Rosetta Papa

Doctor, tell us about yourself, your activism, the choices that marked your personal and professional life and the fundamental role you had in women's health in Naples.

The choice to study Medicine was perhaps not a real choice. In my family they were all engineers and I felt the need, which I can't explain to you where it came from, to choose a path that would make me close to people, that would make me useful. And so my path was born. The choice to specialize in gynecology came almost by exclusion: I didn't choose psychiatry because it scared me “the power of the mind”, with all its facets, and I didn't choose “pediatrics” because seeing a child suffering would have made me absolutely incapable of a judgment, of a logical evaluation that perhaps a doctor must have in front of a patient. In my professional history two stages have been crucial. The first stop was in Turin, in 1977. I used to work at Sant'Anna, the largest hospital in Piedmont and that is where I first became acquainted with discrimination. In those years in Turin there was a certain hostility towards southerners, on the houses you found signs that said "you don't rent to southerners" and there was a head midwife who didn't call me by name but "Naples". Yet, it was a very important experience: it made me grow humanly and professionally. Many of the patients I met came from the South, when I asked where they came from, many tried to mask the accent, pretending to be a fake Piedmontese, but then it turned out that they were from Naples, or Calabria. I felt a deep empathy for those women. They lived in a city that repelled them, but they brought with them a silent force. The second crucial turning point was my return to Naples and the meeting with the consultants. I worked at the Polyclinic for a long time, until 1997 and I must say that the obstetric clinic was the one that trained me from not only a professional point of view, but also from the point of view of attitude towards an activity, a method, research and above all a rigor. I have always combined my hospital work with territorial commitment. I fought for the birth of counseling centers, for the passage of Law 194, for the right of women to decide on their own bodies. I still remember my first assignment in Miano, a neighborhood of Naples located in the northern area of the city that at the time I didn't even know where it was. The headquarters was in a street called “Cupa delle Vedove” – a symbolic, almost cinematic name. There I learned everything, I understood what the “social determinants of health” really represent, well before they became an academic concept. I have seen, touched first-hand, what it is like to live in exclusion, in poverty, in hardship. In 1981, the Miano counseling centre was a centre of excellence, not because of me, but because we all believed in it: psychologist, social worker, paediatrician, midwife. We worked in teams, motivated, present and that's where I decided to stay. When it was necessary to choose between the hospital and the area, I had no doubts: I wanted to be useful where the need does not arrive declared, but must be deciphered. The counseling center is the place where the need for health is often not even expressed, there I learned to recognize it. Between 1997 and 1998 I chose to leave the Polyclinic. Until then, fortunately, it was possible to do both jobs because the clinics worked morning and afternoon, even on Saturdays, and I was able to reconcile them with the hours of the Polyclinic because I had a token contract. Then came the moment of choice, and I chose the territory.

In your work at the clinic you also promoted moments of sharing with the women of the neighborhood, right?

Yes, in Miano we created the “women's groups”. We used to do thematic groups on childbirth, abortion, menopause and the women of the area participated and lent themselves to be filmed to document the meetings. We made videos which we then screened during the celebrations for March 8th or in the celebrations we often organized together. One of the most active was the delicatessen in front of the clinic: she prepared the sandwiches and then said "what time will we see each other tonight?". It was true sharing, it was politics, in the highest sense of the term. “The personal is political” we said a few decades ago, and it still is today even if it seems forgotten.