Healing and ruling: medical reformers after the unification of Italy.

Abstract

In its first part this essay shows how a liberal, scientific elite tried to change values, behaviours and life of rural and urban populations during the decades in which the Italian national body had to be built. At that time Italy was still a country plagued by many epidemic and endemic diseases, with high mortality rates, well above the average of the more advanced European regions. Hygiene became the keyword: an ambitious and young discipline that would monitor all the links of man with his environment. The second part sketches a brief profile of the growing community that medical reformers had created, in proposing themselves as essential advisors and planners of the necessary “redemption”. The inaugural addresses read during half a century by university professors of medicine make clear the image their authors wanted to present about themselves and their activities, claiming competencies, right and duties that would enlarge their field considerably.