• DOI:10.1007/s00415-012-6632-1
• Corpus ID: 13365830

Angelo Mosso (1846–1910)

@article{Sandrone2012AngeloM,
  title={Angelo Mosso (1846–1910)},
  author={Stefano Sandrone and Marco Bacigaluppi and Marco R. Galloni and Gianvito Martino},
  journal={Journal of Neurology},
  year={2012},
  volume={259},
  pages={2513-2514}
}

• Stefano Sandrone, M. Bacigaluppi, +1 author G. Martino
• Published 23 August 2012
• Medicine
• Journal of Neurology

Angelo Mosso was born on the May 30, 1846, in Turin, Italy. His modest family was from Chieri, a town near Turin. Mosso spent a large part of his childhood in Chieri and would for the rest of his life consider himself a citizen of this small town [1]. In school, he was not always a model pupil: on one occasion, for example, his mother had to intercede in order to have him re-admitted after he had been put to work in his father’s carpenter shop [1]. Though he spent his childhood and adolescence in poverty, his brilliant results in secondary school helped him to obtain grants and his diploma. Thanks to his family’s savings and his earnings as an assistant-teacher in Chieri, Mosso could pay the academic fees and study medicine. In 1870, he graduated from the University of Turin magna cum laude. As a young physician in Florence, he devoted himself to research in the physiology laboratory directed by Moritz Schiff (1823–1896), where he studied the mechanics of esophageal contraction. He then moved to Leipzig, to the laboratory of Carl Ludwig (1816–1895), and subsequently to Paris, where he worked with Claude Bernard (1813–1878) and Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904). During his European tour, he focused on graphical methods to investigate the dynamics of physiological phenomena. On his return to Turin, he applied the graphical method to the circulation in the human brain. Mosso’s most well-known contribution to neurology is his study of subjects with skull defects [2, 3]. The ‘Mosso method’ consisted of measuring changes in cerebral blood flow in these patients by recording brain pulsations—a phenomenon normally observed in the fontanelles of newborns—by means of the special plethysmograph he developed for this purpose. By converting brain pulsations into plethysmographic waves he could quantify the S. Sandrone M. Bacigaluppi G. Martino Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, 20132 Milan, Italy