Agostino bassi biography templates
Home / Biography Templates & Examples / Agostino bassi biography templates
The significance of this work was recognized as far greater than its immediate value to practical agriculturists. He infected caterpillars of other species and then, in turn, produced the same disease in silkworms again. Dedicated to his own, private naturalistic researches, Bassi demonstrated experimentally that a type of silkworm disease was due to a "parasitic fungus." He successfully isolated the parasite and used it to infect a healthy animal.
The seeds, transmissible in numerous ways, penetrated the bodies of healthy worms and there nourished themselves. Bassi’s use of experimental inoculation showed his understanding of the importance of this means of tracing the life history of the invading organism. He studied law, but at his parents’ desire, he later wrote.
He was reviving the contagium vivum theory of Rasori, he remarked; it had already been suggested that the disease was caused by a fungus, but only on the basis of odor. Johann Lukas Schonlein of Zurich remarked upon the implications for pathogenesis in Bassi’s discovery of the fungus origin of muscardine.
He also produced scientific works on laboratory cultures of potatoes, on cheese and winemaking, as well as the human diseases of leprosy and cholera, after which he made the important generalization that many diseases of plants, animals, and man are caused by animal or vegetable parasites.
Another Bassi's achievement was in being the first, who prescribed methods for the prevention and elimination of muscardine, the success of which earned him considerable honors.
In 1953 the Italian post office issued a stamp on the 180th anniversary of Bassi's birth in 1773.
However, his experiments justly earn for him the title of "the founder of parasitic theory of infection." The dramatic development of antiseptic and aseptic surgery was simultaneous with the rise of bacteriology.
It is inconceivable today that surgery and the control of disease in all of its phases could be done with any reasonable success without an understanding of bacteriology.
Quotations: "All infections, of whatever type, with no exceptions, are products of parasitic beings; that is, by living organisms that enter in other living organisms, in which they find nourishment, that is, food that suits them, here they hatch, grow and reproduce themselves."
Personality
Physical Characteristics: With time Bassi’s increasing loss of eyesight precluded further microscopic observations.
He recounted his own repetition of Bassi’s experiments, for with these in mind he had microscopically examined material from the pustules of favus, and had found the disease to be caused by a vegetable parasite, a fungus.
Background
Agostino Maria Bassi was born on September 25, 1773, in Mairago, Italy. He was one of twins born to Rosa Sommariva and Onorato Bassi.
The germs were also carried by animals and flies.
Connections
- Father:
- Onorato Bassi
- Mother:
- Rosa Sommariva
- teacher:
- Antonio Scarpa
- teacher:
- Alessandro Volta
- teacher:
- Giovanni Rasori
- mentor:
- Lazzaro Spallanzani
Giovanni Rasori (1766–1837) was an Italian academic, physician and translator.
Before attending university, Bassi took science lessons from the biologist, Lazzaro Spallanzani, who was one of his relatives.
References
Moody Medical Library
Agostino Bassi (1771-1856) studied medicine but because of constant eye trouble could not complete his studies.
The latent life of the seeds was somewhat under two years, but under certain circumstances, it was three.
Bassi presented his results at the University of Pavia in 1833, and in the following year repeated his experiments to the satisfaction of a nine-member committee of the faculties of philosophy and medicine. The hyphae, which penetrate the skin, bear the fine, white, dustlike spores which only then appear.
The first part of the Del mal del segno contained a theory proposing that some contagions of plants and animals had their source in the “germs” of plant or animal parasites, and that possibly certain diseases of man were caused by vegetable organisms.
Bassi’s conviction that parasites were actively involved in most contagions was also reflected in Jakob Henle’s classic paper of 1840, “Von den Miasmen und Contagien und von den miasmatisch-contagiosen Krankheiten.” Over the ensuing years, the clearer understanding of the nature of parasitism affected concepts of infectious disease and contributed to the undermining of the doctrine of spontaneous generation.
The idea that small animalculae may cause disease dates to Marcus Varro in 116 B.C. Fracastoro, in 1546, advanced the theory of invisible living semina which scattered disease.
Bassi studied the silkworm disease called Muscardine and found, using a microscope, that the white calcareous material forming on the silkworm was "organic, living and vegetable.
He reported his experiments and conclusions in Del mal del segno, calcinaccio o moscardino, malattia che afflige i bachi da seta e sul modo di liberarne le bigattaje anche le piu infeslate (1835-1836). The worms eventually died, and, upon maturation, the small plants produced new seeds. Then, suspecting excessive acidity to be the cause, he used phosphoric acid, but was unsuccessful in producing the disease.
It was Bassi who first demonstrated through experiments that a living fungus parasite was the cause of a disease in animals.