ABSTRACT
The practice of poor relief and the care of the needy sick in Italy in the late 19th century reflected realities that were shared with other southern European and indeed Latin American societies in the same period. While southern Europe would share those trends in the 19th century, it was more often the shortage of natural population increase that aroused the first demographic concerns in the 18th century. The Italian rulers of the Restoration simply could not maintain, never mind extend the bureaucratic model administrations they inherited from the Napoleonic past, and in that sense the Restoration was a sort of dialectic response to the exaggerated pretensions of the revolutionary era. The Napoleonic innovations have to be set on a slower, less visible parabola of change that was transforming the fabric of Ancien Régime societies from within. The influence of new clinical science and medicine on these institutions was small.
