Abstract
The 1900 inquest revealed that efforts to reorganize foundling homes proceeded very erratically after 1865 because of the lack of central government direction and coordination. While some authorities began to alter the terms of public beneficence by forcibly involving unwed mothers in the care of infants, others stuck tenaciously to the old ruota regime of anonymous abandonment. The south as a whole failed to capture the momentum of change, with the result that it became a region marked by chronically high levels of child abandonment and stubbornly low levels of maternal reclamation. But in those northern and central regions where the pace of reform was quicker, medical practitioners in charge of foundling homes and maternity hospitals embraced the new creed of responsible unwed motherhood wholeheartedly. The system of arrangements for foundling relief which they introduced had a dramatic effect on single mothers.
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Notes
R. Griffini, Relazione del 1871 intorno all’ospizio provinciale degli esposti e delle partorienti di Milano (Milan, 1882), p. 9. These figures compared very favourably with those from the first half of the nineteenth century: Hunecke, tables on pp. 293–4, 316.
G. E. Curàtulo, L’Arte di Juno Lucina in Roma: Storia dell’ostetricia (Rome, 1901), pp. 244–5: Curàtulo was a professor of obstetrics at the hospital.
O. Viana and F. Vozza, L’Ostetricia e la ginecologia in Italia, intro. E. Alfieri (Emilio Alfieri was one of the founders of both the Italian Obstetrics and Gynaecology Society and the Italian Eugenics Society) (1902; 3rd ed, Milan, 1933), pp. 440, 783ff, 793–6 for details of these institutions. In 1906, Ernesto Pestalozza (1860–1935), professor of obstetrics and gynaecology from 1891 and an avid prewar eugenicist, opened Rome University’s own obstetric and gynaecology clinic. By the 1920s, this clinic was treating annually about 3500 obstetric patients, 1000 gynaecology patients, and 4000 day patients. Pestalozza entered the senate in 1923 as a fascist and was a keen supporter of the regime’s demographic and welfare policy.
P. Frascani, Ospedale e società in età liberale (Bologna, 1986), p. 77.
F. La Torre, Curriculum vitae (Rome, 1903), cited in his L’Utero attraverso i secoli: Storia, iconografia (Città di Castello, 1917), p. x; and see pp. 607–13; A liberal nationalist, La Torre also became a eugenicist: see his I fondamenti dell’eugenica (Rome, 1915).
T. M. Caffaratto, L’Ostetricia, la ginecologia e la chirugia in Piemonte dalle origini ai giorni nostri (Saluzzo, 1973), p. 41.
V. Busacchi and E. Greco, ‘Clinici medici, chirughi, ed ostetrici nella età del risorgimento’, Pagine di storia della medicina, 5:3 (May–June, 1961), pp. 3–15.
A. Corradi, Dell’Ostetricia in Italia dell metà dello scorso secolo fino al presente, vol. iii (Bologna, 1877), pp. 1881; and on the use of chloroform, ether, and opiates, see vol. ii of Corradi’s work (Bologna, 1875), pp. 1192–7.
Bizarrely, E. Shorter credited nineteenth-century obstetrics not only with securing women’s health, but also with causing the rise of feminism; A History of Women’s Bodies (1982; pb edn, Harmondsworth, 1984), esp. p. 296.
I. Loudon, ‘Puerperal insanity in the 19th century’, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 81 (February, 1988), pp. 76–9; Loudon argues that puerperal insanity should be treated as a separate entity from puerperal fever, but Italian medical science did not make any distinction between the two disorders until the rise of psychiatry in the twentieth century.
S. Giordano, ‘Statistica della sezione seconda dell’ospizio di maternità di Torino, 1851 al 1857’, Giornale delle scienze mediche della reale accademia medico-chirugia di Torino, xxix: 12 (June, 1857), pp. 193–210, 195.
S. Giordano, Della febbre puerperale osservato nella clinica ostretrica, dell’eclampsia, e dell’edema acuto (Turin, 1859), pp. 77–80, 89.
Ibid., pp. 81ff.
Ibid., pp. 20–1.
F. La Torre, Intorno all’indicazione dell’isterectomia nelle infezioni puerperali e alla cura di esse (Rome, 1901), passim.
F. La Torre, Osservazioni e note cliniche sulle infezioni puerperali (Milan, 1890), passim.
D. Tibone, ‘Rendiconto statistico della febbre puerperale osservata nella clinica ostetrica’, Giornale delle scienze mediche della reale accademia medico-chirugia di Torino, xxix: 12 (June, 1857), pp. 108–55, esp. 124–9.
See M. G. Nardi, Il pensiero ostetrico-ginecologico nei secoli (Milan, 1944), p. 364 on the continued resistance by Italian obstetricians to the late nineteenth-century bacteriological theories of the causes of the disease which were gaining currency in France and Germany.
See C. Pancino, Il bambino e l’acqua sporca: Storia dell’assistenza al parto dalle mammane alle ostetriche (secoli xvi–xix) (Milan, 1984), ch. 6 on increasing conflicts between midwives and obstetricians in the ninetenth century and ch. 7 on the survival of the ‘traditional’ birth experience outside the big cities.
S. De Sanctis, ‘Su alcuni tipi di mentalità inferiore’, Archivio di psichiatria e scienze penali, 27 (1906), pp. 193–6; Patologia e profilassi mentale (Milan, 1912), ch. 4; De Sanctis was a founding member of the Italian Eugenics Society, which grew out of Giuseppe Sergi’s Anthropological Society of Rome; see my Race and Nation in Italian Science and Culture, c.1890–c.1945 (forthcoming).
S. De Sanctis, Educazione dei deficienti (Milan, 1915), pp. 127–30, 135–7; see also G. Montesano, Assistenza dei deficienti anormali e minorenni delinquenti (Milan, 1913) on the necessity of institutionalization and education for successful social prevention and mental hygiene.
F. Dalmazzo, La tutela sociale dei fanciulli abbandonati e traviati (Turin, 1910), pp. 23–35.
M. U. Masini and G. Vidoni, L’Assistenza e la terapia degli ammalati di mente (Milan, 1914), pp. 193–233 contains the full text of the law.
F. Dalmazzo, ‘Il problema del traviamento precoce’, MI (February, 1927), pp. 35–9.
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© 2002 Maria Sophia Quine
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Quine, M.S. (2002). Religion, Science, and Beneficence. In: Italy’s Social Revolution. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403919793_8
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