Marcello Malpighi

Born in 1628, Marcello Malpighi trained as a physician in Italy and turned the newly refined microscope on nearly everything living. He observed red blood cells shortly after Jan Swammerdam, described how blood clots differed between the heart's chambers in his 1666 treatise De polypo cordis, and discovered that insects breathe through tiny skin openings - tracheae - not lungs. He studied plant anatomy with equal intensity, concluding that tubules ran through them much like those in silkworms, likely spotting stomata in the process. The Royal Society published his botanical and zoological findings across multiple volumes starting in 1675. He died in 1694, his name embedded in the Malpighian corpuscles of kidneys and spleens, the Malpighian tubules of insects, and the plant family Malpighiaceae - a cartography of the microscopic world he made visible.