Andrea Verga

Andrea Verga was born in Treviglio (Bergamo) on 30 May 1811, to a modest family. He was the second son of Domitilla Carcano and Giosuè Verga, who worked as a conveyor from Treviglio to Milan. As a child, he did not attend elementary school, but due to his mother's religious interest, he was initiated into ecclesiastical studies in the seminary. Consequently, he enrolled at the medical faculty of the University of Pavia, in November 1830. During the earliest years, he was attracted to lessons of the anatomy teacher Bartolomeo Panizza, of whom in 1836, after graduation, he became an assistant. In the same period, he participated with Giulio Carcano, Cesare Correnti, and other young patriots in the "Strenna Il Presagio", in which he published the short story "La Fatua" (1836). The love for poetry, the clear and flowing style, and the taste for the curious were characteristic traits of Verga. These stylistic features are remarkable also in his scientific writings, making him fully part of the Italian tradition of medical-literati. The years of assistantship in Pavia (1836–1842) were fundamental for him. Assisting Panizza deepened his knowledge about the study of human and pathological anatomy, physiology, comparative anatomy and experimental practice, devoting himself to the study of the nervous system. At the age of twenty-six, he went on an educational trip to German-speaking countries. He was also interested in Panizza's study of comparative anatomy, therefore between 1839 and 1841 he spent long periods of time in Comacchio, studying the reproduction of eels.[2][3]

In 1842, he moved to Milan, where he found employment in the private asylum Villa Antonini (hospice of San Celso), of which in 1847 he was promoted to "assistant director", then beginning his study of mental alienation. He also undertook the practice of general medicine, surgery, and anatomical exercises at the Ospedale Maggiore, collaborating with the new medical journal of Milan, founded by his friend Agostino Bertani and directed by Panizza. He participated in the congresses of Italian scientists. During the 1844 Milan convention, he participated in the Natural and civil news on the Lombardy of Carlo Cattaneo (whose second volume never came out). He wrote his beliefs about the Stabilimenti Pei Pazzi, a matter he previously discussed in the Gazzetta Medica of Milan with the title of Historical notes on the establishments of the madmen in Lombardy. While adhering to the ideals of the "Risorgimento", he did not take part in the Five Days of 1848 in the newly liberated Milan but was still appointed director of the public asylum of the Senavra by the provisional government. In 1849–1850, following the closure of the University of Pavia, he taught human anatomy in the newly created school of medicine, surgery, and pharmacy in the Ospedale Maggiore. In the following summer of 1850, he was sent by the same hospital to visit asylums in Switzerland and other European countries to study their organization and evaluate a reform of the Senavra. His experience as an asylum director convinced him more and more of the need to reorganize Italian asylums, transforming them into real tools for the treatment of insanity and into research and teaching centers for the nascent psychiatry, which still did not find space in universities.[2][3]

In 1852 he decided to enrich the Gazzetta Medica with a psychiatric appendix, which became the first Italian periodical expressly dedicated to this discipline. In this period he was appointed director of the Ospedale Maggiore, where he distinguished himself for the reforms of the medical-surgical service as a whole and for the promotion of anatomical-pathological studies.[2][4]

In 1864, Verga then transformed the psychiatric appendix into an independent journal, the Italian Archive for nervous diseases and more particularly for mental insanities, directing it together with friends and colleagues Cesare Castiglioni and Serafino Biffi.[2][4]

In 1865 he had to abandon his institutional work internal reorganization of the Ospedale Maggiore. However, a chair of the doctrine and clinic of mental alienation was established for him in the hospital. He managed to give lectures to doctors and psychiatric conferences open to the public. His fame as a teacher in the newborn medical branch of psychiatry had further approval with his new role as president of the Italian Freniary Society. An organization founded in Rome during the 11th Congress of Italian Scientists. He held the position until 1891, when he was replaced by Biffi and appointed honorary president. In 1874, at the Congress of the Society in Imola, the classification of mental illnesses proposed by him was approved, which made it possible to standardize the statistical surveys on the pathologies present in Italian asylums.[2][4]

After having founded the Society of Patronage for the Mad Poor of the Province of Milan in 1874, on 16 November 1876, he was appointed senator, on the proposal of his friend Correnti and with the support of Prime Minister Agostino Depretis. In Parliament, he undertook to support the bill on asylums and alienated persons and to vote in 1888 for the abolition of the death penalty. Present in many of the political, cultural, and scientific institutions of Milan Verga was for a long time provincial councilor (1867–1889), municipal councilor (1876–1889), member of the Municipal Health Commission (1882–1888), and in the matters of the Institute of Lombard of sciences, letters and arts, he was vice president from 1855 to 1857 and president in the years 1857–1858 and 1864–1865. During a visit to the asylum in Siena in 1886, he was injured by an inpatient in the left eye, causing the loss of his sight. Then when in 1892 the Italian Archive for Nervous Diseases merged into the Experimental Journal of Freniatria, founded in Reggio Emilia by Carlo Livi in 1875, Verga, now in his eighties, passed the baton to Livi's successor, Augusto Tamburini.[2][5]

In the last years of his life, he studied the physiology of old age and in 1895 founded a Relief Fund for poor alienists and their families. Andrea Verga died in Milan on 21 November 1895.[2][3]

The correspondence with colleagues and friends is very rich, constituting a relevant testimony of the scientific and cultural environment of Milan in the second half of the nineteenth century. The correspondence also includes a significant number of letters addressed to Bartolomeo Panizza, and Natale Contini. Verga's correspondents include numerous doctors, psychiatrists, naturalists and exponents of the scientific world of the nineteenth century, such as Agostino Bertani,[6] Leonardo Bianchi, Serafino Biffi, Alexandre Brierre de Boismont, Gabriele Buccola, Carlo Cantoni, Filippo De Filippi, Camillo Golgi, Carlo Livi, Cesare Lombroso, Paolo Mantegazza, Scipion Pinel, Augusto Tamburini, Augusto Tebaldi, Tito Vignoli. There are also numerous intellectuals, writers and politicians, including Vittoria Aganoor, Raffaello Barber, Luigi Bodio, Cesare Cantù, Giulio Carcano, Cesare Correnti, Andrea Maffei, Tullo Massarani. The archive also includes a substantial core consisting of medical and scientific writings: notes, observations, manuscripts, drafts and other printed material, which testify the path of studies, the period of the assistantship at the chair of anatomy of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Pavia and the subsequent career of the alienist as a doctor and psychiatrist.[2][7]