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In memory of Anna Maria Accerboni, a dear friend and master
«We are fond of Trieste for the tormented soul that it has given us. It tears us away from our niggling pains, and makes us belong to it, rendering us brothers of all contended lands».
In 1985 Anna Maria Accerboni and I ventured into the cellars of the former Psychiatric Hospital of Trieste, where the asylum archive's health and administrative papers were piled up. We were searching for the medical records drafted by Edoardo Weiss when he worked at the institution in the first 20 years of the last century. We patiently sieved through thousands of clinical diaries, selecting the ones which belonged to Weiss thanks to his unmistakeable handwriting. We were thus able to identify over three hundred case files which recorded the hospital stays of adult male patients of varying ethnic origin, language and religion, coming from different socio-economic backgrounds and suffering from a wide range of psychic and neurological pathologies (Accerboni and Corsa, 1987).1