Abstract
Agostino Gemelli (1878–1959) is known as the founder of the Catholic University in Italy. Franciscan monk and doctor he had a central role in promoting studies on human behavior, thanks to his solid scientific training as a student of Camillo Golgi at the University of Pavia. His research activities during the years of the First World War involved studying the motivation, courage and psychological adaptation of the soldiers, engaged in trench warfare, laying the foundations of modern studies of behavior and trauma.
“Fear is not a disease” said the physician appointed to certify to the fitness for service of Italian airmen during the First World War. The physician in question was Agostino Gemelli, a Franciscan friar, physician and founder of Italy’s first Catholic University. 1 In 1917, Gemelli was appointed director of the Cabinet for Psychophysical Research on Aviation, where pilots were tested, and in the same year he published his work entitled “Our Soldier” [Il Nostro Soldato], which forms the main subject of this article.
To understand how Father Gemelli came to occupy such an important and delicate post, we need to go back to the earlier stages of his life.
Education, training and research
Born on 18 January 1878 in Milan to Innocente Gemelli and Caterina Bertani, his name was originally Edoardo (he acquired the name of Agostino when he took holy orders) and he grew up in a bourgeois family that was certainly not particularly religious. His father, an anticlerical freemason, ran a famous coffee shop in the city center. After primary school, Edoardo went to a state boarding school (1888–1896), where he showed little respect for the rules and he avoided attending any religious services. In 1896, he joined the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Pavia, where he was admitted two years later to the prestigious Collegio Ghislieri, but he was expelled for not otherwise specified “severe failings” in 1902, just before he was due to graduate. 2 The fact that he was a very convinced follower of Camillo Golgi (Bartolomeo Camillo Emilio Golgi: Córteno, 7 July 1843 – Pavia, 21 January 1926), full professor of General Pathology who was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1906, probably had something to do with it: Gemelli probably experienced his attachment as a sense of belonging and partisanship in opposition to other masters and other laboratories. He even went so far as to slap a pupil of the Institute of Pathological Anatomy (whose laboratories worked in antithesis with Golgi’s) during a heated discussion at the college refectory. At Camillo Golgi’s laboratory, Gemelli studied physiopathology and histology. While still a student in his fourth year, he published his first scientific paper in 1900, entitled A contribution to our understanding of the structure of the pituitary gland in mammals, which appeared in the Bulletin of the Society of Medicine and Surgery in Pavia. Gemelli’s years of study in Pavia also profoundly influenced the political path he was to embark on. Gemelli was interested in socialist ideas, and he took part in protests and organized campaigning meetings. It was after some other socialists accused Golgi of being a reactionary (although he was a positivist and anticlerical), that Gemelli first began to move away from the party, and he was eventually expelled from socialist circles. At the same time, he developed more links with Catholic circles, often engaging in lively debates.
His encounters with priests who were also scholars of science probably had an influence on his gradual passage from anticlericalism and materialist faith, to a religious vocation. Among such figures, it is worth mentioning the mathematician and astronomer Pietro Maffi (Corteolona, 12 October 1858 – Pisa, 17 March 1931), future Archbishop of Pisa and cardinal, and director of the Journal of Physics, Mathematics and Natural Sciences, in which Gemelli published some of his studies.
Gemelli graduated with full marks on 9 July 1902, presenting a dissertation on the embryology and anatomy of the pituitary gland that was published and won him a prize, and an appointment as assistant to Golgi. While waiting to do his military service, he trained for three months at the Ospedale Maggiore in Milan, where he also wrote six scientific papers. Instead of going to the Army’s School of Medicine in Florence as an officer, he enlisted for military service in the ranks, working at the Army’s hospital in Milan, which had its headquarters in the city center in what was once a Benedictine monastery in Piazza S. Ambrogio. The people he met socially in Milan led Gemelli to start attending religious services again in April 1903. When he subsequently told his parents that he planned to embark on a religious life, his idea met with such disapproval that, after completing his year of military service, he went to the Franciscan monastery in Rezzato (in the province of Brescia) instead of returning to his family. In a vain attempt to make his son change his mind, Edoardo’s father delivered the letter in which his son had informed the family of his decision to the Corriere della Sera (Italy’s most important national daily): this prompted a journalistic debate on whether faith was compatible with a man of science. On 23 November 1903, Gemelli was admitted to the Franciscan order and he was named Brother Agostino. After a year of novitiate, he took his first vows on 23 December 1904, and was sent first to Dongo (on Lake Como) to study philosophy and theology, and then to Rezzato, and ultimately to Milan, to join the St. Anthony’s brotherhood, where he not only studied the history of Christianity and of the Church, and such topics as spirituality and theology, but he was also granted permission to continue to pursue his studies of physiology and histology (which he had suspended during the year of his novitiate).
He was ordained on 14 March 1908. Partly due to an incompatibility established by canonical law, he chose not to practice as a physician, and decided instead to focus his research in physiology and neurology in the direction of psychology; this enabled him to provide some fundamental experimental grounds for this discipline. 3
Alongside his scientific interests, Gemelli dedicated his attention with his characteristic forcefulness to promoting Catholic culture, especially in the scientific field. Among his eclectic activities in 1908, Gemelli held a conference in Palermo on the diseases affecting workers in the sulfur-mining industry: this was his first study in the sphere of occupational medicine, in which he later established a school.
Gemelli’s cultural interests went beyond the boundaries of Italy. Seeking other models and experiences from which to learn, he started publishing a journal of neoscholastic philosophy (along the lines of the Revue néo-scolastique de philosophie edited by Lovanio) in 1909, together with a group of Catholic philosophers, with help from the philosopher Désiré-Félicien-François-Joseph Mercier (21 November 1851–23 January 1926), who subsequently became a cardinal and the primate of Belgium.
Between 1910 and 1914, Gemelli went several times to Germany, where he studied at scientific laboratories in Bonn, Munich and Berlin. In 1912, he attended the physiology laboratory at the University of Bonn directed by Max Verworn (Berlin, 4 November 1863 – Bonn, 23 November 1921), and the general biology laboratory directed by Moritz Nussbaum, who appointed Gemelli to conduct a study on the anterior roots of the spinal cord. Gemelli then developed his research in Frankfurt am Mein at the neurology clinic run by Ludwig Edinger (Worms, 13 April 1855 – Frankfurt am Main, 26 January 1918), and later at the Nervenklinik in Munich directed by the psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin (Neustrelitz, 15 February 1856 – Munich, 7 October 1926). Gemelli established a fruitful scientific partnership with Kraepelin.
Between 1912 and 1914, Gemelli was in Würzburg, Bonn and Munich to attend lectures and the laboratory of Oswald Külpe (Kandau, 3 August 1862 – Munich, 30 December 1915), a dissident pupil of Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt. It was Külpe who, having noted the close links between psychology and physiology, proposed an approach based on “controlled introspection.” Gemelli completed his education in psychology by attending lectures given by Friedrich Kiesow (Brüel, 28 March 1858 – Turin, 2 December 1940), another of Wundt’s pupils, at the University of Turin. Under Kiesow’s supervision, he became professor of experimental psychology in 1914, subsequently holding courses at the University of Turin, at the scientific-literary Academy in Milan in the early years after the war, and subsequently at the Catholic University founded in 1921.
What interested Gemelli was an experimental psychology influenced by European scientific thinking, with solid empirical roots. There was no space for Freud’s theories, which had little appeal for most of the Italian psychologists of his time. Gemelli’s militant Catholicism also placed him in the front line whenever the Vatican opposed the claims advanced in certain scientific environments. Far from trying to evade this role, Gemelli occupied it with conviction, as we can see from the formidable debate aroused by his stance on the “Lourdes issue.” 2 His opinion was utterly clear: pilgrims could really be cured there, and his scientific knowledge certified to the fact. The reaction of the medical profession was not long in coming, and Gemelli was accused of behaving like a doctor with priests, and like a priest with doctors. The controversy drove Gemelli to adopt a spiritualist attitude and his detractors to become more scientistic. In a fiery meeting of the professional order of physicians in Milan on an evening of January 1910, 2 brought under control with some difficulty by Giuseppe Forlanini (brother of the well-known respiratory physiologist and director of the Policlinico in Milan), Gemelli had to stand up to his colleagues and the most combative amongst them were the socialists, Gemelli’s one-time party comrades (Paolo Pini and Filippetti, future mayor of Milan).
Meanwhile, the lengthy period of peace in Europe known as the belle époque was coming to an end. There was a growing, generalized desire for war. In France, there was an outburst of passion for the Revanche, and a violent urge to cancel the shame of the defeat suffered by the French in 1870. In Italy, there was irredentist talk of a fourth War of Independence to conquer the cities of Trento and Trieste. The Futurist movement guided by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (Alexandria [Egypt], 22 December 1876 – Bellagio, 2 December 1944) and the “warrior poet” Gabriele d’Annunzio (Pescara, 12 March 1863 – Gardone Riviera, 1 March 1938) were the main cultural animators of Italy’s interventionism, nourished by an exasperated nationalism and a sort of cult for the sacred value of the fatherland supported by the religious authorities, and a fervent contempt for deserters and dodgers.
Gemelli’s frequent visits to Germany did not prevent him from voicing his opinions on the political situation. When war broke out in the autumn of 1914, Gemelli took a trip to Munich and noted how compact the German nation was, the conflict uniting men of all classes and all parties.
Called to arms as a medical second lieutenant in the territorial army, Gemelli focused on his military career. He was promoted to lieutenant and then to captain, being destined to the High Command where he also served as chaplain for the staff officers, together with Father Semeria.
Giovanni Semeria (Coldirodi, 26 September 1867 – Sparanise, 15 March 1931) was army chaplain and the personal confessor of General Luigi Cadorna (Pallanza, 4 September 1850 – Bordighera, 21 December 1928), Chief of the Army General Staff. General Cadorna also employed Semeria as a preacher, sending him to the front lines, and Gemelli emulated Semeria in this role, driving a High Command car to visit and incite the troops. After a private interview, Pope Benedict XV authorized him to deal directly with the army chaplains. In Udine, Gemelli established and directed a laboratory of applied psychophysiology that was used to select airmen. He took an active part in some in-flight experiments (and earned his pilot’s license in the 1930s).
Gemelli also studied cases of traumatic shock in many soldiers, setting up a hospital alongside the psychophysiology laboratory for the early treatment of such cases, and conducting scientific observations on life in the trenches.
After the war, Agostino Gemelli was a public figure who made a profound mark on the Italian cultural panorama. His postwar career was not without its battles too, and its contradictions. Gemelli helped to hasten the decline of Cesare Lombroso’s (1835–1909) positivist determinism, and he founded the first Catholic University. On the other hand, when he was cooperating actively with the Fascists, his attitudes were sometimes openly anti-Semitic. However, as stated by J C Hammond: Reducing the complexity of Gemelli's activity to a manifestation of clerical fascism obscures the fact that he, like many Italian Catholics who formed a consensus of sorts with the Fascist state, retained a cultural, social, and political vision that looked beyond Fascism.
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Our soldier
This paper focuses on his interests towards the end of the First World War, when Gemelli collected his studies on the psychology of soldiery in his volume Il nostro soldato. Saggi di psicologia militare [Our soldier. Essays on military psychology], published by Fratelli Treves of Milan in 1917. 5 He had published the essay forming the subject of the present article as a Franciscan minority. His aim had been to identify the most successful methods for motivating the troops in the front line, and he was writing after Pope Benedict XV had announced that the war was a “useless massacre.”
The introduction was written by Father Semeria, one of the best-known public figures of Italian Catholicism in the early twentieth century. Without rhetoric, the book discusses the matter of fear and courage in war, going beyond what Semeria called the “… idea of the soldier as the product of a conventionalism dictated by the circumstances.” The book belongs to the scientific literature analyzing fear and courage, and it was written by one of the first Italian and international psychologists to apply a scientific method to this topic. Clinicians had traditionally seen fear essentially as a pathological condition to be treated, but the Great War posed the problem of how to deal with fear in the single combatant and the army division not as a disease, but as an instinct for self-preservation that the soldiers had to ignore in order to go on fighting.
Gemelli’s soldier is just that because he has successfully completed his training, and because being in the trench (in Gemelli’s words) is tantamount to preparing for the assault. As the officers tell the resting soldiers when the guns fall silent, the trench is not designed as a place to stay. But the soldier’s training has often been short and very basic. For vast masses of peasants, the trenches of the Great War mean industrialization (weapons and means of transport), a forced urbanization (anthills of trenches and underground passages like a subterranean city, or a city on ice in the mountain ranges of the white war), and literacy (mountains of letters sent home from the front). The sudden break with the past and the war as a watershed is experienced, with some confusion, by the men at the front too. Gemelli’s positivism seems to be unscathed by the speed of the historical change. As he sees it, a man can become a soldier and cope with the most terrible trials, without harking back to the heroic ideals of the Risorgimento (the nineteenth-century movement for the political unification of Italy).
To see how this can happen, we need to follow our Franciscan friar-cum-soldier’s explanation step by step. Gemelli says we need to step back from the view according to which courage in war is attributable to a “genetic”, individual heroism. But we also need to understand that what really decides an army’s success is its soldiers’ attitude, so we have to train soldiers to go unquestioningly into action, forge their bravery, especially in a national army like the Italian one made up of soldiers from very different regions, with different dialects and customs. Converting a man into a soldier begins with his mobilization, when he has to leave behind his home and family, and develop a new sense of belonging to his army corps.
Gemelli understands the problems posed by a mass war that involves extenuating hours of waiting for the order to charge, so he focuses his analysis mainly on life in the trenches. It is up to the NCOs (non-commissioned officers) and officers, and to those generally more experienced in life in the trenches to bring about gradually the soldiers’ conversion. But what kind of conversion does our priest and soldier Gemelli have in mind? He says this involves a “gradual fading” of the man’s awareness induced by the monotony of life in the trenches, interrupted only by the bombing the soldiers suffer, that leads to a genuine “shrinking of the field of his consciousness”, an impoverishment of the spirit that necessarily leads to “an impoverishment of the individual’s baggage of images.” This is the only way to ensure that the officer’s word can penetrate the psyche of the soldier, with the requisite power of suggestion. There is a uniformity of the soldier’s landscape, and of the sounds he hears. It is no accident that Gemelli never mentions the exchanges of letters with the family at home (which were sometimes censored and consequently characterized by a uniformity of content, partly favored by the soldier’s low level of schooling).
The difficulty lies in the hours of waiting, without losing heart or showing signs of insubordination. This means that the whole machine must function smoothly, with meals arriving on time, regular changes of the guard, a shift system on the frontline, to avoid disrupting the routines of men reduced to minimum levels of humanity, or allowing them to “lose their grip.” While recent historians emphasize how the Italian front was also an opportunity for emancipation for masses of semi-literate peasants, 6 in 1917 Gemelli suggests that it is the appalling poverty of the soldiers’ horizons that induces them to leap out of the trenches at the right moment without thinking too hard about it.
Concerning the role of religion in the war, Gemelli certainly did not seem convinced that its contribution could motivate the soldiers. In fact, he put a good deal of energy into demonstrating that the trenches were an unlikely place for conversions and the soldiers had little time for religion when they were preparing to charge, whereas their religious interest returned very strongly amongst the wounded in the hospital wards. Gemelli said, “There is no religious rebirth,” and he described the soldiers’ servile faith as being prompted by fear, judging it to be no more valuable than superstition, and to leave no trace once the imminent danger had passed.
Gemelli is no fool and he makes a deliberate effort to avoid producing a theoretical analysis. To his mind, the psychological forces at play are more influential than the cannons, but he adds: “I support no theory. My comments are the conclusions of a psychological investigation that I have conducted with a positive and strictly scientific method.” He is convinced that his analysis must shed light on opposing psychological phenomena: extreme cowardliness and claims to invulnerability that he himself has witnessed (“on the matter of courage, I have noted daily variations due to influences that it is impossible to grasp and analyze (…) a person is not always fearful or always brave”), obstinate beliefs (the conviction that it is impossible to go beyond a certain elevation, or that a certain emplacement is impregnable even though it is actually semi-deserted and there is no machine gun) and the many superstitions so common in war.
Much has been written about the acoustic trauma experienced by soldiers during the Great War, about the rumble of the artillery in Verdun that could be heard – Gemelli tells us – even as far away as in Clermont-Ferrand, or about the roar of the howitzers on the French side of the Western front that even reached the streets of London given the right weather conditions. We have often read about the alphabet of sounds made by shrapnel and grenades in a war in which the soldiers’ apprenticeship was primarily acoustic. Nobody can clearly see what is happening beyond the edge of the trench, the only visual information comes from little mirrors attached to the end of a stick.
Soldiers soon learn to distinguish between friendly and enemy fire, like the difference in the noise made by a 75 mm and the duller sound of the larger-caliber artillery. On the topic of a front where the war is blind right up until the moment of the charge, Gemelli writes his most evocative pages on how soldiers prepare for the assault and the unknown: Here they are, waiting for an order to leave the trench in waves, to join in the assault. They are already standing, armed and equipped. The diggers have cut steps in the sides of the trenches. Everyone has his bayonet in place. Their hand grenades are ready; their gas masks too. The officer holds his watch and waits for the hands to reach the decisive moment. These young men all seem so calm. Anyone who has not been in a trench at the tragic moment that comes before the charge cannot possibly imagine the sentiments that populate the soul of the soldier. The successive waves of men advance and then disappear; some seem to just sink into the void, others lie motionless on the ground, and others arrive at the enemy trenches to fight face-to-face.
According to Gemelli’s description, there is no time to think. You just have to focus on the look in the eyes of the NCOs who have already seen so much and are still amongst us. Now that the wave of men has emerged from the trench and come out into the open, the soldier falls into a state of semi-consciousness that does not prevent him from taking action, from advancing towards the enemy. How long does the action last? Nobody can tell, and this happens in battle just as in any other genuinely demanding action, even in sports.
Finally comes the extreme fatigue described by Gemelli, possibly compounded by the cognac, and with it comes a renewed awareness and the shadow of alienation.
It is then, and only then, that the soldiers feel a vague sense of solidarity and of a destiny shared even with the enemy soldiers. Gemelli suggests that the moral insensitivity that has kept the soldiers alive during the assault, and even believing that wounding others reduces the risk of being wounded themselves (with a beneficial effect on their courage) gives way to compassion. According to Gemelli, it is difficult to expect there to be room for such a sentiment – even for a soldier on one’s own side, in an effort to save him after he has been half-buried by a grenade – while a soldier is under fire during a battle.
The friar-soldier exalts the shrinkage of the field of consciousness that the soldiers experience, imagining the utility of a soldier mass-produced like Ford’s Model T 6 – an individual with no personality essential to the success of the command-plug mechanism. Because, as Gemelli explains, “this enables the officer’s words to have the necessary power of suggestion for the soldier.” He even goes so far as to see as honorable the way in which the soldiers adapt to living the life of a mole: “It is comforting to observe this phenomenon! (…) we saw hundreds of thousands of men facing death every day with serenity, even with joy.”
Gemelli describes the breathing of the army as a psychic metamorphosis of the contracting and dilating individual and collective consciousness that is functional to the art of war: from civilian to soldier under training, to soldier in the trenches, to soldier in the assault, to war veteran. But what happens if the troops’ systolic and diastolic rhythm is disrupted? This occurred collectively on the Eastern front in 1917, when the forces arriving from the rear gained the upper hand (some historians have described the Communist revolution in terms of a mass desertion 7 ), and also individually on the Western front with desertion and self-inflicted injuries. Desertions and self-inflicted injuries were signs of the failure of Gemelli’s soldier training program. But such behavior was punished so severely that it comes naturally to imagine that psychological motives more profound than mere self-interest were involved.
Deserters were simply executed, but the fate of those found guilty of self-inflicted injury was sometimes no much better. Approximately 15,000 soldiers were accused of self-mutilation and 10,000 of them were variously condemned. Gemelli did his part too. As of 1917, he was called to direct the Cabinet for Psychophysical Research on Aviation and to conduct medical examinations on pilots. 8 “His medical examinations were much feared. There was always the risk of him rejecting someone who wanted to fly or sending someone who didn’t back into the air,” wrote Giorgio Cosmacini in a biography dedicated to Gemelli. 2
From 24 October to 12 November 1917, the Austro-Hungarian army broke through the Italian lines; the troops were exhausted from eleven previous battles along the Isonzo and had to withdraw to the river Piave. At this time, Caporetto prompted a furious debate on what the military authorities called the “moral collapse” responsible for the Italians' defeat. They also accused the clergy of being defeatist, after the stance taken by Pope Benedict XV in August 1917 against the “useless massacre” of the war. But Gemelli was untouched by the wave of criticism and remained firmly in his place. Clearly the author of Our soldier could hardly be accused of wishing to demotivate the troops.
The captain Agostino Gemelli on the Italian front line. Source: Archives of the Università Cattolica Sacro Cuore. The monk Agostino Gemelli attending to the histology lab in Milan. Source: Archives of the Università Cattolica Sacro Cuore.
Conclusions
Gemelli represents an anomaly: after being a fervent admirer of German culture, he sided with the interventionists when the war broke out; after studying with the biologist Camillo Golgi, he did not hesitate to follow his religious vocation; after enrolling in the Socialist Youth, he embraced the idea of a national uprising; all these reasons exposed Gemelli to contradictions, but also help to explain his strengths in dealing with the topic of military psychology.
War can drive men mad. That is why the neuroses related to World War I induced the medical community to pay more attention to the etiology of mental disorders, which were no longer seen as the product of a hereditary deficiency but as a result of the dynamics of a failure to adapt to reality. In England, shell shock was investigated by doctors from the beginning of war 9 and, according to E.J. Leed, authenticity of neurosis was admitted by doctors and recognized as a war disease, sometimes even by military authorities. 10
In Italy, Agostino Gemelli acknowledged experience of the front and particularly of life in the trenches of great value as a precious opportunity for clinical observation without the cultural conditioning that influenced the majority of Italian psychiatrists when it came to analyzing mental disorders in war veterans. Agostino Gemelli’s influence on the advances made in military psychology were limited, however, for at least three reasons: the fact that his work “Our Soldier” was never translated; his religious role, which prevented him (by ecclesiastical statute) from practicing as a hospital physician, making it impossible for him to put his ideas into clinical practice and circulate them amongst his colleagues; and the advent of fascism, with the country’s consequent gradual cultural isolation.
War neuroses continued to be treated in Italy mainly in lunatic asylums (with rare exceptions 11 ) – partly because of the dominant organismic ideology deriving from Cesare Lombroso’s approach – as they were considered psychiatric deficiencies that had become manifest as a result of the war. Other hypotheses were based on a moral interpretation of these psychiatric conditions, and were seen as forms of cowardice to be repressed or punished, not treated.
That is why, given the lack of any effective mechanisms for treating war-related neuroses, it was important to acknowledge implicitly at least that there was really no way to become accustomed to war. One of the most important actions taken by the army in this sense was to organize shifts in the trenches, frequently rotating them with periods of rest behind the front, to interrupt the experience of the front before the soldiers reached the limit of their psychological resources.
Gemelli goes beyond the mental boundaries of most Italian scholars of his time and lends dignity to the war-related neuroses that he observes, analyzing the organic and psychological hypotheses without prejudice. He completes his work giving credit to the psychological hypotheses and acknowledging that “The old prejudice that all psychic phenomena could be brought down to an organic phenomenon and that interpreted thinking as a sort of secretion of the brain was now definitively a thing of the past.”
Though he was still far from the modern approach to the interpretation of psychological trauma, and though he attributed the perpetuation of the mechanisms involved to dynamics of suggestion, Gemelli realized that, in war, it was not only weak soldiers who became psychological fragile until a “loss of identity” occurred.
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In his conclusion to his volume he writes:
In some predisposed subjects a violent sense of fear can trigger a particular syndrome, the commotional syndrome, certain elements of which can, as a result of autosuggestion, become fixed for a more or less lengthy period of time. In war, if there are brave men, it is understandable that there will also be those who succumb to fear. They are soldiers who fight, but before that they are men.
Footnotes
Acknowledgement
The authors are grateful to Mrs Frances Coburn for translating Gemelli’s work.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.