SACCO, LUIGI

(b. Varese, Lombardy, Italy, 9 March 1769; d. Milan, Italy, 26 December 1836)

medicine.

Sacco obtained his degree in medicine and surgery in 1792 at the University of Pavia, where he was a pupil of Johann Peter Frank, the founder of social medicine. Sacco subsequently established a medical practice in Milan, where he became a friend of the physician Pietro Moscati. In 1778 Moscati had given the first public demonstrations in Milan of smallpox inoculation. He later became one of the foremost political personalities in Jacobinic and Napoleonic Milan.

Following Jenner’s publication (1798) of his work on cowpox inoculation, Sacco had the good fortune, in September 1800, to find a spontaneous cowpox stock in the neighborhood of Varese. He used this stock to inoculete first himself and then a group of children on the farm where he was staying. From these and numerous other inoculations, he recognized the advantages of inoculating cowpox rather than human smallpox. He decided to publicize this new prophylactic practice, and he realized the importance of giving his work a social and political flavor in accordance with the new times.

Sacco persuaded the government of the Cisalpine Republic to set up a general vaccination department, which was entrusted to him. This department allowed Sacco to extend his work to many other regions of Italy besides Lombardy. By 1809 he had succeeded in reaching “a million and a half vaccinated people, five hundred thousand of whom I have had the satisfaction of vaccinating myself.” In the same year he left his post as general director of vassination and gave to the press his Trattato di vaccinzione. Shortly afterward this treatise was translated into French and German, thus presenting the important conclusions that he had been able to draw from his ample statistics. Sacco became a major advocate of cowpox vaccination, and his stock from Lombardy was sent to Jean de Carro in Vienna. The latter sent it in 1802 to Baghdad, and it was with this stock that the first vaccinations were given in the East Indies.

Sacco subscribed to the theory of contagium vivum, but he believed that the leukocytes in pus were the animalcula that caused disease and transmitted it from one individual to another by contagion. From 1803 he was chief physician at the Ospedale Maggiore in Milan and for several years served as director.

I. Original Works. Sacco’s major works are Osservaioni pratiche sull’uso del vajuolo vaccino, come preservativo del vajuolo umano (Milan, 1801); Omelia soprail Vangelo della XIII. Domenica dopo la Pentecoste, in cui si parla dell’utile scoperta dell’innesto del vajuolo vaccino recitata dal Vescovo di Goldstat, dalla Tedesca nell’Italiana lingua transportata (Brescia, 1802; Parma, 1805; Pistoia, 1805); Memoria sul vaccino unico mezzo per estirpare radicalmente il vajuolo umano diretta ai Governi che amano la prosperitá delle loro nazioni (Milan, 1803): and Trattato di vaccinazione con osservazioni sul giavardo e sul vajuolo pecorino (Milan, 1809), with French and German trans. as Traité de vaccination..., Joseph Daquin, trans. (Chambéry, 1811), and Neue Entdeckungen üiber die Kuhpocken..., Wilhelm Sprengel, trans. (Leipzig, 1812), respectively.

II. Secondary Literature. On Sacco and his work. see Luigi Belloni, “L” innesto del vaccino,” in Storia di Milano, XVI (1962), 960–971, with full bibliography: “Una ricerca del contagio vivo agli alboridell” Ottocento,” in Gesnerus, 8 (1951), 15–31; and “Per la storia dell’innesto del vaiuolo a Milano,” in Physis, 2 (Florence, 1960), 213–222.

Luigi Belloni