Ramazzini, Bernardino

RAMAZZINI, Bernardino (1633–1714), the "father of occupational hygiene," was born in northern Italy. In 1659, he graduated from the medical faculty of the University of Parma; in 1671, he was invited to be the first professor of medicine at the newly opened university in neighboring Modena. In 1700, he was invited to the University of Padua, the most famous university of that era, where he worked fruitfully until his death. He was a member of the Vienna, Berlin, and Rome academies. Medical teaching in the era of Ramazzini was concentrated in a few, sometimes only one or two, departments. Ramazzini's activities were therefore very versatile, and his numerous writings touch upon the most diverse questions. However, purely therapeutic works constitute a minority of his writings; Ramazzini was a distinctly pronounced proponent of prophylaxis. He points to prophylaxis as the most important task of a physician and calls hygiene "preventive medicine." His writings repeatedly state: "it is much better to prevent diseases than to cure them, just as it is better to foresee a storm in advance and save oneself from it than to be carried away by it." The collected works of Ramazzini went through about 10 editions between 1689 and 1828. In his works, Ramazzini wrote about the most diverse hygienic problems: the influence of air and water on health, epidemic diseases, medical meteorology, and occupational hygiene. Of his numerous works, the most important is the treatise on the diseases of artisans published in 1700 ("De morbis artificum diatriba," Modena). Individual observations on occupational hazards are found in medical literature even before Ramazzini; however, this work must be considered "the first and foundational work on occupational hygiene, as it was the first to collect data scattered in various works, supplemented by numerous original studies, and presented critically and uniformly" (Kelyn). Ramazzini was the first to clearly substantiate the role of prophylaxis in the fight against occupational diseases. He himself descended into mines and pits, observed the work of individual laborers at their machines, and encouraged his colleagues and students to do the same. To give an idea of the scope of this work, it suffices to say that its second edition provides occupational-pathological and occupational-hygienic characteristics of 52 major occupational groups, including miners, masons, potters, brewers, wet nurses, laundresses, farmers, fishermen, athletes, military personnel, printers, weavers, sedentary professions, etc. Marx refers to this work in Volume I of "Capital." The book went through a number of editions in various languages and can be read with interest even by a modern worker in occupational pathology and occupational hygiene. For a century and a half—until the mid-19th century—Ramazzini's work served as the leading text in the field of occupational hygiene.