representation of a heart attack, frozen in time. This clot prevented
precious blood flow to the most critical part of his heart, and deprived of
fuel and oxygen, the cardiac muscle ceased to pump, leading to his
collapse in his driveway.
Death and disease had been shrouded from humanity’s comprehension
from our earliest reasonings; in the span of a few generations my
forefathers used discipline, skepticism, the microscope, and chemical dyes
to lift the veil and unlock the secrets of illness. Here in the morgue, armed
with the tools of the pathologist, I can explain, scientifically, why this man
died, even if I can’t comprehend how precarious our existence is.
By the mid–17th century, Padua, Italy, could lay claim as the crucial
birthplace of knowledge and learning of the Italian Renaissance, even
outshining the University of Bologna, the oldest university in the world.
Sons of Padua included Vesalius, Falloppio, Harvey, and Galileo, and as
the 18th century approached, a recent graduate from the University of
Bologna school of medicine arrived in Padua, consumed by a lifetime
devotion to a project that would seismically change medicine forever.
Giovanni Battista Morgagni (1682–1771) graduated from Bologna at
the age of nineteen, soon forming an intellectual society for students and
new graduates called the Academia Inquietorum—Academy of the
Restless. As a new graduate, Morgagni had encountered a new book by
Theophilus Bonetus the Sepulchretum, a compendium of thousands of
cases of clinical histories and correlative autopsies. These were compiled
by Bonetus from the burgeoning medical literature by a vast array of
authors that, unfortunately, was disorganized and haphazard, rendering it
almost unreadable. The young Morgagni “nevertheless, pored over the
Sepulchretum ... and it became clear to him that because the concept upon
which it was based epitomized a fundamental truth,”^1 set about (at first)
revising the book, but later constructing an entirely new work based upon
his own cases.
Morgagni began his project as a newly minted physician, probably
twenty or twenty-one years of age, and began collecting information on
the patients he was treating and the results of their autopsies. One by one,
he built a compilation of cases, with careful observations, astute clinical
interpretations, and the occasional physiological experimentation to
bolster his clinical conclusions. “To this enormous undertaking he brought