Angelo Mosso

(1846 - 1910)

The son of a carpenter, the Italian physiologist Angelo Mosso, inventor of an early progenitor to the MRI, grew up in poverty and often assisted his father as a child. He attended medical school in order to study the mental and physical burdens of workers; he served as a physician in the military before studying the nervous system’s control of blood vessels and circulation in the brain in situations of rest and distress. He also studied fatigue and how humans breathe at great heights.