Adriano Ossicini (20 June 1920 – 15 February 2019) was an Italian partisan, politician, psychiatrist, academic, and Minister for Family and Social Solidarity in the Dini Cabinet. Biography Ossicini was born in Rome on June 20, 1920. During the Fascist regime Ossicini's father, Cesare, was a lawyer and one of the founders of the Italian People's Party. A brilliant student, Ossicini enrolled at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Rome, two years younger than normal. In December 1937, while still a student, he began to volunteer at the Fatebenefratelli Hospital on the Tiber Island in Rome. In April 1938, at a FUCI Catholic students' conference held in Orvieto, Ossicini voiced his opposition to fascism. Once he returned to Rome, he was interrogated by the fascist police, who opened a file on him. In October of the same year, at a new conference of FUCI in Genoa, he appealed to Italian Catholics to oppose racism and fascism, accusing the regime of connivance with nazism. Ossicini disagreed with the future post-war Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi over the reconstitution of a single political party for Catholics, the future Christian Democracy, placed at the center of the political spectrum. On 18 May 1943, Ossicini was arrested by the fascists during a raid and was imprisoned for more than two months. Despite being violently beaten for a few days, he only admitted that he had expressed criticism of racial discrimination under fascism as racism ran counter to Christian Doctrine. On this occasion, from the fascist police, he heard the term "cattocomunista" or Catho-Communist for the first time, a derogatory term for left-wing Catholics. On 30 September 1943, Ossicini received a letter from Giulio Andreotti, in which the future Prime Minister expressed "in the name of the Pope" the opposition to unconditional co-operation between Catholics and the Italian Communist Party. Ossicini replied that he disagreed with Andreotti. Ossicini would claim that the Fatebenefratelli Hospital where he was working also received orders from the Pope to admit as many Jews as possible, something Ossicini claimed led to his supposed creation of a deadly but fictional disease known as syndrome K that was used to deter the nazis and fascists from investigating its purported sufferers, who were Jews hiding in the hospital's premises. During World War II, Ossicini became one of the founders of the Party of the Christian Left, close to the Italian Communist