Brief Happy Military-Neurophysiological Stint of Mario Camis in Wartime Turin

After working at the Universities of Pisa and Liverpool, the physiologist Mario Camis was charged with the selection of pilots for air combat in the First World War at the Psycho-Physiological Office of Italian Aviation in Turin. Inspired by the atmosphere of scientific collaboration between physiology and psychology created in Turin by the physiologist Angelo Mosso, Camis produced two original experimental studies, one on the evaluation of emotionality with the reaction time method and the other one on the electrical cerebellar responses to vestibular inputs. Furthermore, by combining physiological, psychological, and literary knowledge under Sherrington and Mosso’s influence, he wrote an erudite book titled The Mechanism of Emotion. Perhaps the most important consequence for Italian neuroscience of Camis’s stay in Turin was that he transmitted the teaching of Sherrington to Italian physiologists and particularly to his pupil Giuseppe Moruzzi, the recognized father of Italian neurophysiology.