Main description:

Providing a historical overview of healthcare in Italy from its unification in 1861 to the present COVID-19 pandemic, this book analyses the political, social and cultural impact of Italian healthcare policy and medicine. The author examines the development of public health, hospitals, and primary care, and the building of healthcare systems across three political regimes in Italy: the liberal period (1861-1914), Fascism (1922-43), and the Italian Republic (1948 to the present day). By emphasising the embeddedness of health-related legislation in Italy's political and social background, this book offers a comparative account of Italian health policy, and contrasts this with developments in neighbouring European countries, Canada and the United States. The book focuses on the Italian government's reaction to the social and political impact of several diseases: pellagra; cholera; malaria; and tuberculosis, and explores the present-day response to the current COVID-19 pandemic. A timely and comprehensive read, this book will appeal to those teaching and researching Italian history and the history of medicine and healthcare more widely.

Contents:

Chapter 1. Health in the making of a Nation.- Chapter 2. Health and healthcare in the liberal State.- Chapter 3. The Great War and the Spanish Flu.- Chapter 4. Health under the Fascist State.- Chapter 5. Postwar: roads not taken.- Chapter 6. The rise and fall of the mutual jungle.- Chapter 7. The creation of the Servizio sanitario nazionale.- Chapter 8. Reinventing the SSN?.- Chapter 9. New issues at the dawn of the Twenty-first Century. Chapter 10. A Lost Decade.- Chapter 11. Two Converging Crises.- Chapter 12. Postscript./