Beschreibung:

CHIARUGI, Vincenzo (1759-1820)]. Regolamento dei regi spedali di Santa Maria Nuova e di Bonifazio . Florence: Gaetano Cambiagi, 1789. 4 o (263 x 198 mm). Engraved frontispiece by Giovanni Battista Cecchi after Eg. Io. Oricellarius, engraved title-page vignette, 10 folding engraved plates by Cecchi and Benedetto Eredi after Santi Pacini, Carlo Cecci, Luigi Mulinelli, and Loranzo Martelli; 1 folding typographical table; folding flaps pasted to leaves 4/2v and 4/3r. 19th-century half vellum, marbled sides. In 1774 Grand Duke Peter Leopold of Tuscany promulgated Europe's first law concerning the hospitalization of persons recognized as being insane, and several years later he undertook to build a new hospital for the mentally ill. In 1875 the young physician Vincenzo Chiarugi, who had studied at the University of Pisa and then at the hospital of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, was given the responsibility for planning the new hospital of S. Bonifacio, which opened in 1788. The following year, the regulations of the hospital were published, together with the statues of the hospital of Santa Maria Novella. The statutues reflect Chiarugi's pioneering attitude towards the treatment of the insane: "A detailed history was required for each patient admitted to the hospital. The hospital was built to meet high hygienic standards, men were separated from women, and the rooms and furniture offered full protection to the patients... under no circumstances could force be used on patients, and the only methods of restriction allowed were strait jackets and strips of reinforced cotton, in order to prevent impairment in the patient's circulation... [It was] absolutely forbidden to make patients work for the hospital, except by a special prescription of the physician, in cases where certain activities [were] indicated as a form of therapy or relief" (G. Mora, 'Vincenzo Chiarugi', in Journal of the History of Medicine 14, 1959, p. 431). Chiarugi's experiences at S. Bonifacio formed the basis for his Della pazzia in genere e in specie , published in 1793-1794, in which he analyzed the nature of insanity and the treatment of the insane (see lot 370). Garrison-Morton 4020.2; Norman 474.