Gr. H. F. Nuttall 
95 
Prospero Sonsino 
1835-1901. 
(Portrait-plate XIV.) 
iOnsino was born 6 August, 1835, at Tunis, of Italian parents, and died 
9 November, 1901, at Montepiano, a village in the Apennines, Tuscany. He 
tudied medicine at. Pisa. In 1860-64 he travelled and practised his pro- 
ession in Turkey and Asia Minor, then he settled in Florence, where he did 
•ublic health work and edited a medical journal called the Imparziale , in 
diich some of his papers appeared. In 1873-85 he resided in Egypt, practised 
,nd worked under very unfavourable conditions as micrographer to the 
Chedival Laboratory at Cairo, devoting himself specially to the parasitic 
forms of man and animals. He next travelled extensively in South America 
nd the Far East as a ship’s doctor, and returned to Pisa where he gave free 
ourses in parasitology, revisiting Tunis (1893) and Egypt (1897) before he 
ettled down finally in Montepiano. 
As a physician he did heroic work during cholera epidemics in Italy (1865) 
md subsequently in Egypt. Of his 139 publications, 70 (published in 1874- 
901) relate to helminthology. He laid stress on the importance of helminths 
is a direct cause and indirect predisposing cause of disease at a time when 
ill too little significance was attached to them by physicians. Sonsino attached 
nuch importance to the experimental study of helminthology. He wrote on 
Schistosomiasis in man and animals, Filaria bancrofti , Ancylostoma duodenale, 
Distomum hepaticum, and described a number of new and interesting species 
)f helminths with which his name remains linked in the literature. 
For a biography of Sonsino see Galli-Valerio (1906-7), Arch, de Parasitol. 
si, 425-438, with portrait (herein reproduced) and signature (1893), a portrait 
>n his death bed (1901), a facsimile of a letter, and bibliography; see also 
fibliography in Salmon and Stiles (1910), Index Catal. of Med. and Vet. Zool. 
ipp. 2204-2211. Sonsino presented a collection of his papers to the writer in 
1898, these papers being now in the Library of the Molteno Institute for 
Research in Parasitology. 
