Complete Record - Heirs of Hippocrates No. 996

FELICE FONTANA (1730-1805) De irritabilitatis legibus. Johannis Riccomini 1767 130 pp. (misnumbered 144). 17.2 cm.

Fontana studied the natural sciences and literature at Verona, Parma, Padua, and Bologna. He tutored for a time in Rome and, in 1765, was appointed to the chair of philosophy at the University of Pisa. He was later called by the Grand Duke of Tuscany to the directorship of the Museum of Physics and Natural History at Florence. It was there that he spent the remaining thirty years of his life, traveling from time to time to collect specimens for the collection. An impressive and renowned collection, it contains a large number of wax figures created by Fontana for teaching anatomy. Although Fontana was also a cleric, he never engaged in religious activities but devoted himself chiefly to scientific pursuits. A man of wide interests, he made numerous significant contributions to anatomy, physiology, chemistry, pathology, botany, and toxicology. In this work, Fontana presents the observations and experiments that led to the formulation of his five laws of muscular irritability. Introduced by Glisson in 1677, the term irritability was later developed into a doctrine by Haller. Haller believed that contractility and irritability were identical. Fontana, on the other hand, referred to contraction as Hallerian irritability and explained the cessation of a contraction as exhaustion of this irritability. Relaxation, he observed, resulted from the elasticity of the contracted muscle.

Gift of John Martin, M.D.