Pietro Castelli

Who was Pietro Castelli?

Pietro Castelli was an Italian physician and botanist.

Born at Rome, he was graduated in 1617 and studied under the botanist Andrea Cesalpino. He was professor at Rome from 1597 until 1634, when he went to Messina. He laid out the botanical gardens at Messina in 1635, where he cultivated many exotic medicinal plants. The botanist Paolo Boccone studied under Castelli there.

Castelli was equally distinguished as a botanist, chemist, and surgeon. He maintained the necessity for all physicians of studying anatomy, and declared in 1648 that he had dissected more than one hundred corpses.

The Dane Thomas Bartolinus was led by Castelli's fame to visit him in Messina, in 1644, and speaks of his activity as a publicist. Castelli wrote no less than one hundred and fifty pamphlets. Among these there is one written in 1653 in answer to inquiries by Hieronymus Bardi of Genoa, wherein Castelli speaks of the cinchona plant and its curative properties in cases of malaria.

Paolo Boccone's pupil Charles Plumier later perished on his way to South America to learn more of the cinchona.