Giorgio Baglivi (; ; September 8, 1668 – June 15, 1707), born and sometimes anglicized as was a Croatian-Italian physician and scientist. He made important contributions to clinical education, based on his own medical practice. His De Fibra Motrice advanced the "solidist" theory that the solid parts of organs are more crucial to their good functioning than their fluids, against the traditional belief in four humors. Baglivi, however, advocated against doctors relying on any general theory rather than careful observation. He was "a distinguished physiological researcher fascinated by the nerves, his microscopic studies enabled him to distinguish between smooth and striated muscles and distinct kinds of fibres." Life Giorgio was born to Blasius Armeno and Anna de Lupis on September 8, 1668, in Ragusa (now Dubrovnik, Croatia). His mother was Croatian, while his father was possibly of Armenian descent His parents were respectable but poor merchants who both died in 1670, after the birth of Giorgio's younger brother Jacob (). The brothers were originally raised by their uncle and educated at Ragusa's Jesuit college. At 15, the brothers moved to Lecce in Apulia, where they took the name of his adoptive father, a wealthy physician named Pietro Angelo Baglivi. Giorgio studied first at the universities of Salerno, then successively at Padua and Bologna and possibly also Naples. He attended Lorenzo Bellini's lectures in Pisa and worked in hospitals in Padua and Venice, Florence, and Bologna and travelled to the Dutch Republic and England from 1688 to 1692. As early as 1685, Baglivi began experimenting with animals, injecting different substances into dogs' jugular veins and examining the life cycle of tarantulas. Between 1689 and 1691, he performed many autopsies and dissected animals including lions, deer, tortoises, and snakes. He studied dura mater through observing injured men and experimenting on dogs and also investigated toxic drugs. Observing discrepancies between his research and clinical practice, he criticized doctors for following theoretical systems slavishly instead of relying more strongly on observation. (This would later be the central theme of his 1696 book On Medical Practice.) He served as an assistant to Marcello Malpighi in Bologna in 1691, and followed him to Rome the next year when Malpighi was named chief personal physician ("archiater") to the pope. Under Malpighi, Baglivi performed experiments on the circulation of blood in frogs; he also injected various medicines into dogs' veins and spinal canals and experimented on their pneumogastric