Giovanni Battista Morgagni (25 February 1682 – 6 December 1771) was an Italian anatomist, generally regarded as the father of modern anatomical pathology, who taught thousands of medical students from many countries during his 56 years as Professor of Anatomy at the University of Padua.

He acted as prosector to Antonio Maria Valsalva (one of the distinguished pupils of Malpighi), who held the office of demonstrator anatomicus in the Bologna school, and whom he assisted more particularly in preparing his celebrated work on the Anatomy and Diseases of the Ear, published in 1704.

At this period he enjoyed a high repute in Bologna; he was made president of the Academia Enquietorum when in his twenty-second year, and he is said to have signalized his tenure of the presidential chair by discouraging abstract speculations, and by setting the fashion towards exact anatomical observation and reasoning.

[3] He published the substance of his communications to the academy in 1706 under the title of Adversaria anatomica, the first of a series by which he became favorably known throughout Europe as an accurate anatomist; the book included Observations of the Larynx, the Lachrymal Apparatus, and the Pelvic Organs in the Female.

After a time he gave up his post at Bologna, and occupied himself for the next two or three years at Padua, where he had a friend in Domenico Guglielmini (1655–1710), professor of medicine, but better-known as a writer on physics and mathematics, whose works he afterwards edited (1719) with a biography.

He was of tall and dignified figure, with blonde hair and lilac eyes, and with a frank and happy expression; his manners were polished, and he was noted for the elegance of his Latin style.

He lived in harmony with his colleagues, who are said not even to have envied him his unprecedentedly large stipend; his house and lecture-theatre were frequented tanquam officina sapientiae by students of all ages, attracted from all parts of Europe; he enjoyed the friendship and favor of distinguished Venetian senators and of cardinals; and successive popes conferred honours upon him.

[3] In his earlier years at Padua, Morgagni brought out five more series of the Adversaria anatomica (1717–1719); these his strictly medical publications were few and casual (on gallstones, varices of the Venae cavae, cases of stone, and several memoranda on medico-legal points, drawn up at the request of the curia).

[3] Francis Glisson indeed (1597–1677) shows in a passage quoted by Bonet in the preface to the Sepulchretum, that he was familiar with the idea, at least, of systematically comparing the state of the organs in a series of bodies, and of noting those conditions which invariably accompanied a given set of symptoms.

Those seventy letters constitute the De sedibus et causis morborum, which was given to the world as a systematic treatise in 2 vols., folio (Venice, 1761), twenty years after the task of epistolary instruction was begun.

Some of these are given at great length, and with a precision of statement and exhaustiveness of detail hardly surpassed in the so-called protocols of the German pathological institutes of the present time; others, again, are fragments brought in to elucidate some question that had arisen.

[9] Although Morgagni was the first to understand and to demonstrate the absolute necessity of basing diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment on an exact and comprehensive knowledge of anatomical conditions, he made no attempt (like that of the Vienna school sixty years later) to exalt pathological anatomy into a science disconnected from clinical medicine and remote from practical experience with the scalpel.