Taking as its starting point the Italian psychiatric context between the end of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth century, this essay analyses Italian psychiatry's steps towards a new theoretical and therapeutical framework. Focusing on Ugo Cerletti's work on the electric shock, this paper shows how this Italian psychiatric renewal occurred at the same time as a process of internationalization of psychiatric knowledge, practice and problems. Moving from Europe to America, the author describes Cerletti's position towards the wide spread of a merely empirical and technical use of electric shock, and reconstructs an international debate on the divorce of electric shock from research.
Taking as its starting point Angelo Mosso's studies of muscular and mental work carried out in Turin at the end of the nineteenth century, this essay focuses on early Italian investigations of the psycho-physical attitudes of workers undertaken by Mosso's pupils Zaccaria Treves and Mariano Luigi Patrizi in the fields of medicine and psychophysiology between the end of the nineteenth century and the first ten years of the twentieth century. In particular, the author is interested in delineating the differences between the various methodological approaches of these studies and in indicating their different ideological meanings, whose origins lie in the various facets of the materialistic philosophy of Italian scientific and postivist culture.
Taking as its starting point Angelo Mosso's studies of muscular and mental work carried out in Turin at the end of the nineteenth century, this essay focuses on early Italian investigations of the psycho-physical attitudes of workers undertaken by Mosso's pupils Zaccaria Treves and Mariano Luigi Patrizi in the fields of medicine and psychophysiology between the end of the nineteenth century and the first ten years of the twentieth century. In particular, the author is interested in delineating the differences between the various methodological approaches of these studies and in indicating their different ideological meanings, whose origins lie in the various facets of the materialistic philosophy of Italian scientific and postivist culture.
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