The Globetrotter of Medicine. The life and times of Aldo Castellani (1874-1971)

Aldo Castellani (1874-1971), for more than 100 years, has been at the centre of a fiery debate over the discovery of the etiological agent of sleeping sickness. At the same time, almost everyone has forgotten that it was Castellani who introduced into public healthcare one of its most powerful weapons: combined and polyvalent vaccines. He is the scientist who has received the most nominations for the Nobel Prize in Medicine (sixty one!) without ever being awarded it. It has been written of him that in London's Harley Street, on a given occasion, one "could count three European queens in his consulting room at one and the same time". After the Second Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935-36, the US magazine Time wrote that Castellani, with his healthcare choices regarding the Italian troops, had been indeed the man who won that war. After taking care of the health of Benito Mussolini and many hierarchs of the Italian fascist regime for years, he switched to the Resistance in the later stages of World War II and risked much to help opponents of that regime and its Nazi allies. He was then chosen by the last king and queen of Italy as their personal physician and followed them into their Portuguese exile. There, in his seventies and eighties, he still had time to become one of the most admired figures in Portuguese tropical medicine and to conceive and found the world's most important international dermatology society. The long and complicated earthly life of Aldo Castellani offers interesting insights into issues that are as inexhaustible as they are inescapable in the current historiographical debate. He lived in the most fruitful age and context for making important contributions to science. His life story captures the difficult balance of those times between a private and a professional life, as well as between patriotism and internationalism; it reveals the lights and shadows of tropical medicine in relation to colonialism and post-colonialism; the intricate relationships between war and medicine, between politics and medicine... All this, and much more, is well present in Castellani's life. And with the biographer refraining, on principle, from making judgments about the events he rediscovers and recounts, the resulting biography can offer the reader much food for thought on a wide range of very controversial topics.