Amalia's Tale: A Poor Peasant, an Ambitious Attorney, and a Fight for Justice | 
 enlarge | Author: David I. Kertzer
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Category: Book
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 215166
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.5 x 1
ISBN: 0618551069
Dewey Decimal Number: 344.454104121
EAN: 9780618551064
ASIN: 0618551069
Publication Date: March 6, 2008
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Product Description
This quintessential David-and-Goliath saga tells the story of a wholly unexpected triumph of the poor against the rich and of a crusading city attorney who fought on behalf of an impoverished peasant.
Amalia Bagnacavalli, an illiterate young peasant from the mountains near Bologna, is forced by poverty to take in a child from the city's foundling home to wet-nurse. When Amalia contracts syphilis from the sickly and malformed baby given to her, the city fathers callously dismiss her pleas for treatment and restitution.
Bewildered and frightened, she seeks out Augusto Barbieri, an ambitious attorney looking to make a name for himself. He takes up Amalia's cause, fighting the case for years through the Italian courts before winning an unprecedented and stunning victory for his by now broken client. The unforgettable story of a landmark struggle for basic human rights, Amalia's Tale is the moving drama of a rural woman whose life was ruined and the man from the city who would not stop -- or so it seemed -- until he had seen justice done.
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A Dramatic and Forgotten Legal Episode March 14, 2008
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
The sexually transmitted diseases we have now are in addition to the ones we had a century ago. Syphilis is no longer the horror that it was because of antibiotics that were first used sixty years ago, although the problem of resistance means that it may regain its status as a sexual scourge. What it will never again regain is its danger of being transmitted from infants to their wet nurses. That this was a problem was mentioned in a medical text of 1498, shortly after the disease first showed up in Europe. An infected baby suckling at a nurse's nipple could easily transmit the disease. That this was an enormous problem, now nearly completely forgotten, is made clear in _Amalia's Tale: A Poor Peasant, an Ambitious Attorney, and a Fight for Justice_ (Houghton Mifflin) by historian David I. Kertzer. It is also a story of a legal battle with the peasant heroine facing off against the medical establishment, helped by a crusading attorney. It is thus a surprisingly engaging legal drama, pieced together from century-old archives and fleshed out with a flare for storytelling. Kertzer may be an academic (he is provost of Brown University and a professor of anthropology and Italian studies), but he has deliberately omitted footnotes, and as in his _The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara_, he has told a gripping story of a time, land, science, and social conditions very different from our own.
Bologna's foundling home was a charitable institution run by the rich and powerful, like its president Count Francesco Isolani. There was no way to feed the infants deposited in the foundling home except by hiring wet nurses. The wet nurse economy took infants from the foundling home itself and placed them in rural areas, with a stipend to the nurse that was a welcome supplement for those trying to get by on the land. The women might continue to get paid for raising the children as they grew older. One of these women was Amalia Bagnacavalli, who lived in the little hamlet of Oreglia twenty miles from Bologna. In 1890, she was 23 years old. She was married, and her one-year-old daughter was no longer nursing. She got a sickly baby from the foundling home, and eventually returned it, but contracted syphilis from the short time spent nursing. Kertzer demonstrates that a medical malpractice suit could not have been contemplated before the political upheaval Italy was undergoing, with leftist reforms and championing of the lower classes. Such movements were boosted by people like the young lawyer Augusto Barbieri who saw as his mission the protection of the poor and the institution of a more scientific government. Most of _Amalia's Tale_ has to do with the tangled path of the case through the courts, with expert testimony, shifty tactics on both sides, appeals, counter-appeals, and more. It was legally a victory for Amalia, but if you remember the case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce in _Bleak House_, the outcome was of as little monetary benefit. Eventually social changes, pasteurization, and the development of a reliable infant formula in the 1920s would completely seal the events described here into history.
It is still significant history, in Kertzer's hands, even though the episodes here are long gone and little-remembered. There are many modern parallels, however, and the phrase "medical malpractice suit" is quite familiar to us all, as are the legal shenanigans on display here, as is the spectacle of dueling medical experts and physicians affronted by any questioning of their judgement. Amalia's tale is a sad one of a muted victory. As Kertzer writes at the end of the book, "... back then, as today, when the world of the rich collides with that of the poor, it is rarely the rich who suffer."
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