He was born in Modena, Italy, on 17 July 1852, and died in Genoa on 18 February 1929. He was a brilliant Italian psychiatrist, academic and active promoter of the Italian positivist school of neuropsychiatry. A specialist in nervous and mental illnesses, he was a professor at the University of Genoa.

He had been a staunch sceptic of mediumistic phenomena. However, his encounter with the great medium Eusapia Paladino and the conduct of 30 spirit materialisation sessions in 1901-2 and 1906-7. Enrico Morselli became completely convinced of the reality of spiritualist phenomena and announced his change of opinion in 1907 in the journal Annals of Psychic Science: "The question of spiritism has been debated for more than fifty years, and although no one can predict at this time when it will be resolved, everyone agrees that it is of great importance among the problems left as a legacy by the 19th century to the 20th.

If, for many years, academic science has disregarded the entire category of facts that spiritism has contributed to form the elements of its doctrinal system, so much the worse for science. And even worse for the scientists who have remained deaf and blind to all the claims, not of credulous sectarians, but of serious and worthy observers such as Crookes, Lodge, and Richet. I am not ashamed to say that I myself, to the extent of my modest power, had contributed to that stubborn scepticism, until the day I was able to break the chains in which my absolutist prejudices had bound my judgement.

Enrico Morselli wrote a work entitled Psychology and Spiritism, published in two volumes in Turin in 1908. In it, he recounts the events he observed with the remarkable medium Eusapia Paladino. He also published Spiritualist Hypothesis and Scientific Theory. It was based on Eusapia Paladino's physical mediumship that Dr Enrico Morselli affirmed his conviction that the spirits of the dead—in whose existence he did not believe—did not intervene in the production of the phenomena.

However, it is worth noting Professor MorseIli's firm conviction in the reality of the objective or physical phenomena achieved through Eusapia's mediumship, including those of partial or total materialisation, phenomena considered fraudulent by the new “prophets” of hypnotism and lethargy.

Here, then, is what the wise neurologist wrote in the columns of the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera in 1907, shortly before his book Psychology and Spiritism was published:

"To those who ask me, and there are many who have questioned me on this matter, what I think of the physical phenomena attributed to Eusapia, and whether I believe them to be real, authentic, true, I reply: Yes! Such phenomena, whose acceptance I initially thought was based on error or naivety, on fraud or sensory illusion, on good faith or on “parti-pris”, are, for the most part, true and real; and as for those that form the “small number”, which I have not certified, they in no way invalidate the existence of an extraordinary or ultra-normal category of facts that depend on special organisms and a particular activity."

I confess, however, that in my opinion there is something else that is much more remarkable, much more astonishing: it is to affirm with full awareness that these events are true... and not to believe in spiritism.