- Paolo Mantegazza
Paolo Mantegazza (1831–1910) was a prominent Italian neurologist,
physiologist andanthropologist , noted for the isolation ofcocaine fromcoca leaves and his experimental investigation into its effects on the human psyche. He was also a writer offiction .Life
Mantegazza was born at
Monza onOctober 31 ,1831 . After spending his student-days at the universities of Pisa and Milan, he gained hisM.D. degree at Pavia in 1854. After travelling inEurope ,India and theAmericas , he practised as a doctor in the Argentine Republic andParaguay . Returning to Italy in 1858 he was appointed surgeon atMilan Hospital , inMilan , and professor of generalpathology atPavia . In 1870 he was nominated professor of anthropology at theIstituto di Studi Superiori ,Florence . Here he founded the first Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology in Italy, and later theItalian Anthropological Society . From 1865 to 1876 he was deputy for Monza in theParliament of Italy , subsequently being elected to theItalian Senate . He became the object of bitter attacks on the ground of the extent to which he carried the practice ofvivisection .In a time when the popular and official science and culture in Italy were still under heavy influence of the
Roman Catholic Church , Mantegazza was a staunch liberal and defended the ideas ofDarwinism in anthropology, his research having helped to establish it as the "natural history of man". From 1868 to 1875 he maintained a correspondence withCharles Darwin , too. Mantegazza's natural history, however, must be considered to be from a racist/social Darwinist perspective, evident in his "Morphological Tree of Human Races." This tree maps three principles: a single European metanarrative marshals all of the world's many cultures; human history is imagined as progressive, with the European human as the pinnacle of progress and development; lastly, a ranking of different races onto a hierarchical structure. If one envisions a tree, the Aryan race is the topmost branch, followed by Polynesians, Semites, Japanese, and moving downward to the bottommost branch, the "Negritos." Mantegazza also designed an "Aesthetic Tree of the Human Race" with similar results.Paolo Mantegazza also believed that drugs and certain foods would change humankind in the future, and defended the experimental investigation and use of
cocaine as one of these miracle drugs (its addiction potential was not known at the time). When Mantegazza returned fromPeru , where he had witnessed the use of coca by the natives, he was able to chew a regular amount of coca leaves and then tested on himself in 1859. Afterwards, he wrote a paper titled "Sulle Virtù Igieniche e Medicinali della Coca e sugli Alimenti Nervosi in Generale" ("On the hygienic and medicinal properties of coca and on nervous nourishment in general"). He noted enthusiastically the powerful stimulating effect of cocaine in coca leaves oncognition :"... I sneered at the poor mortals condemned to live in this valley of tears while I, carried on the wings of two leaves of coca, went flying through the spaces of 77,438 words, each more splendid than the one before...An hour later, I was sufficiently calm to write these words in a steady hand: God is unjust because he made man incapable of sustaining the effect of coca all life long. I would rather have a life span of ten years with coca than one of 10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 centuries without coca." "
Mantegazza died at San Terenzo (
La Spezia ) in 1910.Works
Mantegazza's published works also included "Fisiologia del Dolore" (Physiology of
Pain , 1880); "Fisiologia dell'Amore" (Physiology of Love, 1896); "Elementi d'igiene" (Elements ofHygiene , 1875); "Fisonomia e Mimica" (Physiognomy andMimics , 1883); "Gli Amori degli Uomini" (The Sexual Relations of Mankind, 1885); "Fisiologia dell'odio", (Physiology of Hate, 1889); and "Fisiologia della Donna" (Physiology of Women, 1893). His advanced philosophical and social views were published in a 1,200-page volume in 1871, titled "Quadri della Natura Umana. Feste ed Ebbrezze" ("Pictures of Human Nature. Feasts and Inebriations"). Many consider this opus hismasterpiece .As a fiction writer, Mantegazza was very original and daring. He wrote a romance on the marriage between people with disease, " Un Giorno a Madera" (1876), which made quite a sensation. Less well known is his
science fiction and futuristic romance "L'Anno 3000 " (The Year 3000, written in 1897).References
* Mantegazza, P.: "L'Anno 3000". Milano, 1897. (in Italian: [http://www.nigralatebra.it/anno3000/Anno3000rtf.zip Zipped RTF full text] from Nigralatebra, or [http://www.intratext.com/X/ITA1698.HTM HTML full text with concordance] from IntraText Digital Library).
* Mantegazza, P.: "Un Giorno a Madera". (in Italian: [http://www.intratext.com/X/ITA1288.HTM HTML full text with concordance] from IntraText Digital Library).
* Mantegazza, P.: "Studi sui Matrimoni Consanguini". (in Italian: [http://www.intratext.com/X/ITA1699.HTM HTML full text with concordance] from IntraText Digital Library).
* [http://darwin.lib.cam.ac.uk/perl/nav?pclass=name;pkey=Mantegazza%2C%20Paolo;refs=y The Darwin-Mantegazza Correspondence] . The Darwin Correspondence On-Line Database.
* McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Context. New York, Routledge, 1995.External links
* [http://cocaine.org/mantegazza/ Paolo Mantegazza on the power of coca] . Cocaine.org.
ource
*1911
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