Paduan medical museology has very ancient roots. Already at the Botanical Garden a “museum” containing “all the wonders of Nature” was planned at the end of the 16th century. Antonio Vallisneri (1661-1730), professor of Medicine in Padua from 1700, collected a collection of natural history, ethnographic, anatomical and anatomopathological preparations which, upon his death, was donated to the University and formed the original nucleus from which several 19th-century university museums derived.
Pathology, before Giovanni Battista Morgagni (1682-1771), was based on the idea that the functioning of the human body was regulated by four humors – blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile – on which all physiological and pathological processes depended. Diseases were a consequence of “humoral” imbalance. With anatomical dissection, organic alterations of the body began to be observed casually. Morgagni for the first time associated the patient’s symptoms in life with the lesions of organs observable in the cadaver. By systematically studying the anatomical causes of diseases he came to formulate a first classification of pathologies. Morgagni was also the first in Padua to try to create a Pathological Museum adjacent to the Anatomical Theater of Palazzo Bo in 1756, but he did not manage to complete it.
In 1808 Francesco Luigi Fanzago (1764-1836), professor of Pathology and Legal Medicine, decided to establish a “pathological cabinet” at his home, to give “new lights to the cultivators of medicine”, later transferred to Palazzo del Bo in 1822. Thanks to Francesco Cortese (1802-1883), professor of Anatomy, the pathological cabinet not only increased its possessions with preparations executed by the doctor himself, but also saw its premises improved and expanded, which were located near the ancient sixteenth-century anatomical theater.
However, it was necessary to wait for the arrival of Lodovico Brunetti (1813-1899) in Padua for the transition from cabinet to museum to take place. Brunetti, already an assistant in Vienna to the famous pathologist Karl von Rokitansky (1804-1878), was called to Padua in 1855 to hold the first chair of Pathological Anatomy and immediately set about creating a collection of pathological pieces to be preserved in a museum for educational purposes. At the beginning of the 1860s Brunetti founded the Museum of Pathological Anatomy, which continued to be enriched with preparations created by Brunetti himself using a new method called tannization. This system consisted of four phases: blood removal and degreasing of the organ through perfusion in water, tannization through injection of tannic acid through blood vessels, and drying with compressed hot air.
Over the years the museum continued to grow, in particular thanks to Brunetti’s successors, namely Augusto Bonome (1857-1922) and Giovanni Cagnetto (1874-1943): it is to these three names that most of the collection is owed. The current location of the museum took shape from the 1920s, when the former convent of San Mattia where Brunetti had worked was demolished and the building that is still today the headquarters of both the museum and pathological anatomy as research, diagnostic and teaching activities was built. Starting from the approval of the consolidated text of laws on higher education (royal decree of August 31, 1933, n. 1592), up to the most recent mortuary police regulations (D.P.R. September 10, 1990, n. 285), severe limitations have been defined in the removal of anatomical parts from cadavers, which have in themselves significantly reduced the possibility of preserving preparations in anatomical museums.
Today the Museum of Human Anatomy “G. B. Morgagni” still preserves the ancient anatomical and pathological preparations, divided into two sections: Pathological Anatomy, renovated in 2018 and open to the public, and Normal Anatomy, in the study and preparation phase for future reopening to the public.