[Medicine in the Giornale de'letterati].

The Giornale de' letterati published in Rome from 1668 to 1681 was the first Italian scientific journal. It was meant to be the Italian version of the French Journal des SA§avans or the English Philosophical Transactions. Unlike these two, it was not backed by a formal or informal scientific institution, even if one of its editors, Giovanni Giustino Ciampini, was the founder of the Accademia Fisico-Matematica, the leading scientific academy in Rome in the second half of the XVIIth century. The paper, a preliminary step in a study on the diffusion and communication of European medical culture in Rome in this period, indexes and broadly examines the articles pertaining to medicine published in the journal. Keywords: Scientific journal - Scientific communication - Rome - XVIIth century