Santorio Santorio

Who was Santorio Santorio?

Santorio Santorio, also called Sanctorio Sanctorio, Santorio Santorii, Sanctorius of Padua, and various combinations of these names, was an Italian physiologist, physician, and professor. He introduced the quantitative approach into medicine and, as his pupil, introduced the mechanistic principles of Galileo Galilei to medicine. His work De medicina statica influenced generations of physicians.

Santorio was born in Capodistria, then part of the Republic of Venice. From 1611 to 1624 he was a professor at Padua where he performed experiments in temperature, respiration and weight. Sanctorius studied what he termed insensible perspiration and originated the study of metabolism.

For a period of thirty years Santorio weighed himself, everything he ate and drank, as well as his urine and feces. He compared the weight of what he had eaten to that of his waste products, the latter being considerably smaller because for every eight pounds of food he ate, he excreted only 3 pounds of waste. This important experiment is the origin of the significance of weight measurement in medicine. He produced his theory of insensible perspiration as an attempt to account for this difference.