Mary Gibson

Forensic psychiatry and the birth of the criminal insane asylum in modern Italy

This paper focuses on the creation of the criminal insane asylum in Italy between unification in 1861 and World War I. The establishment of criminal insane asylums was a triumph of the positivist criminology of Cesare Lombroso, who advocated for an institution to intern insane criminals in his classic work, Criminal Man (1876). As a context for the analysis of the birth of the criminal insane asylum in Italy, this essay also outlines the history of the insanity plea in Italian criminal law and the young discipline of psychiatry during the fifty years after Italian unification.

Ai margini della cittadinanza : le detenute dopo l'Unità italiana (1860-1915)

This article explores the gendered nature of the Italian prison system after unification in 1860. Despite its liberal and secular principles, the new Italian parliamentary state left penal institutions for women and girls in the control of religious orders of nuns. While the state instituted a series of reforms for male prisons during the first fifty years after unification, it ignored the deplorable conditions for female inmates. This failure to secularize female prisons denied women the “negative right” to equal punishment and constituted one of the many ways in which women were denied full citizenship in united Italy.

Labelling Women Deviant: Heterosexual Women, Prostitutes and Lesbians in Early Criminological Discourse

In 1893, the internationally-renowned psychiatrist, Cesare Lombroso, published the first criminological treatise on women. Entitled Criminal Woman, the Prostitute and the Normal Woman (hereafter Criminal Woman), it offered a plethora of examples from around the world to support Lombroso’s assertion that female ‘born criminals’ — that is, women who had inherited a biological and psychological propensity to deviancy — were more terrible and monstrous than their male counterparts. Bell Star represented one of his prime examples, an ‘outlaw [brigantessa] who had terrorised Texas until a few years ago’.1 By the age of ten, she had learned the use of the lasso, revolver and shot-gun from her father, an officer in the Confederate army during the Civil War: Strong and brave like a man, her greatest pleasure was to ride horses that the most expert soldiers had failed to tame. One day she won two races, one dressed like a man and one like a woman, changing her clothes so quickly that no one realised that it was the same person.2 She was not only strong but lusty, having ‘as many lovers as there were desperados and outlaws in Texas, Kansas, Nebraska and Nevada’.3 For 18 years she and her band fought government troops and committed a string of spectacular robberies. Preferring male attire, she even shared a hotel room one night with a sheriff whose mission it was to catch her.

Il governo dell'esistenza: Organizzazione sanitaria e tutela della salute pubblica in Trentino nella prima meta del XIX secolo@@@Naples in the Time of Cholera, 1884-1911

Preface Introduction Part I. Sanitary Anxieties: 1. A city at risk Part II. The Public Epidemic of 1884: 2. From Provence to the Bay of Naples 3. Death in Naples 4. Survival and recovery Part III. Risanamento and Miasma: 5. Rebuilding medicine and politics Part IV. The Secret Epidemic of 1910-11: 6. The return of cholera: 1910 7. Concealment and crisis: 1911 Conclusion: Neapolitan cholera and Italian politics Bibliography.