LUCIANI, LUIGI. - Distinguished physiologist, b. at Ascoli Piceno on 23 Nov. 1840, d. at Rome on 23 June 1919. Having completed (1860) his secondary studies with the Jesuits in his native city, he studied from Nov. 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 carried out a good part of his experimental research, and at Rome in 1893, called to succeed Moleschott.
He was the head of a school in Italy, of a numerous host of able physiologists. He left some seventy papers on the diastolic activity of the heart (1871-74), on fasting (1882-89), on the localizations of the cortical centers of the brain (1878-85), on the functions of the cerebellum (1884-91), on the physiology of the silkworm (1885-97) and on other minor subjects. He compiled a valuable and voluminous treatise on Human Physiology (translated into Spanish, English and German), to which he devoted all the energies of the last 25 years of his life.
His positivist thought, but anti-materialist and vitalist, emerges quite clearly in his speeches and in his works: "...the great mystery of life will always remain such, even when methods will have reached the maximum imaginable experimental perfection"; and furthermore: "...more and more I reaffirm myself in the opinion that the position of positivism, which draws a clear line of separation between metaphysics and science, is the only one that the physiologist ought to assume" (Discorso per il XXV anniversario d'insegnamento, 3 May 1900). "Life looked at from the outside is mechanism, looked at from within it is soul or, as more timidly it is affirmed, psyche" (Onoranze a L. L., in La tribuna, 23 June 1913).
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