Autism's Institutionalization from Clinical Files of Venice Asylum of San Servolo

When we started working on autism, the first thing we asked ourselves was, what was autism before 1943, that is, the date of birth of the disease? Since human difference replicates statistically... [ view full abstract ]

When we started working on autism, the first thing we asked ourselves was, what was autism before 1943, that is, the date of birth of the disease? Since human difference replicates statistically in a regular way, people in the same condition always existed, object (or not) of social, cultural and medical attention. Since we are interested into history of psychiatry, we started a research project on thousands of clinical files on the archive of the ex psychiatric asylum in the island of San Servolo, in Venice, from 1874 to 1939, to see how autism, in its whole spectrum, was treated. So in our talk we will contextualize the pre-history of autism as institutionalization, a theme that is at the core of Gil Eyal’s The Autism Matrix, focusing on the findings of our research on San Servolo’s clinical files.