CECCARELLI, ALESSANDRO. - Pontifical archiater and chief surgeon of the papal army, b. at Castiglione in Teverina, near Orvieto, on 11 March 1830, d. in Rome on 19 Feb. 1893. After his studies at the Sapienza, he distinguished himself greatly in the lazaretto of S. Spirito during the cholera epidemic of 1854, until, struck in his turn, he ran serious danger of death and bore the consequences for his whole life.
Chief surgeon of the pontifical militias (1860), he supported, together with his colleague C. Mazzoni, the meritorious Dr. F. Palasciano in the work of securing recognition of the neutrality of the wounded in war. This was the basis of the Geneva Convention, to which the pontifical Government adhered on 9 May 1868, and which marked the starting point of the international Red Cross. After 1870 he retired to private life and became surgeon to Pius IX.
Surgeon of the Conclave and archiater of Leo XIII, he was a member of the directing Council of the Catholic secondary schools and a lecturer in pharmacology and surgery at the free pontifical University of Palazzo Altemps, founded after 1870 following the sectarian stance taken toward Doellinger by several professors of the Sapienza. Surgeon in place of Panunzi at the Fatebenefratelli hospital and chief surgeon of the association of the Italian Knights of Malta for the assistance of the wounded in war, he organized the first dressing stations and the first hospital trains; director of the health services of the Sacred Apostolic Palaces, he supervised the arrangement of the lazaretto of S. Marta, desired by Leo XIII in view of a cholera epidemic in 1884, and the erection of the civil hospital of Carpineto. A member of the administrative Council of the Catholic artistic-workers' Bank, from 1889 he directed the dispensary of consultation and treatment for the poor, the first of its kind since Pius IX, established at the Zoccolette; between 1869 and 1872, seconding the impetus of the dukes Salviati, he created the children's hospital of the Bambin Gesù, now pontifical, where he then for a long time, and without payment, lavished his beneficent professional labors. Several times sent by the Catholic electors of Rome to the municipal Council, and a deputy to the Congregation of Charity, he was the promoter of a similar hospital at Anzio for rachitic and scrofulous children, and from Leo XIII he obtained that the monastery of S. Cosimato in Trastevere be used as a shelter for abandoned old people. At his death, he bequeathed to the hospital of Orvieto his valuable scientific library together with his entire and rich surgical equipment.
Bibliography3 works
Paolo Dalla Torre