Parere frenologico su Napoleone I. e Giuseppe Garibaldi / conferenza pronunziata nella filodrammatica Goldoni il 23 marzo 1884 (con dudici insicioe e tre tavole).

Miraglia, Biagio Giacchino

Publication Date: 1884

About this Item

Napoli, R. Stab. Tipografico Comm. Francesco Giannini & Figli, 1884, 8°, 48 pp., 6 Fig., 2 Tabellen im Text und 1 Falttabelle, orig. Broschur; mit eigenhändiger Widmung des Verfassers auf Umschlag. First Edition! "Biagio Gioacchino Miraglia lived during the great movement for the reform of psychopathology, a period in which psychiatry and neuropathology were making great strides towards the theories of modern medicine. He undertook an extensive work of renewal, opening up to Italian medical culture the horizons of the new German Alienistic Science of Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, the fathers of phrenology. By revisiting the divinations of the alchemist Giovanni Battista Della Porta, concerning anthropological investigations, he anticipated Cesare Lombroso's criminological theories and furthered research into brain localisation through necropsy analyses. According to Miraglia's deductions, madness was delineated as a disorder and affection of the brain, proper to its anatomical structure and deriving from the morphological properties of the cranial box and its structural and dimensional anomalies. Consequently, it was conceptually irreducible to the mysterious, sudden and chaotic breakdown of human rationality. At the same time, he argued for the existence of latent and partial forms of insanity, in relation to which he had always demonstrated a disreputable difficulty of approach, both methodological and diagnostic. As early as 1843, he deepened his studies on the physiology of the brain, making clinical and anatomopathological observations in order to arrive at the notion of madness and proving himself adept at coupling the results of theory with the teachings of medical practice. He devoted most of his life to observing and analysing the personality and behavioural disorders manifested by his patients at the Morotrophy in Aversa. He analysed their slightest changes in mood in order to deduce the causes and courses of individual pathologies and trace them back to cranial structures and thus to the locations of psychic faculties and brain functions[23]. He carried out in-depth craniological studies with an evident phrenological matrix on the mask of Napoleon I in order to deduce the intellectual, affective and behavioural faculties as well as personality characteristics resulting from the cranioencephalic configuration, and then compared the latter to the physiognomy of Giuseppe Garibaldi." Ital. wiki Biagio Gioacchino Miraglia (1814-1885), was an Italian psychiatrist, poet and patriot; a doctor in the psychiatric hospital in Aversa, the first holder of a course in the clinic of mental illness at the University of Naples, he founded the first Italian psychiatric journal and implemented innovative criteria in psychiatric therapy by resorting to music therapy and psychodrama, among other things.

Seller Inventory # 64764

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Parere frenologico su Napoleone I. e Giuseppe Garibaldi / conferenza pronunziata nella filodrammatica Goldoni il 23 marzo 1884 (con dudici insicioe e tre tavole).
• Publication Date: 1884
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)
• Seller catalogs:
  • Anatomie und Physiologie