Rough Skin: An Introduction

Abstract

AbstractWe begin this chapter, and the book, with the tragic story of Mattio Lovat (1806), to introduce the then fairly new and little-understood disease, known in Italy as pellagra—literally, ‘rough skin’, after its primary manifestation. But dermatitis was only the first of the infamous ‘four Ds’, to which we can add diarrhoea, dementia and death. Italy and the United States would be the countries most affected by the disease, but pellagra was either epidemic, endemic or occasional in many other areas where maize cultivation and consumption was widespread. We suggest that what must have seemed like a positive agricultural development—the introduction of the Central American plant maize, with its prodigious yields and its ability to feed so many—had some unintended consequences in Italy over the course of the long nineteenth century. If it became a celebrated part of local culture and diet, because of its very success, maize cultivation altered longstanding landholding patterns and adversely affected peasant conditions and livelihoods. A combination of poverty and meagre diet resulted in endemic pellagra, with an estimated 100,000 sufferers in Italy by the late 1870s. We conclude this chapter by outlining the aims and structure of the book.