Paolo Mantegazza

Paolo Mantegazza (Italian pronunciation: [ˈpaːolo manteˈɡattsa]; 31 October 1831 – 28 August 1910) was a prominent Italian neurologist, physiologist, and anthropologist, noted for his experimental investigation of coca leaves into its effects on the human psyche. He was also an author of fiction.

Mantegazza was born at Monza on 31 October 1831. After spending his student-days at the universities of Pisa and Milan, he gained his M.D. degree at Pavia in 1854. After travelling in Europe, India and the Americas, he practised as a doctor in the Argentine Republic and Paraguay. Returning to Italy in 1858 he was appointed surgeon at Milan Hospital, in Milan, and professor of general pathology at Pavia. In 1870 he was nominated professor of anthropology at the Istituto di Studi Superiori, Florence. Here he founded the first Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology in Italy, and later the Italian Anthropological Society. From 1865 until 1876 he was deputy for Monza in the Parliament of Italy, being elected subsequently to the Italian Senate. He became the object of fierce attacks because of the extent to which he practiced vivisection.

During a time when the popular and official science and culture in Italy were still influenced by the Roman Catholic Church, Mantegazza was a staunch liberal and defended the ideas of Darwinism in anthropology, his research having helped to establish it as the "natural history of man". From 1868 to 1875 he maintained a correspondence with Charles Darwin, too. Mantegazza's natural history, however, must be considered to be from a racial or social Darwinist perspective, evident in his "Morphological Tree of Human Races." This tree maps three principles: a single European meta-narrative controls all of the world's many cultures; human history is imagined as progressive, with the European human as the pinnacle of progress and development; lastly, a ranking of different races onto a hierarchical structure. If one envisions a tree, the Aryan race is the topmost branch, followed by Polynesians, Semites, Japanese, and moving downward to the bottom-most branch, the "Negritos." Mantegazza also designed an "Aesthetic Tree of the Human Race" with similar results.

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