Giuseppe Moscati (25 July 1880 – 12 April 1927) was an Italian doctor, scientific researcher, and university professor noted both for his pioneering work in biochemistry and for his piety.

[4][5][6] His father, Francesco, was well known as a lawyer and magistrate in the area; his mother, Rosa De Luca dei Marchesi di Roseto, was of noble birth.

During this time his family would spend its summers in Avellino, and Giuseppe would see his father serve at the altar in the local chapel of the Poor Clares whenever they attended Mass.

[2] After finishing his elementary schooling in 1889, Moscati entered into the Liceo Vittorio Emanuele II in Naples, where among his professors was vulcanologist Giuseppe Mercalli.

Observing the care which Alberto received at home inspired in Giuseppe an interest in medicine,[16] which he pursued after graduating from the Liceo in 1897; it was in the same year that his father died, struck by a cerebral haemorrhage.

Also in 1911 Moscati was sent to Vienna by Gaetano Rummoit (then at the Higher Council of Public Education), to attend the International Physiology[8] Conference, taking the opportunity to also visit Budapest;[23] he also collaborated, for English and German, on the newspaper La Riforma Medica, founded by Rummo first as a daily, then as a weekly and then as a fortnightly.

[24] When cholera broke out in Naples in 1911, Moscati was charged by the civic government with performing public health inspections, and with researching both the origins of the disease and the best ways to eradicate it.

Also in 1911, Moscati became a member of the Royal Academy of Surgical Medicine (in Italian: Regia Accademia Medico-Chirurgica),[16] and received his doctorate in physiological chemistry.

[28] During World War I, Moscati tried to enlist in the armed forces, but was rejected; military authorities felt that he could better serve the country by treating the wounded.

[32] The board of directors of the Incurabili Hospital appointed him chief physician in 1919, and on 2 May 1921 Giuseppe Moscati sent an application to the Ministry of Public Education to be qualified as a free lecturer in General Medical Clinic; on 6 June 1922, the Commission appointed by the Ministry examined his qualifications and deemed him suitable to obtain such a free teaching qualification, unanimously exempting him from the discussion of the proposed works, the lecture and the practical test.

Moscati's body was initially buried in the cemetery of Poggio Reale, where they ere enclosed in a bronze urn, the work of sculptor Amedeo Garufi, which is why it is on this date that his liturgical memorial was placed.

[37] Moscati remained true to his faith his entire life, taking a vow of chastity and practicing charity in his daily work.

[2] He said about illness and pain: The sick are figures of Jesus Christ; immortal and divine souls who, according to the Gospel rule, must be loved as themselves.Pain is not to be treated as a tic or a muscular contraction, but as the cry of a soul to which another brother rushes with the fire of love and mercy.Moscati maintained that there should be no contradiction or antithesis between science and faith: both had to contribute to the good ofman.

Moscati's spiritual writings were approved by theologians on 11 May 1945, and his cause was formally opened by the Catholic Church on 6 March 1949, granting him the title of Servant of God.

The young man, from Somma Vesuviana, was in his twenties in 1978 and began to have ailments due to which, on 13 April of the same year, he was admitted to the Cardarelli hospital in Naples, where he was diagnosed with acute myeloblastic leukaemia.

Collective prayers were then addressed to Moscati, who was blessed at the time, and Montefusco was cured in June 1979, stopping all treatment and resuming work as a blacksmith.

The case was submitted to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints which, on 27 March 1987, promulgated the decree on the miracle, confirming "the relatively rapid, complete and lasting healing, which cannot be explained according to medical knowledge."

The young man's mother dreamed of a doctor wearing a white coat, whom she identified as Moscati when shown a photograph.

A silver reliquary holds a toe of St Joseph Moscati's right foot; it is displayed during the saint's solemn celebrations and is taken on 'peregrinatio' to churches that explicitly request it.

In 2007, Italy's Rai Uno presented the TV film St. Giuseppe Moscati: Doctor to the Poor directed by Giacomo Campiotti.