Giovanni Alfonso Borelli ------------------------
The son of a Spanish soldier, Giovanni Alfonso Borelli was born in Naples in 1609 but spent his life between Rome, Pisa and Messina, where he died on the last day of 1679. He studied mathematics in the papal city, but it was in Sicily that he went on to teach it. His meeting in 1640 in Florence with a very elderly Galileo left a deep mark on him and encouraged him in his scientific approach.
Deeply struck by an epidemic of malignant fever in Sicily, he wrote an analysis of it that stands as his first work in medicine. He then turned his attention to the phenomenon of digestion, which he first studied in poultry. He worked out how the gizzard functions and concluded that the process of digestion is mechanical.
In 1656 Borelli obtained a chair of mathematics at Pisa. The greatest anatomists of the age had studied at this famous university, Andreas Vesalius among them. Borelli played a key role in the founding of the Accademia del cimento, established in 1657 by students of Galileo. There, rational scientific research methods based on experiment and the invention of instruments were promoted, and in particular the use of mathematics in the service of "the art of healing".