Famous Physicians from Italy

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Updated October 14, 2018113 items

List of notable or famous physicians from Italy, with bios and photos, including the top physicians born in Italy and even some popular physicians who immigrated to Italy. If you're trying to find out the names of famous Italian physicians then this list is the perfect resource for you. These physicians are among the most prominent in their field, and information about each well-known physician from Italy is included when available.

People here include everything from Philip Mazzei to Francis de Sales.

This historic physicians from Italy list can help answer the questions "Who are some Italian physicians of note?" and "Who are the most famous physicians from Italy?" These prominent physicians of Italy may or may not be currently alive, but what they all have in common is that they're all respected Italian physicians.

Use this list of renowned Italian physicians to discover some new physicians that you aren't familiar with. Don't forget to share this list by clicking one of the social media icons at the top or bottom of the page. {#nodes}
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  • Abella

    Abella

    Abella, often known as Abella of Salerno or Abella of Castellomata, was a physician in the mid fourteenth century. Abella studied and taught at the Salerno School of Medicine. Abella is believed to have been born around 1380, but the exact time of her birth and death is unclear. Abella lectured on standard medical practices, bile, and womenโ€™s health and nature at the medical school in Salerno. Abella, along with Rebecca de Guarna, specialized in the area of embryology. She published two treatises: De atrabile (On Black Bile) and De natura seminis humani (on the Nature of the Seminal Fluid), neither of which survive today. In Salvatore De Renzi's nineteenth-century study of the Salerno School of Medicine, Abella is one of four women (along with Rebecca de Guarna, Mercuriade, and Constance Calenda) mentioned who were known to practice medicine, lecture on medicine, and wrote treatises. These attributes placed Abella into a group of women known as the Mulieres Salernitanae, or women of Salerno.
  • Abraham de Balmes

    Abraham de Balmes

    Abraham de Balmes ben Meir (born at Lecce, in the kingdom of Naples; died at Venice, 1523) was an Italian Jewish physician and translator of the early 16th century. A short time before his death he was physician in ordinary to the cardinal Dominico Grimani at Padua. See Steinschneider, "Hebr. Bibl." xxi. 7 and 67; "Hebr. Uebers." p. 62; Perles, "Beitrรคge," pp. 193, 197, etc. Through his Latin translations of many Hebrew works on philosophy and astronomy he attained a great reputation in the Christian world. He dedicated to Cardinal Grimani two of these translations: (1) of an astronomical work in Arabic by Ibn al-Heitham (died 1038), which had been translated into Hebrew by Jacob ben Machir, in 1372, under the title "Liber de Mundo"; (2) of the "Farewell Letter" of the Arabic philosopher Ibn Bajjah (Avempace), which he translated from the Hebrew under the title "Epistolรฆ Expeditionis" (MS. Vat. No. 3897. The dedication is published in "Revue des ร‰tudes Juives," v. 145). In Padua Abraham delivered philosophical addresses to Christian audiences. He also compiled a book on Hebrew grammar, in which he attempted to treat philosophically the construction of the Hebrew language and to refute the opinions of the eminent grammarian David Kimhi. In this work Abraham was the first to treat the syntax (which he called in Hebrew harkabah) as a special part of the grammar. The book was published, with a Latin translation and a supplementary treatise on the Hebrew accents, under the title "Miแธณneh Abram," by Maestro (Calo) แธฒalonymos ben David, a well-known translator. Grรคtz ("Gesch. der Juden," ix. 215) suggests, without evidence, that the printer Daniel Bomberg (who is supposed to have learned Hebrew from Balmes) translated this grammar. At his death, honors were paid to his memory by his Christian pupils.
  • Aldo Castellani

    Aldo Castellani

    Dec. at 94 (1877-1971)
    • Birthplace: Florence, Italy
    Aldo Castellani (8 September 1874 โ€“ 3 October 1971) was an Italian pathologist and bacteriologist.
  • Alessandro Achillini

    Alessandro Achillini

    Dec. at 48 (1463-1512)
    • Birthplace: Bologna, Italy
    Alessandro Achillini (Latin Alexander Achillinus; 20 or 29 October 1463 (or possibly 1461) โ€“ 2 August 1512) was an Italian philosopher and physician.
  • Alexius Pedemontanus

    Alexius Pedemontanus

    Alessio Piemontese, also known under his Latinized name of Alexius Pedemontanus, was the pseudonym of a 16th-century Italian physician, alchemist, and author of the immensely popular book, The Secrets of Alexis of Piedmont. His book was published in more than a hundred editions and was still being reprinted in the 1790s. The work was translated into Latin, German, English, Spanish, French, and Polish. The work unleashed a torrent of 'books of secrets' that continued to be published down through the eighteenth century.Piemontese was the prototypical 'professor of secrets'. His description of his hunt for secrets in the preface to the Secreti helped to give rise to a legend of the wandering empiric who dedicated his life to the search for natural and technological secrets. The book contributed to the emergence of the concept of science as a hunt for the secrets of nature, which pervaded experimental science during the period of the Scientific Revolution.It is generally assumed that Alessio Piemontese was a pseudonym of Girolamo Ruscelli (Viterbo 1500 โ€” Venice 1566), humanist and cartographer. In a later work, Ruscelli reported that the Secreti contained the experimental results of an 'Academy of Secrets' that he and a group of humanists and noblemen founded in Naples in the 1540s. Ruscelli's academy is the first recorded example of an experimental scientific society. The academy was later imitated by Giambattista Della Porta, who founded an โ€˜Accademia dei Secretiโ€™ in Naples in the 1560s.
  • Alfanus I

    Alfanus I

    Saint Alfanus I or Alfano I (died 1085) was the Archbishop of Salerno from 1058 to his death. He was famed as a translator, writer, theologian, and medical doctor in the eleventh century. He was a physician before he became archbishop, one of the earliest great doctors of the Schola Medica Salernitana. As a translator, Alfanus was well-versed in both Latin and Arabic and he translated many manuscripts from the latter into the former. His interest in medicine and the translation of Arabic treatises on the subject led him to invite Constantine the African from Carthage (in what is now Tunisia) to Salerno to assist him. Constantine brought with him a library of Arabic medical texts which he commenced to translate into Latin. In 1076, Robert Guiscard laid the foundations for the new Salerno Cathedral. In Alfanus' later days as archbishop, he sheltered the exiled reformer, Pope Gregory VII, who died in Salerno.