Henry Morselli

Enrico "Henry" Agostino Morselli (17 July 1852 - 18 February 1929) was an Italian physician and psychical researcher.

Enrico Agostino Morselli
Occupation(s)Physician, Psychical researcher

Morselli was professor at the University of Turin. He is best known for the publication of his influential book, Suicide: An Essay on Comparative Moral Statistics (1881) claiming that suicide was primarily the result of the struggle for life and nature's evolutionary process.[1][2][3][4]

According to Edward Shorter "Morselli is known outside of Italy for having coined the term dysmorphophobia. In Italy, he is known for the psychiatry textbook, A Guide to the Semiotics of Mental Illness."[5]

Morselli was a eugenicist and some of his writings have been linked to scientific racialism.[6][7] Morselli was also interested in mediumship and psychical research. He studied the medium Eusapia Palladino and concluded that some of her phenomena was genuine, being evidence for an unknown bio-psychic force present in all humans.[8]

Selected works

Science

  • Suicide: An Essay on Comparative Moral Statistics (1881)
  • A Guide to the Semiotics of Mental Illness (Manuale di semeiotica delle malattie mentali) (1895)

Psychical research

  • Morselli, E. (1907). Eusapia Paladino and the Genuineness of Her Phenomena. Annals of Psychical Science 5: 319-360, 399-421.
  • Morselli, E. (1908). Psicologia e “Spiritismo”: Impressioni e Note Critiche sui Fenomeni Medianici di Eusapia Palladino (2 vols). Turin: Fratelli Bocca.

References
  1. Stark, Rodney; Bainbridge, William Sims. (1996). Religion, Deviance and Social Control. Routledge. p. 32. ISBN 978-0415915298
  2. Maj, Mario; Ferro, F. M. (2002). Anthology of Italian Psychiatric Texts. World Psychiatric Association. pp. 177-180. ISBN 2-84671-041-4
  3. Farberow, Norman L. "History of Suicide" In "Suicide Basics" article, Encyclopedia of Death and Dying (Retrieved June 29, 2009).
  4. Weaver, John. (2009). Sadly Troubled History: The Meanings of Suicide in the Modern Age. McGill Queens University Press. pp. 25-26. ISBN 978-0773535138
  5. Shorter, Edward. (2005). A Historical Dictionary of Psychiatry. Oxford University Press. p. 182. ISBN 978-0195176681
  6. Cassata, Francesco. (2011). Building the New Man: Eugenics, Racial Science and Genetics in Twentieth-Century Italy. Central European University Press. pp. 18-21. ISBN 978-9639776838
  7. Bashford, Alison; Levine, Philippa. (2012). The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics. Oxford University Press. p. 380. ISBN 978-0199945054
  8. Brancaccio, Maria Teresa. (2014). Enrico Morselli's Psychology and "Spiritism": Psychiatry, psychology and psychical research in Italy in the decades around 1900. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 48: 75-84.
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