Francesco Redi

Born in 1626, Redi held doctorates in medicine and philosophy from Pisa by age 21. A rationalist working across Italian cities, he set out to dismantle the verifiable myths of his era. His 1668 masterwork, Esperienze intorno alla generazione degl'insetti, laid out the maggot experiments and dismantled folklore about vipers - that they drank wine, shattered glass, poisoned through ingestion. He traced venom to the fangs, not the gallbladder. He catalogued some 180 parasites with precision no one had managed, distinguished earthworms from helminths, and likely invented the experimental control. He also wrote poetry: his 1685 Bacco in Toscana earned him a medal from the Grand Duke and stands among the century's finest Italian verse. He died in 1697, having split the difference between the laboratory and the line.