Giuseppe Moscati

Giuseppe Moscati was born on 25 July 1880 in Benevento, in the Kingdom of Italy, the seventh of nine children of Francesco Moscati, a magistrate who rose to preside over a court of assizes, and Rosa De Luca, of the Marquises of Roseto. While he was still a small child the family settled in Naples, the city with which his life and work would be identified. A decisive episode of his youth was a grave riding accident suffered by his brother Alberto, a cavalry officer, who was left with lasting neurological injury; the long experience of helping to care for him is consistently reported as having turned Giuseppe toward medicine. He studied at the University of Naples and took his medical degree with highest honours in 1903.

After qualification he entered the Ospedale Santa Maria del Popolo degli Incurabili in Naples, a hospital that served large numbers of the city’s poor, and he combined bedside practice with laboratory research in physiological chemistry. His published work included studies of glycogen metabolism and of diabetes. He obtained teaching responsibilities in the medical faculty and directed biochemical work at the hospital. In April 1906, during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, he took a leading part in evacuating a hospital at Torre del Greco that lay in the path of the fall of ash, remaining until the last patients had been moved. During the cholera epidemic that struck Naples in 1911 he worked both on the care of the sick and on public-health investigation of the outbreak. In the First World War he treated wounded soldiers while continuing his civilian hospital and teaching duties.

Moscati never married and had no children. He lived as a Catholic layman of marked asceticism, attending Mass and receiving Holy Communion daily, and he treated the practice of medicine as a religious vocation rather than merely a profession. He became widely known in Naples for refusing fees from the poor, for visiting the sick in the city’s poorest quarters, and for insisting that scientific competence and Christian charity were inseparable. Students and colleagues recalled his teaching that the patient was not a case but a person in whom Christ was to be served. He was closely associated with the Jesuit church of Gesù Nuovo. Numerous biographies record that he belonged to the Third Order of Saint Francis.

On the morning of 12 April 1927, after hearing Mass and seeing patients, he collapsed and died in an armchair in his Naples apartment; he was forty-six. He was first buried in the family vault at the Poggioreale cemetery. In 1930 his remains were translated to a tomb in the Church of Gesù Nuovo, which became the centre of his cult. Popular reputation for holiness grew quickly in Naples and then more widely in the Church. Pope Paul VI beatified him on 16 November 1975. Pope John Paul II canonized him on 25 October 1987, holding him up as a model of the Christian physician and of holiness in professional lay life. His liturgical memorial is kept on 16 November. He is invoked especially as a patron of physicians and of bachelors, and his life is frequently cited in Catholic discussion of medical ethics and of the unity of faith and scientific work.