When was santorio santorio born

To study insensible perspiration, he designed a movable platform attached to a steelyard scale that allowed for the quantification of changes in body weight of subjects who partook in their daily activities on the platform. After years of self-experimentation, he applied his device to the study of patients. Unfortunately, his records are lost. What survives is a summary of his observations in a series of aphorisms published under the title of Ars de statica medicina, in ; 3 years after he was appointed Ordinary Professor of Theoretical Medicine in Padua.

He was educated in Justinopolis and then Venice, and then entered the University of Padua, where he received his M. From to Santorio spent time in Croatia as the personal physician of a local nobleman. In he set up a medical practice in Venice. Here he became part of the circle of learned men that included Galileo. In he was appointed to the chair of theoretical medicine at the University of Padua, and he taught there until his retirement in He spent the remainder of his life in Venice.

Although in treating his patients Santorio did not stray far from Hippocratic and Galenic practice based on the notion of a balance of the fluids, or "humors" , in his theory and method of investigation he differed from the classical authors a great deal. Rather than relying on authority in the first instance, as so many of his colleagues still did, Santorio argued that one should first rely on sense experience, then on reasoning, and only lastly on authority.

His most famous experiments involve the study of bodily weight. His use of medical instruments and quantitative measurements helped lay the foundations of modern medicine but also made him the founding father of metabolic studies and the first documented weight-watcher in the history of science. References Eknoyan, G. Santorio Sanctorius — Founding father of metabolic balance studies.

American Journal of Nephrology 19, Mulcahy, R. Medical Technology: Inventing the Instruments. The Oliver Press; University of Virginia. Vaulted Treasures. Accessed Dacome, L. Balancing acts: picturing perspiration in the long eighteenth century. Regis, E.