Hundreds of cases over the course of sixty years had convinced
Morgagni that disease followed observable patterns. In the 1700s,
pharmacology was in its nascence; physicians (and especially surgeons)
were largely impotent. But Morgagni was gaining insight about organ-
based illness, and with experience, he could predict what he would find at
autopsy. He probably saved not one life, but as the decades passed, he grew
confident that he could predict what he would encounter at the autopsy
table. De Sedibus was quickly translated into French, English, and German
in the same era of the American Revolution; the United States was born at
the same time that physicians around the world were concluding that a
constellation of symptoms were pointing to a specific ailing organ.
A truism exists regarding advances in medicine: to best comprehend
how an organ (and its constituent cells) actually function, evaluate the
organ following an injury or during disease. Descartes had proposed that
the human body was merely a machine; Morgagni’s influence was to view
the coordinated physical-mechanical structures (that normally worked in
faultless harmony) as a watchmaker or machinist whose job was to
diagnose faulty parts. Physicians would now be in the business of carefully
listening to the cries of sick organs, fastidiously observing and examining
patients, and then empirically theorizing about what was killing them.
Morgagni is not simply the father of anatomic pathology, but also the
figure who is credited with initiating modern medical diagnosis. “The full
consequences of what he worked out were harvested in London and Paris,
in Vienna and in Berlin. And thus, we can say that, beginning with
Morgagni and resulting from his work, the dogmatism of the old schools
was completely shattered, and that with him the new medicine begins.”^5 It
seems odd that we don’t know his name better, but Morgagni is among the
most important figures of the Enlightenment. His disciples include Jean-
Nicolas Corvisart (1755–1821) and Pierre-Charles-Alexandre Louis
(1787–1872), physicians who helped establish Paris as the mecca of
medicine in the 19th century. The pendulum would eventually swing back
toward the east, when a critical physician from Vienna fully adopted the
concepts of the pathologic basis of disease, performing over 30,000
autopsies in his career, all without the most powerful tool in the history of
medicine.
A wave of political upheavals pulsed across Europe in 1848, affecting
almost every European country and many of their colonies worldwide.