It was not only the patients who had to go through traumatic experiences. The staff also suffered under the circumstances:
The experience of Teresa Medeghini, a nurse who worked from 1955 to 1960 in the then neuropsychiatric hospital of Varese:
"Those admitted were treated with insulin. We started with a low dose and had to give them a lot of insulin until they went into a coma: The first coma lasted 5 minutes, the second one the next day lasted 10 minutes, and then the maximum tolerable time that state. Then they were made to wake up with the intravenous dextrose : this was the task of the Poverelle nurses, of which my sister Carla was one.
If they did not wake up even with the first 50 ml of dextrose , they added more amounts . Sometimes, however, they simply did not wake up from the coma, so the patients were beaten. I remember, for example, a girl whom we beat in two: she had an unrecognizable face, when her relatives visited her, they did not show her to them "
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