Tommaso Campailla

Tommaso Campailla (7 April 1668 – 7 February 1740) was an Italian philosopher, physician, politician and poet.

Life

Tommaso Campailla was born in Modica, near Syracuse, in 1668. His family belonged to the local nobility.Template:Sfn At sixteen he was sent to Catania to study law. He employed his leisure hours in the study of literature, philosophy, science, astronomy, and physics.Template:Sfn He studied both neo-Scholastic and Cartesian philosophy, and adopted a mechanical view of the universe.

After the death of his father, Campailla devoted himself to the natural sciences, and to medicine. He practised medicine successfully and taught local physicians.Template:Sfn Following a syphilis epidemic that slaughtered the city in the early 18th century, Campailla devoted himself to a systematic search for chemical substances which would cure the infectious disease. In 1698 he introduced fumigation stoves known as botti (barrels), within which patients were suffumigated with cinnabar and incense which were inhaled and absorbed by the sick. In addition to syphilis they were also used to cure tuberculosis. Through this practice, but also thanks to the success of some works on fevers and a treatise on physiology influenced by the iatrophysicist Borelli, Campailla brought the Modica school of medicine to the forefront.Template:Sfn

Campailla's most significant work was the philosophical poem in twenty cantos L'Adamo, ovvero il mondo creato (Adam or the created world). The poem describes Adam, the first human (a symbol of good nature that has not yet been corrupted), discovering and contemplating the truths and beauties of the created universe through the help of the archangel Raphael. The first incomplete edition of the poem was published at the beginning of the 18th century (Mazarino and Catania, 1709). The complete edition was published in Messina in 1728, and reissued posthumously in Milan in 1744. The poem achieved remarkable success and earned him a reputation both in Italy and abroad.Template:Sfn

The philosopher George Berkeley visited Campailla in his home in Modica in 1718 and introduced him to the works of Isaac Newton, which were to exert significant influence on Campailla's later writings.Template:Sfn Berkeley promised to introduce the Italian's work to the scientific circles in England. In 1723, Berkeley sent Campailla from London Newton's Principia and Opticks “as a pledge of sincere friendship” («tamquam sincerae amicitiae pignus»). He informed Campailla that he had given his books "Viro erudito e Societate Regia", "qui cum solertiam, & ingenium tuum pro meritis extimet, tum id plurimum miratur, tantum scientiae lumen in extremo Siciliae angulo tam diu delituisse." The degree to which Campailla and Berkeley might have influenced one another has been debated.Template:Sfn

In 1738 Campailla published a series of dialogues in Italian confuting Newtonian physics from a Cartesian perspective. Campailla's dialogues were highly commended by the secretary of the French Academy of Sciences Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle.

Campailla was a close friend of Ludovico Antonio Muratori, with whom he corresponded throughout his life. He was also an acquaintance of the Sicilian poet Girolama Lorefice Grimaldi. He was a member of the Arcadian academy, using the pseudonym 'Andremoneo'.Template:Sfn

On 24 October 1694 Campailla married Antonia Giovanna Leva, by whom he had two children. He was elected a senator seven times, and refused professorships in London and Padua because of his reluctance to travel. He died of a stroke on 7 February 1740, aged 72, and was buried near the altar of Modica's Cathedral.Template:Sfn A plaque to his memory was erected by the church's entrance.Template:Sfn

The Museo Medico Tommaso Campailla, in Piazza Campailla, Modica, is named after him. It contains the medical equipment he used, his anatomical theatre, his medical volumes, and more recent photographs of the stages of syphilitic progression. A high school in Modica is named after him.

Works

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Opuscoli filosofici, 1738

• L'Adamo ovvero il mondo creato, poema filosofico, I, Catania 1709; II, Messina 1723.
• Discorso diretto all'Accademia del Buon Gusto, dell'incendio dell'Etna e come si accende, Palermo 1738.
• Filosofia per principi e cavalieri, 2 vols., Siracusa 1841.

Sources

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