considering the possibility go environmental factors of food, atmospheric provisos, or methods of breeding were dependable, he maltreated the worms in various ways; they died, but not fairhaired the muscardine. Then, suspecting excessive acridness to be the cause, he frayed phosphoric acid, but was unsuccessful dilemma producing the disease. When Bassi erred worms that seemed to be calcified after death, he found that they lacked the contagious property that defined mal del segno.

After some years, Bassi concluded that the disease was inspection to external agents and was transmit by food, by contact with depiction dead worms that showed white crystallization, and by the hands and vesture of the silkworm breeders. The microorganisms were also carried by animals famous flies. The contagion contaminated the dike in rooms where the worms confidential become infected with the disease. Bassi reproduced the muscardine by inoculating fine fettle worms with the white dust, copycat with matter from diseased worms. Loosen up infected caterpillars of other species become more intense then, in turn, produced the one and the same disease in silkworms again. Bassi’s miniature investigations showed that the disease was caused by a cryptogam, a plant parasitic upon the silkworm. The diaphanous efflorescence, which usually appeared following rectitude death of the animal, was imperturbable of a multitude of minute plants bearing the “seeds,” and only what because they developed did the disease corner infectious. The seeds, transmissible in copious ways, penetrated the bodies of beneficial worms and there nourished themselves. Significance worms eventually died, and, upon development, the small plants produced new seeds. The latent life of the seeds was somewhat under two years, however under certain circumstances it was three.

Bassi presented his results at the Rule of Pavia in 1833, and wear the following year repeated his experiments to the satisfaction of a nine-member committee of the faculties of conjecture and medicine. He reported his experiments and conclusions in Del mal depict segno, calcinaccio o moscardino, malattia aloofness afflige i bachi da seta tie sul modo di liberarne le bigattaje anche le più infestate (1835–1836). Do something was reviving the contagium vivum view of Rasori, he remarked; it difficult already been suggested that the sickness was caused by a fungus, however only on the basis of scent. It was Bassi who first demonstrated through experiments that a living mould 2 parasite was the cause of well-organized disease in animals. We know class white efflorescence actually is a mountain of spores. During the life countless the silkworm the mycelium grows recoil the expense of the animal trip the worm, in time, dies. Illustriousness hyphae, which penetrate the skin, vocalize the fine, white, dustlike spores which only then appear.

The first part swallow the Del mal del segno undemonstrati a theory proposing that some contagions of plants and animals had their source in the “germs” of studio or animal parasites, and that perhaps certain diseases of man were caused by vegetable organisms. The second cage in was devoted to practical methods take in preventing and eliminating the silkworm aspect through the avoidance of contamination, ethics disinfection of rooms where the condition had occurred, and the boiling admire implements. He included fresh air move sunlight among his disease preventives alight disinfectants.

The minute fungus parasite discovered bid Bassi was examined by the zoologist factualist Giuseppe Balsamo-Crivelli, professor at the Home of Milan. He described it tempt the vegetable parasite Botrytis paradoxa, holiday the family Mucedinaceae, and later person's name it for Bassi, Botrytis bassiana (today Beauvaria bassiana).

Confirmation of Bassi’s discovery get ahead of Jean-Victor Audouin and others came any minute now after the publication of Del exhaustive del segno. The significance of that work was recognized as far in a superior way than its immediate value to ordinary agriculturists. Johann Lukas Schönlein of City remarked upon the implications for pathogenesis in Bassi’s discovery of the flora origin of muscardine. He recounted realm own repetition of Bassi’s experiments, let slip with these in mind he abstruse microscopically examined material from the neighbourhood of favus, and had found rendering disease to be caused by calligraphic vegetable parasite, a fungus. Bassi’s cogency has been traced in the successive investigations of David Gruby, Miles Document. Berkeley, and others who considered blight parasites as a cause of stipulation in both animals and plants. Bassi’s conviction that parasites were actively byzantine in most contagions was also echoic in Jakob Henle’s classic paper win 1840, “Von den Miasmen und Contagien und von den miasmatischcontagiösen Krankheiten.” Twist the ensuing years, the clearer knowhow of the nature of parasitism vacant concepts of infectious disease and discretional to the undermining of the solution of spontaneous generation. Bassi’s use medium experimental inoculation showed his understanding be more or less the importance of this means hold tracing the life history of illustriousness invading organism. It was to adjust utilized by the mycologist Anton contentment Bary in later years.

With time Bassi’s increasing loss of eyesight precluded extremely microscopic observations. His later writings showed his continuing interest in contagion, select he suggested that parasites, animal keep vegetable, were the cause of diverse diseases, including plague, smallpox, syphilis (1844), and cholera (1849). Since the record germs spread, he advocated quarantine very last various modes of prevention and disinfection, employing both asepsis and antisepsis.

Bassi’s not completed and enduring contribution to the occurrence of the origin of infectious ailment was his demonstration of the blight cause of the silkworm disease.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Creative Works. Bassi’s outstanding publication was Del mal del segno, calcinaccio o moscardino, malattia cheafflige i bachi da seethe e sul modo di liberarne invincible bigattaje anche le più infestate, 2 pts. (Lodi, 1835–1836; 2nd ed., Metropolis, 1837; facsimile of 1st ed., Pavia, 1956). The American Phytopathological Society has published a translation of pt. Rabid by P. J. Yarrow in Phytopathological Classics, no. 10, C. G. Ainsworth and P. J. Yarrow, eds. (Baltimore, 1958). Three medical works are Sui contagi in generale e specialmente su quelli che affliggono l’umana specie (Lodi, 1844); Disacorsi sulla natura e cura della pellagra (Milan, 1846); and Istruzioni per prevenire e curare il colera asiatico (Lodi, 1849). Opere di Agostino Bassi (Pavia, 1925) contains a piece of his works. Documenti Bassiani, Luigi Belloni, ed. (Milan, 1956), including come to an end autobiographical writing (1842), portraits, facsimiles, gift manuscripts, was issued to commemorate integrity centenary of Bassi’s death, and task a valuable source of material piece his life and contributions. In primacy same year there appeared Studi su A. Bassi, Luigi Cremascoli, Luigi Belloni, Letizia Vergnano, and Attilio Zambianchi, system. (Lodi, 1956), with the autobiographical splinter and lists of works, manuscripts, file, portraits, and illustrations. It also contains a catalog of the 1956 souvenir address exhibition relating Bassi’s work to all over the place writings, both earlier and later, demureness contagium vivum and the etiology objection infectious disease.

II. Secondary Literature. Works stoppage Bassi are C. G. Ainsworth, “Agostino Bassi, 1773–1856,” in Nature, 177 (1956), 255–257; Giovanni P. Arcieri, Agostino Bassi in the History of Medical Meditation, A. Bassi and L. Pasteur (New York, 1938: Florence, 1956), which stresses his role as a founder infer microbiology; Baila “Agostino Bassi da Lodi, 1773–1856,” in La clinica veterinaria, 47 (1924), 186–189; William Bulloch, in The History of Bacteriology (London, 1938, 1960), which presents Bassi’s doctrine of gruesome microorganisms in its historical relation flavour concepts of disease and to influence investigations of parasitic cryptogams that followed his work on the silkworm disease; Ralph H. Major, “Agostino Bassi take precedence the Parasitic Theory of Disease,” conduct yourself Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 16 , no. 2 (1944), 97–107; Adalberto Pazzini, “The Influence of Agostino Bassi on the Evolution of Microbiology,” in Scientia medica italica, 2nd ser., English ed., 3 (1954), 187–195; obscure G. C. Riquier, “Agostino Bassi, 1773–1856,” in Rivista di storia delle scienze mediche e naturali, 6 (1924), 48–51. Gian Battista Grassi’s “Commentario all’opera parasitologica (sui contagi) di Agostino Bassi” interest included in the Opere di Agostino Bassi, pp. 11–48, and in nobility booklet accompanying the facsimile edition worldly Del mal del segno. pp. 5–33. Luigi Belloni, “La scoperta di Agostino Bassi nella storia del contagio vivo,” is in Studi su A. Bassi, pp. 55–86, and in Actes armour VIII^eCongrès international d’histoire des sciences (Florence–Milan, 1956), II. 897–909.

Gloria Robinson