LAUSR

Nowadays, infectious diseases are a topic of great interest in the scientific community. One of the main issues concerns the spread of infections within hospitals. This is not a new fact. Indeed, doctors and health facilities have always fought against the spread of infections adopting new models, especially during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One of the most emblematic infectious diseases in Europe during the last centuries was tuberculosis (TB). Throughout history, many terms have been used to refer to tuberculosis [1]. Consumption, phthisis, mal du siècle and white plague are some of them. This variety of names is probably due to the difficulties in a proper diagnosis of TB [2]. Indeed, the symptoms of the infection may significantly differ in subjects. Starting from the end of the nineteenth century, thanks to scientific progress, the scientific community was able to understand the disease and, most importantly, to develop an efficient medical treatment. It is interesting to underline that the treatises on psychiatry of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries highlighted the close connection between neuropsychiatric disorders and TB [3]. Indeed, in some scientific articles, some mental alterations diagnosed with TB were indicated as “tuberculous madness”. In particular, in those years, the symptomatology of tuberculosis was well-known and therapies made substantial progress with Forlanini’s pneumothorax, while the treatment of mental illnesses was still hinged on substantially ineffective means, to the point that the mental hospital population was always growing in number. Problematic conditions of asylums such as the scarcity and the decay, the poor hygienic conditions, the overcrowding and the lack of clinical registration are wellknown. In this regard, the complaint by Minister Giovanni Nicotera in an “Inspection on the asylums of the Kingdom” in 1891 is interesting. Indeed, in Italy, medical and political debates were leading the first law on asylums, promulgated in 1904. Because of the conditions mentioned above, asylums were considered places with a high risk of contracting TB. How did doctors deal with this disease in asylums and what prevention strategies were introduced? We would like to present an interesting article published in the Rivista Mensile di Psichiatria Forense, Antropologia Criminale e Scienze Affini—Journal of Forensic Psychiatry and Criminal Anthropology—entitled “TB and Madness”, signed by Professor A. Grimaldi and by Doctor F. Scotti, psychiatrists of the asylum in Milan [4]. This contribution that represents part of an oral communication at the Congress on TB, which took place in Naples on the 25th–28th of April 1900, encouraged to investigate the connection between mental illness and TB, in order to deal with a situation that was starting to be worrisome: the spread of the disease inside the asylums. In particular, this investigation was carried out through the following questions: (i) Did TB cause neuropsychiatric alterations? Or (ii) Was mental disease a condition that led to the development of TB? And (iii) Did TB cause, in the progenies of individuals who were affected, a strong predisposition to the mental disease? * Omar Larentis [email protected]