History of the ‘Accademia Medica Pistoiese Filippo Pacini’ : in the Legacy of the Famous Scientist toward a Scientific Institution of Our Time

With this communication Authors want to highlight some key-spots of the history of the scientific institution ‘Accademia Medica Pistoiese Filippo Pacini’ named after the famous scientist from Pistoia who was born and performed his early studies in Pistoia at the Medical School of the Hospital of Pistoia, suppressed by a Grand Duke’s edict in 1844, which instituted only three Medical Schools In Tuscany, in Florence, Siena and Pisa. The Accademia was founded about half a century after the death of Filippo Pacini, and more exactly in the year when Pistoia became a province in 1928. Some local physicians from the Hospital ‘del Ceppo’ established this Institution with two main aims, first to improve the professional medical education of the new province’s physicians and second to increase and sponsor medical research in Pistoia. Between the two world wars, as well as in the period after the WW-II, the history of Accademia Medica coincided with the history of the Hospital ‘Il Ceppo’ literally ‘The Stem’ which was founded as early as in 1277 and remained, over all these centuries, the Town Hospital of Pistoia. Some physicians such as Collatino Cantieri (Internist) Faustino Vannucci (Surgeon) and finally Mario Romagnoli (Radiologist), were the main and more active animators and leaders of the ‘Accademia’s activities and made alive the old memory of the historical Medical School of Pistoia. Only recently the Accademia has been completely newly founded again, adding to the old and still valid initial aims, new features such as the possibility of membership to all professionals involved in health assistance and research, even If not strictly graduated as medical doctors. This novel challenge is the path which will be taken by this renewed Accademia of today, and, we hope, of future years, in the legacy of the intelligence and strive for research of Filippo Pacini, who just in Pistoia, near the actual site of Accademia, as a young medical student, discovered the ‘Corpuscoli’.