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Some areas of Northern Italy, especially Ferrara during the nineteenth century, represent privileged observatories regard to malaria, a disease that affected the poor, but did not spare the rich and powerful people. The so called Delta of the River Po, as well as the Maremma and other lowland areas in Italy, was particularly noted for its marshland environment (mosquito breeding grounds). Spared from Malaria because of the better hygienic conditions of the city that restricted the proliferation of anopheles, Ferrara represented an important study centre due to the presence of renowned physicians and scientists who exchanged knowledge and findings in the medical academies. Among these, Antonio Campana was very attentive to the latest scientific findings, and wrote about antimalarial remedies in his famous Ferrarese Pharmacopoeia. This paper analyses the main remedies listed in the various editions of Campana Pharmacopoeia since 1798 and particularly that of 1841, in the reports from the Accademia Medico Chirurgica di Ferrara and of Argenta physicians of the mid nineteenth century and in the Reports (1871 and 1876) from Alessandro Bennati, director of Arcispedale Santa Anna and concerned with hospital practice. Other printed documents referring to the town of Argenta are discussed.

The paper describes the private book collection owned by Adalberto Pazzini and kept in the Library of the Sezione di Storia della Medicina. Gathered from the 1930s to the 1970s, the collection allows a reconstruction of the 'state of the art' of medical history in this period in Italy. Books were sent and dedicated to Pazzini by colleagues, mostly active in Italy and in the Spanish-speaking countries; many of them deal with the history of medicine, but some also with medicine itself.

The first part of the paper deals with the Italian tradition of medical history in the 1930s, when Adalberto Pazzini became the most successful medical historian in Italy. Its second part deals with the founding and renovation (1938 and 1954 respectively) of the Istituto di Storia della Medicina at Rome University, with a description of the innovative--and largely utopian--planning of the Library and of the Museum and didactic collections by Pazzini.

The archival fund by Giuseppe Montalenti, the distinguished Italian genetist and biologist, comprehends correspondence--both personal and scientific--, papers on his activity as a collaborator to the Enciclopedia Treccani, documentation on Montalenti's engagement in the politics of science in Italy and abroad in the 1950s-60s, a collection of offprints and books. A large part of the archive refers to the activities of the IUSB (International Union of Biological Sciences).

Gout is one of the oldest known diseases. The term derives from the Latin "gutta", which means "a drop" This word expresses and describes, as no other term can, a method of interpreting the pathologies that have been with us for more than 2000 yrs. The theory of humoral disturbance goes back to the time of Hippocrates. This paper is a historical review of gout, with particular attention given to the interpretation of the origins of clinical, articular and renal involvement allowing us paradigmatically to sum up all the stages in the evolution of the etiopathogenetic and nosographic concepts of medicine through the ages.

The paper illustrates the archival work on the repository of historical documentation kept in the Hospital (documents from the end of the XIX century to 1978, the year of the Basaglia reform of psychiatric asylums). The paper also deals with the history of the Hospital, 1870 to our days, highlighting the 1913 opening of the 'Nuovo Manicomio Provinciale', and its subsequent evolution and administration, first by the Provincia di Roma then by USL and ASL.

The Parasitology Institute of the University of Rome "La Sapienza" keeps documents from the Societa per gli Studi della Malaria, from the Istituto Superiore di Malariologia Ettore Marchiafava and from the Ente Regionale per la Lotta Antianofelica in Sardegna (Erlaas). The papers arrived in the private Archive of Guido Casini, malariologist and secretary of the Istituto Marchiafava, who involved himself in many activities performed by those Bureaux and who recently gave the documentary sources as a donation to the Parasitology Institute. The intervention of reorganization and inventory of the Guido Casini Fund is in its final phase; it will allow to reconstruct the institutional events of these Bureaux and to point out their important sanitary, scientific and political contribution in Italy and abroad.

The paper makes some references to the documentary funds for malaria history retained in state and private archives. The most important are seven: the State archives of Cagliari, Sassari, Nuoro, the Provincial administration archive of Sassari, the ERLAAS (Ente regionale per la lotta antianofelica in Sardegna) archive. The private archives are deposited in town libraries of Iglesias and Olzai. The documentation available allows to carry out a lot of research on various courses; a) activity of land reclamation on marshy zones between XIX and XXth century; b) issues of the anti-malarial legislation in the early twentieth century for peculiar social classes such as railwaymen and miners. They were the first to assay the quinine for preventive treatment; c) the anti-anopheles struggle during the Fasciste regime (it was carried out with oil and Paris green and with the predator fish of the genus Gambusia as well) d) organization of anti-anopheles campaign of ERLASS after World War II.

This article offers an overview on the roman Archivio Storico Capitolino papers reconstructing the history of malaria in the city of Rome and in the countryside from 1870 to the 2nd post-war period. The researches must be based on the critical evaluation of the Deliberations of the Consiglio Comunale of Rome, reflecting the social history of life in the city. The chronological continuity of this archivistic series allows to follow the history of Malaria in Rome since the Unity of Italy. The papers of the VIII Bureau of Hygiene and Sanity offer interesting points of views for the period 1883-1940, useful for deeply investigating the attitude of Roman Administration towards the fight against malaria. The roman Library of the Archivio Capitolino keeps an important bibliography, collected by the Campidoglio since the past century.

The changes of legal condition that the hospitals have had in these last years, have caused great problems also in the Archives' administration produced by those. In particular, there is a lamentation for lack of exact rules which regulate the preservation and the order of clinical fulders, although during these last years SIASO (Italian Society for Sanitary Hospital Archives) is working very much. Photographic supports or other things in place of paper documentation and the archives' administration of hospital institutions on behalf of a third party (records management) do not seem suitable and convenient solutions to safeguard documents that must not be considered from a bureaucratic point of view, but above all from a historical and cultural one.