Cere e illustrazioni dermatologiche sul vaiolo presso il Museo di Anatomia Patologica dell'Università di Padova

Luigi Sacco (1769-1863) has been the main protagonist of the first vaccination campaign in Italy, thanks to the discovery of a vaccine source by which he vaccinated more than 500.000 people. Starting from the illustrations of his books (1081 and 1809), Sacco proposed to create wax models representing human, cow, sheep and horse pox viruses’ dermatological alterations. His purpose was that physicians and midwives, sawing these waxworks, could learn to distinguish the right pustules of animals’ pox viruses from which to extract the pus effective for humans’ vaccination. The model of human smallpox represented what he defined “real” and “spurious” vaccine pustules: the first ones caused by an effective vaccine, the second ones caused by an ineffective vaccine extracted from wrong animals’ pustules. In the University of Padua Museum of Pathological Anatomy there are the four wax models described by Sacco, which correspond exactly to the illustrations of his books. The same models are at the Milan, Pavia and Bologna Universities, that is, the principal towns, together with Padua, of the Cisalpine Republic created by Napoleon at that time.