First notes on the files in the archives of the San Giacomo Hospital in Verona: the case of G. C.

Abstract

The archives of the former mental asylum in Verona contain more than 37,000 medical records relating to the years 1880-1980; many of the records contain private writings of patients, which offer numerous and varied reasons for interest in relation to the relationship between language and mental illness and to the evaluation of the linguistic skills of writers with different levels of schooling, at a time when the national language was still being defined. The paper proposes a linguistic analysis of two letters by a semi literate writer, written in 1895-1896, and defines their main graphic, phonetic, morphological, syntactic and lexical features. The two letters are addressed to his father and to the psychiatrist: despite the writing difficulties common to both, it is possible to verify how the writer was aware of the addressee and tried to adapt the register according to the addressee.