Did Nobel laureate Rita Levi-Montalcini talk about the benefits of alcohol?

A picture with a quote attributed to the long-lived Italian scientist is popular on social networks. We checked its accuracy.

On the Internet you can find many publications in which neurobiologist Rita Levi-Montalcini is credited with the authorship of the phrase “To improve digestion, I drink beer, if I have no appetite, I drink white wine, if I have low blood pressure, red wine, if I have high blood pressure, cognac, if I have a sore throat, vodka.” To a clarifying question from an unnamed interlocutor: “What about water?” — the researcher allegedly answers that she has never had such a disease. Similar posts are easy to find in popular public pages on VKontakte - World of History, "Schrodinger's Humor", "Psychology about life", "Leprosy", "The Art of Reality", "Secrets of History" and many others have been telling stories about the scientist since at least 2016 (some of them several times) and gaining thousands of likes. This story was not deprived of attention by bloggers on other social networks, for example Instagram And Facebook.

Rita Levi-Montalcini is one of the most famous women in European science of the 20th century. Her advances in neuroscience brought researcher has received many prestigious awards, including Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1986. In 2001, Levi-Montalcini became a life member of the Italian Senate for her achievements. Scientist died at the end of 2012, a few months short of his 104th birthday.

At the same time, pictures and text messages in which Levi-Montalcini is credited with the phrase about the benefits of alcohol began to appear on the Internet only a few years later - around the end of spring 2016. The first mentions can be found, in particular, in numerous publications in "VKontakte", "LiveJournal" and on several forums. Moreover, then the picture ended up in selection “Funny photos with captions and quotes”, where it is adjacent, for example, to this image:

However, we were unable to find a quote in authoritative sources in English or Italian. In English-language texts, Rita Levi-Montalcini attributes these words to only one user Facebook and the author publications on a culinary website registered in the Russian domain zone. Neither in scientific studies dedicated to the researcher monographs, nor in numerous publications in Italian, English or American media does this quote exist.

Two years before the picture of the Italian scientist began to gain popularity on Russian social networks, a phrase very similar to the one attributed to Levi-Montalcini first appeared in publications in English. On February 16, 2014, the blog of American Hugh Paxton published recording about an unnamed grandmother who spoke about the benefits of different alcoholic drinks for various health problems. Quite quickly this quote became use for the design of souvenirs and gift wrapping (but again using the collective image of an old woman, and not a famous Italian scientist). The paradoxical phrase became the basis for one of the jokes pictures on the Indian humorous site SantaBanta, however, here too she is in no way connected with the outstanding neuroscientist - the resource is dedicated to typical Indian jokes about stereotypes about Sikhs.

Thus, we were not able to reliably confirm that the famous researcher really talked about how she overcomes certain health problems with the help of various alcoholic drinks. A phrase very similar to the one being verified appeared no later than 2014 in an English-language publication without reference to Levi-Montalcini, but already in the spring of 2016, one of the Russian Internet users (probably on VKontakte) decided to attribute the authorship to the Italian scientist. The quote, supposedly backed by the authority of the Nobel laureate, has gone viral.

Incorrect quote attribution

What do our verdicts mean?

Read on the topic:

1. Biography of Rita Levi-Montalcini on the Nobel Prize website
2. European Brain Research Institute Rita Levi-Montalcini