{"title":"Outpatient Clinics, Visiting Nurses and Propaganda: Spaces, Actors and Tools of Mental Hygiene in Interwar Italy","authors":"Marianna Scarfone","doi":"10.1093/shm/hkad056","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Summary In interwar Italy, the mental hygiene movement enacted a series of measures in order to control, prevent and contain psychiatric diseases. Developing as a pillar of social medicine, mental hygiene represented a challenging outlook for the psychiatric field, as far as it filled a gap in existing assistance, providing outpatient facilities and avoiding the pitfalls of hospitalisation’s legal constraints. This article analyses the debates aimed at reforming the 1904 law on asylums and the issues at stake, as autonomy from judiciary powers and screening and follow-up in free consultations. It then examines the functioning of dispensaries that responded to these issues, the role of the visiting nurses, as well as that of propaganda deployed by the local sections of The League of Mental Hygiene. Relying on diverse case studies, it aims at reopening the debate on a controversial phase of Italian sociopolitical history through the analysis of psychiatric practices.","PeriodicalId":21922,"journal":{"name":"Social History of Medicine","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6000,"publicationDate":"2024-01-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Social History of Medicine","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkad056","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"HISTORY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Summary In interwar Italy, the mental hygiene movement enacted a series of measures in order to control, prevent and contain psychiatric diseases. Developing as a pillar of social medicine, mental hygiene represented a challenging outlook for the psychiatric field, as far as it filled a gap in existing assistance, providing outpatient facilities and avoiding the pitfalls of hospitalisation’s legal constraints. This article analyses the debates aimed at reforming the 1904 law on asylums and the issues at stake, as autonomy from judiciary powers and screening and follow-up in free consultations. It then examines the functioning of dispensaries that responded to these issues, the role of the visiting nurses, as well as that of propaganda deployed by the local sections of The League of Mental Hygiene. Relying on diverse case studies, it aims at reopening the debate on a controversial phase of Italian sociopolitical history through the analysis of psychiatric practices.
期刊介绍:
Social History of Medicine , the journal of the Society for the Social History of Medicine, is concerned with all aspects of health, illness, and medical treatment in the past. It is committed to publishing work on the social history of medicine from a variety of disciplines. The journal offers its readers substantive and lively articles on a variety of themes, critical assessments of archives and sources, conference reports, up-to-date information on research in progress, a discussion point on topics of current controversy and concern, review articles, and wide-ranging book reviews.