Daniel Costa — Medicine, Religion, and History

A meticulously arranged wooden desk in a quiet study, featuring an open, cloth-bound medical textbook displaying a detailed anatomical brain diagram beside a worn, gilt-edged seventeenth-century theology volume opened to a Latin page. A fountain pen rests across a yellow legal pad filled with neat handwritten notes. In the background, shelves of organized books fade into a soft blur. Late afternoon natural light enters from an unseen window, casting gentle, directional light and long, calm shadows across the desk surface. Shot at eye level with a shallow depth of field, photographic realism, and a clean, modern yet scholarly aesthetic that conveys thoughtful, interdisciplinary research at the intersection of medicine, religion, and history.

Medicine, Religion, History

Exploring religious behavior and experiences described in an extensive corpus of sworn eyewitness testimonies through the perspectives of neurology, psychiatry, and the history of medicine: “One time, when he was blessing the people at the end of the Mass, at the words Pater et Filius, he raised his arm with a scream, facing the people, then remained motionless for a quarter of an hour, not blinking, but keeping his eyes open, shining like a crystal.”—Testimony of G. Benigni, communal magistrate from Assisi.

About

I am a psychiatrist with prior neurological training conducting interdisciplinary research in medicine, religion, and history.

Biography
I was born in 1946 in the historical province of Transylvania, Romania. After graduating from medical school, I completed specialty certification in both neurology and psychiatry and obtained my doctoral degree. Later, in Canada, I achieved certification in psychiatry as a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada.
In 1984, I spent five months in Italy as a political refugee. After settling in Canada and marrying an Italian, I remained deeply immersed in Italian culture and history, traveling extensively throughout Italy over several decades.
In 2007, I published The Lost Gold of Rome (History Press), a historical work exploring late ancient Rome, early Christianity, the sack of Rome in 410 AD, and the legend of Alaric’s treasure.
Following my retirement from psychiatric practice in 2019, I devoted six years to the study of seventeenth-century sworn eyewitness testimonies concerning the extraordinary phenomena associated with St. Joseph of Copertino. Through neuropsychiatric and historical analysis, I identified recurrent semiological features compatible with non-convulsive epilepsy. In 2026, this research was published in Epilepsy & Behavior Reports, a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to epilepsy research.