Dr Alvise Sforza Tarabochia, Lecturer in Italian in the Department of Modern Languages, has given an online lecture entitled ‘Making Madness Visible: Early Italian Psychiatric Photography’ for the University of Kent’s Think Kent series, which is now available on YouTube.
The 19th century saw the birth of psychiatry, photography and also Italy as a unified country. Their histories are curiously intertwined. While Italy was a young country, struggling to unify the provision of psychiatric health care across the peninsula, psychiatry was itself having a hard time, struggling to give visibility to its object – madness – and to its clinical practice, locked up, as it was, behind the walls of the asylum. Photography came to the rescue, enabling psychiatrists to make madness visible, in the portraits of the patients, and to advertise its clinical practice as a well organised, orderly and scientific endeavour.
The Think Kent lectures are a series of TED talk-style lectures produced with the intention of raising awareness of the research and teaching expertise of Kent academics and the international impact of their work.
The talk may be viewed below or on YouTube via the link:
https://youtu.be/mHOaU6ODbkg