[Not Available].

Abstract

Research which did not have reference to mental hospital archivistic sources, but to the files of the ducal family of Este bureaucracy, give us back the vicissitude of a woman whose mental illness comes into notice of the constituted authority. In the period preceding the national unification, when the mental hospital pattern of intervention on mental illness had not yet asserted itself, the mail interlacement among the proper offices is accompanied with an exemplary clinical report belonging to a "government physician"; so we are enabled to reconstruct the institutional behaviour in the presence of mental illness, till the epilogue, which could be defined "antipsychiatrical".