Ettore Marchiafava, Italian Zoologist

Ettore Marchiafava (1847 - 1935) was an Italian physician and zoologist who worked on malaria. He studied malaria intensively for 11 years, from 1880 to 1891. With Angelo Celli, in 1880, he studied a new protozoan discovered by Alphonse Laveran, finding it in the blood of the many patients affections from malaria fever, recognizing of several the stages of development. They called the new microorganism Plasmodium. In 1884, with Angel Celli, he first observed Gram-negative diplococci in the cerebrospinal fluid of a fatal case of meningitis in 1884. This was the then-unnamed Neisseria meningitidis (Meningococcus), the agent of bacterial meningitis. Marchiafava described for the first time the histopathology of syphilitic cerebral arteritis. In 1897, he observed a callused body in the brain of an alcoholic patient, and, in 1903, with Amico Bignami, published a complete description of the insanity of alcoholics, one form of which is today known as Marchiafava-Bignami disease. He was the first one to prove the importance of sclerosis of the coronary arteries in the pathogenesis of myocardial infarction. He died in 1935 at the age of 88

Restrictions Only for Ireland and United Kingdom

Ettore Malaria Researcher Zoologist

Features In These Collections

> Contributors > PHR