Overview

The Man Who Crucified Himself is the history of a sensational nineteenth-century medical case. In 1805 a shoemaker called Mattio Lovat attempted to crucify himself in Venice. His act raised a furore, and the story spread across Europe. For the rest of the century Lovat’s case fuelled scientific and popular debates on medicine, madness, suicide and religion. Drawing on Italian, German, English and French sources, Maria Böhmer traces the multiple readings of the case and identifies various 'interpretive communities'. Her meticulously researched study sheds new light on Lovat’s case and offers fresh insights on the case narrative as a genre - both epistemic and literary.

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Overall, Boehmer's study contributes broadly to scholarship on epistemic genres and specifically to our understanding of the role of case histories in the history of psychiatry. Alexandra Bamji (University of Leeds), Bull. Hist. Med., 2020, Vol. 94 (3), 527-528 pp. Maria Boehmer's The Man Who Crucified Himself is an important contribution to many convergent fields: the history of medicine, and especially surgery; nineteenth century Italian history; the history of medical communication; and, last but not least, the history of one crucial textual genre in medicine, the case, as defined by Gianna Pomata for the early modern period. [...] The book is an exciting reading for specialists, but it can also be fruitfully used in the classroom, to illustrate the multiple layers and diverse adventures and uses of medical narratives in the long nineteenth century. Maria Conforti (History of Medicine and Bioethics, Sapienza University, Rome, Italy), Journal of the History of Medicine, Vol. 75 (3), 2020, 346-347 pp.

Maria Boehmer's The Man Who Crucified Himself is an important contribution to many convergent fields: the history of medicine, and especially surgery; nineteenthcentury Italian history; the history of medical communication; and, last but not least, the history of one crucial textual genre in medicine [...] The book is an exciting reading for specialists, but it can also be fruitfully used in the classroom, to illustrate the multiple layers and diverse adventures and uses of medical narratives in the long nineteenth century. - Maria Conforti (Sapienza University, Rome, Italy), Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Volume 75, Issue 3, July 2020, Pages 346-347

Author Information

Maria Böhmer, Ph.D. (2013), European University Institute Florence, Italy, is postdoctoral research fellow in the history of medicine at the Institute of Biomedical Ethics and History of Medicine (IBME) at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.

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