Doctors and Peasants in Nineteenth-Century Italy
With the rise of statistics, many modern states made it a tool of government and a link between the authorities and their subjects (or citizens). The case of Italy was that of a composite world where the early emergence of statistical science (with Melchiorre Gioia) was accompanied by many studies on the reality of the populations. Naples under the Bourbons and under the reign of Gioacchino Murat, and central-northern Italy under Napoleon, were the fields of application of studies which covered everything from folklore to material conditions. The growth of a high-level modern medical science, in contact with the scientific cultures of Germany, France and Britain, provided the new Italian nation with a means of analysing the social and sanitary problems of the country. A rich documentation of all this survives in the studies of the socio-sanitary conditions of the inhabitants of Italian towns and communes which began in the early nineteenth century and continued for nearly a century.
The statistical study of sanitary and hygienic problems, commissioned by Italian governments and carried out by the corporation of local doctors highlighted the abject conditions in which most of the Italian population lived from many points of view: malnutrition, disease, alchoholism, illiteracy, high infant mortality, short average lifespan, devastating death rate from malaria, cholera, pellagra, etc. But the economic policy of the ruling classes – big landowners in the south and the entrepreneurial middle classes in the north – chose to turn Italy into an economic and military power, leaving the agricultural world to fend for itself. And medical science was split between those who, like Camillo Golgi, dedicated their lives to solving the problem of malaria, and those who, like Paolo Mantegazza, offered the culture of a rising middle class intriguing opportunities to explore the mysteries of pleasure and sexual hygiene.
