Davide Giordano, surgeon and mayor / [Max Thorek].

  • Thorek, Max, 1880-1960.
Date:
[1924]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Davide Giordano, surgeon and mayor / [Max Thorek]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    xeady as Venice to appreciate the potential value of medical men in important executive posts? No class of citizens is more finely trained or more highly prepared to serve the people m public activities. Professor Giordano, at least, is a shining light to point the way in this direction, and to demonstrate the wisdom of the city which has honored itself in selecting him for the position of leadership. His brilliant career is an encouragement and an in¬ centive to superior service to every member of the profession which has the privilege of numbering him among its leadeis. Professor Giordano’s professional career has been a long and interesting one. During his medical education in the University of Turin, he engaged in special training and work in the various branches of surgery in the local hospitals, having as his instruc¬ tors and directors such eminent surgeons of the period as Novaro, Mo and Margary. In the year 1886-87 he was the chief student interne in the surgical department of the Greater Hospital of San Giovanni Battista and of the City of Turin, of which the dis¬ tinguished surgeon Caponotto was the director. He received special laboratory training under Professor Perroncito m the Laboratory of Pathologic Anatomy. Here he became familiar with the use of the microscope, and had his interest in bacterio¬ logical studies thoroughly awakened. His earliest publications date to these student days, and show that his keen intellect was already becoming concentrated on certain important problems of the profession. In 1884, appeared the first of these, the subject being “ a Note on Septicemia and on Some Antiseptics. It is an admirable summary of the knowledge of his time on the sub¬ ject. In the same year, he published a second document entitled “A Contribution to the Aetiology of Tetanus.” In “A catalogue of the Titles of Dr. Davide Giordano,” which was printed in 1900, the following comment on this brochure is found. “In this work is seen the first experimental demonstration of the identity of the ‘Erdtetanus’ with the ‘Wundstarrkrampf’; in other words, of the peculiarity of the tetanic agent found in given regions and e- veloping in certain classes of wounds. It is here shown how the bacillus of tetanus develops preferably in the anfractuous recesses of the wounds while not easily to be found in the more superficial regions. . . . it * demonstrated, however, that the general infection is not necessanly due to the diffusion of the bacillus through the organism but simply to he nassaee in a circuit of the poison prepared by the bacillus in the infect wound. (This theory, afterwards confirmed by other authors, is given precisely by Senn as a conclusion of the studies of Giordano, w ic has recapitulated in his ‘Bacteriologie Chirurgicale, Paris, 1890, p. 108).