JOHN KEATS AS A MEDICAL STUDENT: A PHOTOGRAPHIC ITINERARY.

John Keats (1795-1821), besides being the famous English poet, was a student of medicine at the United Hospitals in London. On the occasion of the bicentenary of his death, we would like to pay tribute to this versatile figure with a photographic itinerary of his medical life. This article, in connection with the project "Himetop - The History of Medicine Topographical Database", retraces objects and places where the poet lived, studied, worked, and prematurely died, showing the importance of material culture.

"Man Who Won the War": Myth and Reality of Aldo Castellani's Role in Preserving the Health of Troops During the Italo-Ethiopian War 1935-1936.

The invasion of the ancient Ethiopian empire perpetrated by the Italian fascist regime in 1935-1936 deserves all the blame due to a war of aggression, a belated colonial enterprise and a bullying act of a totalitarian regime. Yet there is one aspect of that war that aroused universal admiration among contemporaries and which still deserves to be analysed today: the healthcare of troops. The Italian army, which came close to half a million men, was the largest European army that had ever fought in tropical or sub-tropical territories.

Was Aldo Castellani the inventor of combined and polyvalent vaccines?

Italian born and long term resident in England, Sir Aldo Castellani (1874-1971), is usually credited with "several discoveries of great importance in tropical medicine", most notably for his role in determining the aetiology of sleeping sickness and yaws. This contribution tries to highlight his role in the history of vaccinology as a pioneer in the design and use of combined and polyvalent vaccines. In the light of existing data, while acting as Director of the Bacteriological Institute of Colombo (Ceylon) in the decade before the First World War, Castellani was the first to experiment with both different strains of "antigens belonging to the same group" like in his typhoid-paratyphoid vaccine (TAB), as well as the simultaneous use of more pathogens, or part of them, for protection against different diseases, like in his "tetravaccine" (TAB + cholera) and "pentavaccine" (TAB + cholera + Malta fever).

Mazzini at 150: the Italian death of a London exile.

The year 2022 will mark the 150th anniversary of the death of Giuseppe Mazzini, the spiritual father of the Italian Republic and one of the best political minds of the nineteenth century. In this review, we revisit the events surrounding Mazzini's death, based on a report published in 1872 by Dr. Giovanni Rossini, the Italian physician who cared for him during his last days in Pisa.

Efficient 2-phosphoglycolate degradation is required to maintain carbon assimilation and allocation in the C4 plant Flaveria bidentis.

Photorespiration is indispensable for oxygenic photosynthesis since it detoxifies and recycles 2-phosphoglycolate (2PG), which is the primary oxygenation product of Rubisco. However, C4 plant species typically display very low rates of photorespiration due to their efficient biochemical carbon-concentrating mechanism. Thus, the broader relevance of photorespiration in these organisms remains unclear.

Tapping on the chest of history. Lost and found memories of Leopold Auenbrugger, inventor of percussion, in Austria and beyond.

Leopold Auenbrugger (1722-1809), the inventor of percussion, joins René Laennec as the father of modern physical examination. On the occasion of the bicentennial of the invention of the stethoscope (1816), I went in search of the material footprints left by Auenbrugger in his homeland, Austria. This attempt led me to construct a rather fragmented picture, with some disillusionment (e.

The monuments men: in the history of anesthesia, too.

A 2014 American-German war movie directed by and starring George Clooney (Actor, Screenwriter, Film Director, and Producer; Los Angeles, California and Laglio, Italy) (1961-current) popularized the work of a special United States Army unit devoted to the rescue of art treasures stolen or hidden by the Nazis during World War II. A similar story occurred in Paris to a curious little monument closely linked to the history of Anesthesia. This happened about 70 years ago, in December 1944.

Physician and dictator: a pictorial essay on Luigi Carlo Farini (1812-1866) in his homeland.

Luigi Carlo Farini (1812-1866) was one of the leading figures in the Italian unification, the Risorgimento. As a physician he always took care of the health problems of its people with a broadminded attitude, promoting for example extensive campaigns of Jennerian vaccination or experimenting the effects of electricity on tetanus. As a political leader - he was proclaimed "Dictator" in 1859 - he made possible the annexation of the Adriatic regions of Emilia and Romagna to the Kingdom of Vittorio Emanuele II of Savoy that later, in March 1861, was to become the new Kingdom of Italy.

Rome's physician: Guido Baccelli and his legacy in the new Italian capital.

Many Italian physicians played a more or less relevant role in the military, social and political events which paved the way to and accompanied the birth of the unitary State, which 150th anniversary falls in 2011, but probably just one of them, Guido Baccelli (1832-1916), left so many traces in the very landscape of the present-day Italian capital. Even if the millions of tourists pouring into Rome every year are not aware of it, the vision and tenacity of this celebrated physician lay behind quite a lot of the most typical and popular places of the Eternal City. Baccelli, as a politician, took care of his home town with the same kindness and effectiveness he put, as a physician, in the care of the sick.