ABSTRACT
The historic roots of Italian psychiatry go back to the second half of the nineteenth century.1 In many respects the basic and enduring patterns of the discipline and its practice were laid down or codified in those decades: the main professional association of Italian psychiatry was founded in 1873, on the basis of a strongly organicist programme; asylums were built or planned in different regions of the country at an unprecedented rate; and in 1904, after several decades of pressure, the Parliament enacted an asylum law, which codified the public mandate of psychiatry to defend society against the ‘dangerousness’ of the insane, and laid down the legal framework for mental health policy in force right down to the present.
