“Italic scurvy”, “pellarina”, “pellagra”: medical reactions to a new disease in Italy, 1770-1830

...Francesco Fanzago — the name of our young doctor — had just returned from two years’ training at the hospital in Pavia, at what was Lombardy’s university. Here, he had studied under Johann Peter Frank, the noted German scholar of hygiene and legal medicine and proponent of public health reforms. Fanzago (1764 - 1836) returned to his native Veneto, to Padua where he had taken his degree, full of curiosity and crusading zeal, which he applied to pellagra. His committed and methodical examination of hospital cases, and his undogmatic presentation of his findings, was also consistent with the approach outlined by the Scottish physician John Gregory, whose work on medical ethics Fanzago had just translated into Italian. From the start, Fanzago’s concerns were as much social as nosological, and he would spend the next twenty - five years of his life studying and writing about the disease. More than anyone else in the Veneto, he was the physician who put his name to pellagra; not that there were not other claimants to the title, as we shall see.