The Italian microscopist Marcello Malpighi (1628-1694) was the first to see the capillaries and was a founder of histology, embryology, plant anatomy, and comparative anatomy.

On March 10, 1628, Marcello Malpighi was born at Crevalcore near Bologna. He attended the University of Bologna, where he graduated in philosophy and in medicine in 1653. Malpighi became a lecturer in logic at Bologna in 1655 but left in 1656 to be professor of theoretical medicine at Pisa. There he met Giovanni Borelli, a mathematician who had recently turned his attention to the analysis of movement in animals.

Malpighi returned to Bologna in 1659, where he was made extraordinary lecturer in theoretical medicine. Through Borelli's influence, Malpighi was elected to the first chair in medicine at Messina in 1662, but in 1666 he returned to Bologna to become professor of medicine, and he remained there for the next 25 years.

By 1667 Malpighi's work had already aroused the interest of the...