Enrico Agostino Morselli (17 July 1852 – 18 February 1929) was an Italian

physician A physician, medical practitioner (British English), medical doctor, or simply doctor is a health professional who practices medicine, which is concerned with promoting, maintaining or restoring health through the Medical education, study, Med ...

and psychical researcher.

Work

Morselli was a professor at the

University of Turin The University of Turin (Italian language, Italian: ''Università degli Studi di Torino'', UNITO) is a public university, public research university in the city of Turin, in the Piedmont (Italy), Piedmont region of Italy. It is one of the List ...

. He is best known for the publication of his influential book ''Suicide: An Essay on Comparative Moral Statistics'' (1881) claiming that

suicide Suicide is the act of intentionally causing one's own death. Risk factors for suicide include mental disorders, physical disorders, and substance abuse. Some suicides are impulsive acts driven by stress (such as from financial or ac ...

was primarily the result of the struggle for life and nature's evolutionary process. 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''." Morselli was a

eugenicist Eugenics is a set of largely discredited beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetics, genetic quality of a human population. Historically, eugenicists have attempted to alter the frequency of various human Phenotype, phenotypes by ...

and some of his writings have been linked to scientific racialism. Morselli was also interested in

mediumship Mediumship is the practice of purportedly mediating communication between familiar spirits or ghost, spirits of the dead and living human beings. Practitioners are known as "mediums" or "spirit mediums". There are different types of mediumship or ...

and

psychical research Parapsychology is the study of alleged psychic phenomena (extrasensory perception, telepathy, teleportation, precognition, clairvoyance, psychokinesis (also called telekinesis), and psychometry) and other paranormal claims, for example, those r ...

. 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.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.

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 Fratelli Bocca Editori was an Italian publishing house. Their activity as printers in Piedmont dates back to the first decades of the 18th century. The business ceased in Milan in the 1950s. History Origins Antonio Secondo Bocca worked as a print ...

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Morselli, Henry 1852 births 1929 deaths Italian psychiatrists Parapsychologists Academic staff of the University of Turin