Angelo Mosso

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Angelo Mosso

Angelo Mosso (born May 30, 1846 in Turin , † November 24, 1910 ibid) was an Italian physiologist and archaeologist .

family

Mosso came from a humble background and was the eldest son of three siblings. His father was a craftsman, a grandfather a bricklayer. The family lived and worked in Chieri (Piedmont), near Turin. His brother Ugolino Mosso (1854–1909) was a private lecturer in pharmacology in Turin.

education and profession

He attended high school in Chieri, Cuneo and Asti. In 1865 he enrolled in medicine at the University of Turin . Two of his teachers, the botanist Moris and the zoologist Filippo De Filippi , got him a job as a science teacher at the Turin high school. In 1868 he became an assistant at the Mauriziano Hospital. He received his doctorate summa cum laude in 1870 with an experimental thesis on bone growth. The examiners recommended the highly gifted Mosso to the physiologist Jakob Moleschott , who holds a chair in Turin.

In 1871, through Moleschott's mediation, he received a position in the laboratory of the experimental physiologist Moritz Schiff (1823-1896) in Florence , where he worked experimentally for the first time. He then spent a year in Leipzig with Carl Ludwig , where Mosso studied the graphic registration of physiological phenomena and designed a plethysmograph . There he also met Henry Pickering Bowditch (1840–1911) and Hugo Kronecker , whom he assisted in experiments on the fatigue and recovery of the striated muscles (in the frog).

Mosso turned down two job offers from Heidelberg and Kiel and instead visited the Paris laboratories of Claude Bernard , Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard , Étienne-Jules Marey and Louis Antoine Ranvier . He returned to Turin to continue working at Moleschott, mainly on blood circulation . In 1875 Mosso received the private professorship for pharmacology ( materia medica ), in 1877 the extraordinary and 1878 the full professorship. In 1879 he took over the chair of physiology at the University of Turin as Moleschott's successor. The Accademia dei Lincei he belonged since 1879 as a corresponding member, 1882, he was socio nazionale (full member). In 1888 he was elected a member of the Leopoldina . Since 1898 he was a corresponding member of the Académie des sciences .

In the following 30 years of activity, Mosso founded the school of Italian experimental physiology. Among the visitors from all over the world was the later founder of the neurosurgery Harvey Williams Cushing , who was interested in Mosso's intracranial pressure experiments.

power

Experiment to record "brain pulsations"

Mosso's scientific work is varied and comprises 172 articles and books. He was a designer of scientific apparatus, founded experimental human physiology as an opponent of vivisection and dealt with questions of public health and archeology .

Mosso described a large number of technical devices that he used as aids in his experimental studies: including an artificial iris , a plethysmograph (1875), a pneumograph (1876), a urological cystometer (1882), a sphygmograph (1883), an ergograph and a ponometer (1888), a myotonometer , a sphygmomanometer (1895), and various respiratory apparatus and recorders.

His scientific questions mainly included the analysis of motor functions (smooth and striated muscles under various physiological or pathological conditions) and the relationship between physiological and psychological phenomena (including intracranial pressure, micturition ). In addition, he was a pioneer in respiratory physiology (for example, inversion sleep breathing) and research into high-altitude respiration . Mosso also worked on vasomotor functions , carried out pulse and blood volume examinations and experiments on the physiology of the heart and circulation.

Circulatory scales

Mosso is one of the early pioneers in functional neuroimaging . He examined the pulsation of the brain volume in patients with skull defects. From his findings that the brain volume increases while the patient is doing arithmetic problems, he concluded that the blood flow to the brain increases during mental activities. For examinations on people without a skull defect, he devised sophisticated scales ("human blood circulation scales"); his work was rediscovered by Stefano Sandrone and colleagues.

As a forum for his physiological research results, Mosso founded the journal Archives Italiennes de Biologie (1882), the Institute for Physiology Parco del Valentino (1893) and a research station in the Monte Rosa massif (Col d'Olen 3000 m) for altitude climatic and respiratory physiological studies ( 1895).

Among other things, he advocated the integration of sport into education. In the last years of his life he turned to archeology, took part in excavations in Crete , southern Italy and in the Roman Forum and published articles about it.

Mosso had more than 17 memberships in scientific societies worldwide, was rector of the University of Turin in 1899/1900 and was appointed Italian senator in 1904.

Works

  • Saggio di alcune ricerche fatte intorno all'accrescimento delle ossa . (Tesi di laurea) Napoli 1870
  • Sopra un nuovo metodo per scrivere i movimenti dei vasi sanguigni dell'uomo . Atti Acad Sci (Turin) 11 (1875) 21
  • Introduzione ad una serie di esperienze sui movimenti del cervello nell 'uomo . Archivio per le scienze mediche I, Fasc. 2, 1876
  • Esperienze sui movimenti del cervello nell'uomo . (Mosso, A. & Giacomini, C.) Archivo per le scienze mediche, I, fasc. 3, Torino, Vincenzo Bona 1877, p. 278
  • Osservazioni sui movimenti del cervello di un idiota epilettico . (Mosso, A. & Albertotti, G.) R. Accademia di Medicina di Torino, 1877
  • Diagnosis of the pulse in relation to its local changes . Leipzig 1879
  • Sulla circolazione del sangue nel cervello dell 'uomo . Atti di Lincei. Me. Sc. Fis., Ser. 3, Vol. 5, 7 December 1879, p. 237
  • About the blood circulation in the human brain . Leipzig, Veit 1881 ( online )
  • La peur: étude psycho-physiologique . Paris 1886 ( online )
  • The fear . 1889 ( online )
  • The fatigue . Leipzig 1892 ( online )
  • The temperature of the brain . Leipzig, Veit 1894 ( online )
  • Sphygmomanomètre pour mesurer la pression du sang chez l'homme . Arch Ital Biol 23 (1895) 177
  • Man in the high Alps . Leipzig 1899 ( online Italian ; online English )
  • La fatigue intellectuelle et physique . Paris 1903 ( online )
  • Les exercices physiques et le développement intellectuel . Paris 1904 ( online )
  • Vita moderna degli Italiani . Milan 1906 ( online )
  • The palaces of Crete and their builders . New York / London 1907 ( online )
  • Escursioni nel Mediterraneo e gli scavi di Creta . Milan 1907 ( online )
  • La democrazia nella religione e nella scienza; studi sull'America . Milan 1908 ( online )
  • The dawn of Mediterranean civilization , New York 1910 ( online )

literature

Web links

Commons : Angelo Mosso  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ S. Sandrone, M. Bacigaluppi and a .: Weighing brain activity with the balance: Angelo Mosso's original manuscripts come to light. In: Brain: a journal of neurology. Volume 137, Pt 2, February 2014, pp. 621-633, doi: 10.1093 / brain / awt091 , PMID 23687118 .
personal data
SURNAME Mosso, Angelo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian physiologist
DATE OF BIRTH May 30, 1846
PLACE OF BIRTH Turin
DATE OF DEATH November 24, 1910
Place of death Turin