Mrs. Rosa, Professor Moscati’s mother, fell ill during the last few months of 1914. As her conditions became serious, she was taken to Resina (today Herculaneum), but there were no improvements. She died on 25^th November. She was suffering from diabetes and her son looked after her with the greatest care but he could do very little for her since the disease was incurable at that time.

Moscati’s mother, died of diabetes in 1914.

Before her death, after having received the sacraments, she said to her children: "My dearest, you let me die satisfied. Always avoid sin, which is the greatest evil of life". Joseph never forgot her words.

Some years later, Moscati was one of the first doctors in Naples, to experiment with insulin and teach the treatment of diabetes. The insulin was tried on humans starting from January 1922.

From a letter written by Saint Joseph Moscati to Miss Carlotta Petravella who had lost her mother on 20^th Jan. 1920

"As a boy I lost my father and then, when I was an adult, my mother. Now, both of them always stand by me.
I feel their sweet company. Whenever I try to imitate them, always so good and upright, I feel their encouragement and if I deviate they incite me to do the right thing, just like they used to tell me when they were still living...""

During the first months of 1915, there were heated and violent debates throughout the country; but as time went by, the certainty of a war grew remarkably. In Naples, as in all the cities, there were violent noisy demonstrations and loud enthusiastic singing of patriotic hymns. The Umberto Gallery and the adjoining streets was the centre of many daily papers, so it was always crowded with people debating and waiting for the final decisions of Rome.

On 24th May 1915 Italy went to war; the call to arms decimated many families and, on July 8^th, Eugenio Moscati went to the front.

Prof. Moscati asked for voluntary enlistment, without being satisfied. The Military Authorities entrusted him the wounded soldiers who were coming to the Incurabili Hospital, which was militarised.

He visited and treated about 3000 soldiers, drawing up their diaries and clinical histories. He was not only their doctor but also their watchful and affectionate consoler.

Professor Filippo Bottazzi, Director of the Institute of Physiology and Chancellor of the University of Naples asked Dr. Moscati to supervise the experiments and the scientific research at the Institute of Physiological Chemistry.

The entrance of Incurabili Hospital

Besides, during those years, Moscati was already famous in the medical circles for his contribution and for his many articles that were published in special reviews. He wrote for various scientific reviews, such as Riforma Medica. In 1911, Professor Rummo asked him to become the foreign correspondent for this review as he spoke English and German quite well. From 1903, the year he got his degree, to 1916 Moscati wrote 27 scientific publications.

In spite of his didactic and scientific curriculum vitae why did not Moscati get a chair? We know that some of his colleagues were awfully jealous of him because of his brilliant career and the growing number of students attending his lectures. But Professor Quagliariello gives us the real answer to this question. Gaetano Quagliariello, in 1948, was the Chancellor of the University of Naples. He wrote an article for Medicus (IV 1948), a scientific review, where he explained:

"As it was necessary to hold the chair of Physiological Chemistry, left vacant following the death of the teacher, Dr.Malerba, towards the end of 1917, and as the Faculty wanted to opt for him because he had already taught with satisfactory results for teachers and students, during the long period of the illness of Malerba and after his death, [Moscati] communicated he would not have accepted the charge, and suggested and recommended my name. So the charge was granted to me […].

Moscati gave up the official teaching position that he would have inevitably reached if only he had wanted it and he did that for love of his hospital and his students continually increased about him. Perhaps even for the desire to mortify an ambition that certainly he should possess in his youth […].

And so, free of every terrestrial ambition, he devotes all himself, mind and heart, to his patients and to the education of young doctors. The hospital becomes his house, his love, and his shrine. Though he was a man of great clinical intuition he did not fail to use all laboratory’s aids. Besides, his extraordinary chemical and bacteriological preparation permitted him to utilize the most elaborate methods of research to study sick persons."

Moscati’s fame as a master and as a doctor was undiscussed. All people spoke about his lessons, his diagnostic abilities, and his work among patients. The Board of Directors of the Incurabili hospital officially intervened and in 1919 named him Manager of III Men Ward.

A statue made in XVI century put by Moscati in the 3rd ward of the Incurabili Hospital

Considering the appreciations for the work of Moscati and the references to his new title we have to think that this further promotion was a joy for his friends, assistants and pupils. Nobody else could aspire to this appointment and nobody else could get it.

He was happy, but, as always it happened to him, the human satisfaction was not disjoined from the spiritual one, that flew over the contingent motives and took root on noble and high motivations.
Successes in hospital did not have to concern his person, but just patients: he worked for them. This is the sense of a letter wrote in July 26, 1919 to Senator G. D’Andrea, President of "Ospedali Riuniti" of Naples.

"When I was a boy I looked with interest to the Incurabili hospital as my father showed me that far from the house terrace. It inspired me pity feelings for the pain without name, calmed in those walls. A beneficial dismay took me and I started to think about the frailty of all the things, and the illusions passed, as falling flowers of the orange groves surrounding me.

Then I was completely fallen in my starting literary studies, and I did not suspect or dream that, a day, in that white building, to whose large windows patients were hardly visible, as white ghosts, I would have held the supreme clinical degree. […]

I will try, with the God help, with my minimal strengths, to deserve your complete trust, and to collaborate to the economic reconstruction of the old Neapolitan hospitals, so well deserving in term of charity and culture, and nowadays so poor."

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