Ettore Marchiafava

Who was Ettore Marchiafava?

Ettore Marchiafava was an Italian physician and zoologist who worked on malaria. He was also a senator.

Ettore Marchiafava was the personal doctor of three popes and the Royal House of Savoy, a senator, and professor of Pathological Anatomy at the Sapienza University of Rome. 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. He wrote Sulle febbri malariche estivo-autunnali and La infezione malarica. 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, the agent of bacterial meningitis, although this was not proven until 1887 when Anton Weichselbaum isolated the bacterium from six cases of meningitis and established the isolates as a distinct species. 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 also worked on Nephropathy and described streptococcal glomerulonephritis. In 1931, it described Paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria in depth, and also a rare form of this disease Strübing-Marchiafava-Micheli Syndrome.