LUIGI LUCIANI. — Eminent physiologist, born in Ascoli Piceno on 23 Nov. 1840, died in Rome on 23 June 1919. After completing his secondary studies (1860) with the Jesuits in his native city, he studied from November 1862 at the University of Bologna, where he graduated in 1868. In 1875 he became professor of general pathology at Parma, then professor of physiology at Siena in 1880, at Florence in 1882—where he carried out much of his experimental research—and at Rome in 1893, succeeding Moleschott.
He was the founder of a school in Italy that produced many distinguished physiologists. He left about seventy papers on the diastolic activity of the heart (1871–74), on fasting (1882–89), on the localization of cortical brain centres (1878–85), on brain functions (1884–91), on the physiology of silk spinning (1885–97), and on other minor topics. He also composed a valuable and voluminous treatise on Human Physiology (translated into Spanish, English, and German), to which he devoted all his energies during the last twenty-five years of his life.
His positivist but antimaterialist and vitalist outlook is clearly evident in his speeches and writings: “…the great mystery of life will always remain such, even when methods have attained the highest imaginable degree of experimental perfection”; and further: “…I am increasingly confirmed in the view that the positivist position, which draws a clear line of demarcation between metaphysics and science, is the only one suitable for the physiologist” (Discourse on the 25th anniversary of his teaching, 3 May 1900). “Life viewed from without is mechanical; viewed from within it is soul or, more cautiously stated, psyche” (Onoranze a L. L., in La tribuna, 23 June 1913).