Portrait of Baldo Rossi

Baldo Rossi (1879-1932), graduated in Pavia, directed the mechanotherapeutic department (1902) at the Policlinico of Milan, then becoame chief of general surgery (1906) and director of the Zonda pavilion in 1915. An extraordinary professor of traumatology in Clinical Specialization Institutes , he was appointed professor of surgical clinic in 1924; he was then rector of the University of Milan from 1926 to 1930, succeeding Luigi Mangiagalli. In 1923 he was appointed Senator of the Kingdom. Enlisting voluntarily as a major doctor, in the Great War he set up the "Città di Milano" mobile surgical hospital, which treated almost 5,000 of the seriously injured and non-transportable and which earned him the silver medal for military valor and the gold medal of the Red Cross . Ernest Hemingway outlines his figure in the novel "A Farewell to Arms". The portrait is donated by the Rossi family in 1934 to the hospital, so that it can be kept in the Zonda Pavilion; it was most likely executed in the same year specifically for the purpose.