[The importance to nineteenth century hospital medicine of an anatomic specimen of severely traumatized vertebrae. Scientific history at the Museum of Pathologic Anatomy in the Hospital of Trieste].

The museum of pathological anatomy, established in Trieste in 1847, a few years after the opening of the general hospital, keeps a sole pathological finding of "lethal vertebral trauma" dated 1903 and prepared by one of the fathers of Trieste's pathological anatomy, Enrico Ferrari (1874-1970). This museum object recalls a clinical sensitivity in traumatology going back to Simone Pertot (1845-1907), the first pathologist of Trieste, but also the clinical observations of one of Billroth's disciples, the triestine Arthur Menzel (1844-1878), head of the i.v. Surgery Division. Giving this museum object its historical scientific genesis means answering the following questions: Why does the pathologist provide clinical medicine with such a preparation? In other words, what pragmatic meaning does it have? What is its function? In the practical clinical activity of the above-mentioned hospital's medicine, the state of disease finds its meaning in concepts like diagnosis and prognosis and, therefore, the same epicritic function of the pathologic sample representing vertebral trauma. Its "clinical" meaning is in the pathologist's and clinician's ability at elaborating a pathognomonic sign which is able to put forth, at the patient's bedside, the physiopathological laws determining the seriousness of the trauma taking place in the organism.