LUCIANI, LUIGI. — Distinguished physiologist, b. at Ascoli Piceno on 23 November 1840, d. at Rome on 23 June 1919. Having completed (1860) his secondary studies with the Jesuits in his native city, he studied from November 1862 at the University of Bologna, where he graduated in 1868. Professor of general pathology at Parma in 1875, he became professor of physiology at Siena in 1880, at Florence in 1882, where he conducted a substantial part of his experimental research, and at Rome in 1893, having been called to succeed Moleschott.
In Italy he was the leader of a school comprising numerous able physiologists. He left some seventy memoirs on the diatolic activity of the heart (1871–74), fasting (1882–89), the localization of the cortical centers of the brain (1878–85), the functions of the cerebellum (1884–91), the physiology of the silkworm (1885–97), and other minor subjects. He compiled an important and voluminous treatise on Fisiologia dell'uomo (translated into Spanish, English, and German), to which he devoted all the energies of the last 25 years of his life.
His positivist, but antimaterialist and vitalist, thought emerges quite clearly in his speeches and works: «...il grande mistero della vita rimarrà sempre tale, anche quando i metodi avranno raggiunto la massima perfezione sperimentale immaginabile»; and furthermore: «...sempre più mi riaffermo nell'opinione che la posizione del positivismo, che traccia una linea netta di separazione tra la metafisica e la scienza, sia l'unica che convenga assumere al fisiologo» (Discorso per il XXV anniversario d'insegnamento, 3 May 1900). «La vita guardata dal di fuori è meccanicismo, guardata dal di dentro è anima o, come più timidamente si afferma, psiche» (Onoranze a L. L., in La tribuna, 23 June 1913).