In August 1890, peasant woman Amalia Bagnacavalli traveled from her mountain village to Bologna in northern Italy to meet with Augusto Barbieri, a 28-year old lawyer. Their meeting spawned an unlikely 10-year odyssey in which the illiterate Amalia and her politically-minded attorney took on the medical establishment in Bologna and effectively changed the laws governing the treatment of wet nurses, while reaping a huge settlement.
Author David Kertzer’s achievement with “Amalia’s Tale” is to render an obscure and fascinating case as a riveting courtroom drama that touches on medical, legal and charitable ethics on the cusp of the 20th century. “Today too we witness the drama of a terrible disease passed between baby and the breast, but now it is infants, not the women who are nursing them, whose lives are at risk, threatened with infection by HIV-positive mothers,” Kertzer points out. “Today the kind of legal action that Amalia took, which then had no name, has become so common that it is part of a well-known category, the medical malpractice suit.”
Abandoned babies were such a huge problem in Italy that a series of Foundling hospitals were set up to attend to them. But then so many of those babies born with syphilis ended up passing it on to their wet nurses, young peasant women such as Amalia who were paid nine lire a month to nurse. (The train ride from Amalia’s hometown to Bologna was five lire.) “The nineteenth century was something of a high-water mark for syphilis in Europe,” Kertzer explains.
This was not an isolated issue – in the 1880s “34 former wet nurses had approached the hospital claiming they had been infected with the disease,” while “276 foundlings had been struck with syphilis.” The Bologna Foundling Hospital had a policy of paying for the treatment of the illness, on the quiet. The treatment included the use of mercury, which had a number of awful side effects.
At the heart of it all is Amalia, utterly baffled by the labyrinthine legal proceedings the author renders with such readable simplicity here. At the end of their case, Amalia and her husband Luigi are called into Barbieri’s office only to be informed that they can take no part in the ultimate settlement of 22,500 lire. It is an affecting scene, all the more so because it spells out the attorney’s gradual cynicism – the passion for social justice at 28 has curdled to a bullying opportunism within 10 years, devastating the couple who trusted him completely.
Amalia’s Tale
A Poor Peasant, An Ambitious Attorney, and a Fight for Justice
by David I. Kertzer
Houghton Mifflin