ABSTRACT
Enrico Morselli’s somewhat unorthodox attitudes often incurred the disapprobation of the scholars of Turin – for instance, Cesare Lombroso and Giulio Fano – just as his reforming ideas encountered strong opposition in the board of directors of the mental hospital. In Macerata, in February 1877, Morselli found a suburban institute, not large, but none the less well constructed and, in certain aspects, comparable with some of Italy’s most renowned hospitals. Morselli intervened with severity: dismissals, punishments, and strict regulation, so that at least the personnel did not steal food or linen from the patients, and that they performed their duties without themselves deciding how to employ the instruments of constraint. Morselli investigated those presumed causalities and concomitances, advising circumspection. In Genoa Morselli changed his system: there were nine nosographical groups provided for the compilation of medical records, from encephalic irritations to functional disturbances. Yet, Morselli added, the quid that distinguished psychiatry from medicine remained intact.
