Lancisi, Giovanni Maria (1654–1720)

Italian physician. The leading clinician of his day, he served as personal doctor to several popes from 1688 onwards, and was eminent in the fields of anatomy, physiology, and pathology. He is renowned for being the first to identify the breeding ground of malaria as mosquito-infested swamps, in his 1717 work De Naxiis Paludum Effluviis/On the Noxious Effluvia of Marshes. He also wrote extensively on heart disease; his posthumous De Motu Cordis et Aneurysmatibus, 1728, was a landmark treatment of the subject.

Lancisi was born in Rome into a wealthy family, and educated there at the Collegio Romano and the University of Rome, graduating in medicine at the age of 18. In 1688 he was appointed physician to Pope Innocent XI and subsequently to Clement XI and Innocent XII. Lancisi was also responsible for publishing, in 1714, the lost anatomical plates of Bartolomeo Eustachio in 1552, which had remained hidden in the Vatican Library.