Medical Doctor, Economist and Statistician: A Strategic Alliance for Healthcare and Development in the Italian Directorate General for Statistics (1861-1898)

This work outlines the role played in Italy by statisticians, together with medical doctors, to draw politicians’ attention to the population healthcare to further encourage national development. This topic becomes particularly relevant thanks to the “statistics factory” at the MAIC’s (Ministry for Agriculture, Industry and Commerce) Directorate General for Statistics which existed from the Italian Unification (1861) till the end of the nineteenth century. Moreover, under the supervision of Luigi Bodio, a scholar and a master with a wide net of relations with other scientists, MAIC becomes an interesting vantage point for observing how healthcare issues became a substantial element of the Italian national building process with reference to foreign counterparts.