Wirth, Aaron J. (Author)
Brandeis University
Jankowski, Paul
Jankowski, Paul
Conrad, Peter
Kelikian, Alice
Conrad, Peter
Edition Details: Advisor: Kelikian, Alice; Committee Members: Jankowski, Paul, Conrad, Peter.
Physical Details: 256 pp.
Language: English
In the course of the nineteenth century, industrializing Western states took a keen interest in the health and well-being of populations that were becoming substantially larger, more urban, and more "threatening" to the public order. This was an era of revolutions and civil wars, but also, in Italy's case, of nation-state formation and nationalist warfare. On the peninsula there emerged a universal conviction that a healthy and prolific populace was the foundation of a unified, successful nation. Statesmen and the public alike became accustomed to analyzing symptoms of national strength or weakness from a medical perspective. Italian physicians readily cooperated in this endeavor, while seeking professionalization and specialization through medical congresses and associations. They combatted infectious diseases, such as syphilis and tuberculosis, identified illnesses brought on or worsened by poor nutrition, tainted water, and insalubrious living conditions, and expanded medical services to the nation's new urban slums and rural back waters. This dissertation examines the legacy of the Italian positivist physicians on the terrain of the Vatican as it endured from Unification to the eve of the First World War. It focuses on the liberal medical and scientific elite who tried to change the values, behaviors, and life of rural and urban populations during the decades in which the Italian national body had to be built. At the time Italy was still plagued by many epidemic and endemic diseases, with high mortality rates, well above the average of the more advanced western European regions. "National Health" became the key phrase: an ambitious and young idea that would link all of man with his environment. The end result was a fast-growing community of medical reformers created to prepare themselves as essential advisors and planners of the necessary "redemption."
...MoreDescription Cited in Dissertation Abstracts International-A 76/02(E), Aug 2015. Proquest Document ID: 1616760245.
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