Fortunio Liceti

Fortunio Liceti (1577 to 1657) was an Italian physician and philosopher, born prematurely at Rapallo near Genoa and raised by a physician father who saved him in a makeshift incubator. He studied philosophy and medicine at Bologna, took his doctorate in 1600 and taught at Pisa, Padua and Bologna, returning to Padua in 1645 as the first professor of theoretical medicine. He stayed an Aristotelian throughout his life and was a colleague and friend of Galileo, with whom he exchanged letters for three decades. His natural philosophy, which he preferred to call physiology, covered the immortality of the soul, embryogenesis and spontaneous generation, and his De monstrorum caussis was the first work to classify developmental abnormalities by their form. In astronomy he defended Aristotelian cosmology and geocentrism against Galileo and others.