Cesare Lombroso facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Cesare Lombroso
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Ezechia Marco Lombroso
6 November 1835 Verona, Lombardy–Venetia
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| Died | 19 October 1909 (aged 73) |
| Nationality | Italian |
| Known for | Italian school of positivist criminology |
| Children | Gina Lombroso |
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Cesare Lombroso (/lɒmˈbroʊsoʊ/, also US: /lɔːmˈ-/; Italian: [ˈtʃeːzare lomˈbroːzo, ˈtʃɛː-, -oːso]; born Ezechia Marco Lombroso; 6 November 1835 – 19 October 1909) was an Italian eugenicist, criminologist, phrenologist, physician, and founder of the Italian school of criminology. Lombroso rejected the established classical school, which held that crime was a characteristic trait of human nature. Instead, using concepts drawn from physiognomy, degeneration theory, psychiatry, and Social Darwinism, Lombroso's theory of anthropological criminology essentially stated that criminality was inherited, and that someone "born criminal" could be identified by physical (congenital) defects, which confirmed a criminal as savage or atavistic.
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Early life and education
Lombroso was born in Verona, Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia, on 6 November 1835 to a wealthy Jewish family. His father was Aronne Lombroso, a tradesman from Verona, and his mother was Zeffora (or Zefira) Levi from Chieri near Turin. Cesare Lombroso descended from a line of rabbis, which led him to study a wide range of topics in university. He studied literature, linguistics, and archæology at the universities of Padua, Vienna, and Paris. Despite pursuing these studies in university, Lombroso eventually settled on pursuing a degree in medicine, which he graduated with from the University of Pavia.
Career
Lombroso initially worked as an army surgeon, beginning in 1859. In 1866 he was appointed visiting lecturer at Pavia, and later took charge of the insane asylum at Pesaro in 1871. He became professor of forensic medicine and hygiene at Turin in 1878. That year he wrote his most important and influential work, L'uomo delinquente, which went through five editions in Italian and was published in various European languages.
Three of his works had been translated into English by 1900, including a partial translation of The Female Offender published in 1895 and read in August of that year by the late nineteenth-century English novelist George Gissing (1857-1903).
Lombroso became professor of psychiatry (1896) and of criminal anthropology (1906) at Turin University.
Personal life and final years
Lombroso married Nina de Benedetti on 10 April 1870. They had five children together, one of whom—Gina—would go on to publish a summary of Lombroso's work after his death. Later in life Lombroso came to be influenced by Gina's husband, Guglielmo Ferrero, who led him to believe that not all criminality comes from one's inborn factors and that social factors also played a significant role in the process of shaping a criminal.
He died in Turin in 1909.
Legacy
Self-proclaimed the founder of modern scientific psychiatry, Lombroso is purported to have coined the term criminology. He institutionalized the science of psychiatry in universities. His graduating thesis from the University of Pavia dealt with "endemic cretinism". ext several years, Lombroso's fascination with criminal behavior and society began, and he gained experience managing a mental institution. After a brief stint in the Italian army, Lombroso returned to the University of Pavia and became the first professor specializing in mental health. By the 1880s, his theories had reached the pinnacle of their fame, and his accolades championed them throughout the fields dedicated to examining mental illness. Lombroso differentiated himself from his predecessor and rival, Cesare Beccaria, through depicting his positivist school in opposition to Beccaria's classist one (which centered around the idea that criminal behavior is born out of free will rather than inherited physical traits). Lombroso's psychiatric theories were conglomerated and collectively called the positivist school by his followers, which included Antonio Marro and Alfredo Niceforo. Ideas similar to Lombroso's assessment of white and northern-European supremacy over other races would be used by fascists to gird, for example, the promulgation of Italian racial laws. His school of thought was only truly abandoned in Italian universities' curriculum after World War II.
Through his various publications, Lombroso established a school of psychiatry based on biological determinism and the idea that mental illness was via genetic factors. A person's predisposition to mental illness was determinable through his appearance, as explained in the aforementioned criminal atavism segment. Lombroso's theory has been cited as possibly "the most influential doctrine" in all areas studying human behavior, and indeed, its impact extended far and wide. According to Lombroso, criminal appearance was not just based on inherited physiognomy such as nose or skull shape, but also could be judged through superficial features like tattoos on the body. In particular, Lombroso began searching for a relationship between tattoos and an agglomeration of symptoms eut (which are currently diagnosed as borderline personality disorder).
Through his observations of criminals, Lombroso hypothesized a correlation between left-handedness, criminality, and degenerate behavior. He also propagated the idea that left-handedness lead to other disabilities. Lombroso's theories were likely accepted due to the pre-existing regional stigma against left-handedness, and greatly influenced the reception of left-handedness in the 20th century. His hypothesis even manifested in a new way during the 1980s and 1990s with a series of research studies grouping left-handedness with psychiatric disorders and autoimmune diseases.
Within the penal system, Lombroso's work led to new forms of punishment, where occasionally punishment varied based on the defendant's biological background. There are a few instances in which case the physiognomy of the defendant actually mattered more than witness testimony and the defendant was subjected to harsher sentences.
Since his research tied criminal behavior together with the insane, Lombroso is closely credited with the genesis of the criminal insane asylum and forensic psychiatry. His work sponsored the creation of institutions where the criminally insane would be treated for mental illness, rather than placed in jails with their saner counterparts. One example of an asylum for the criminally insane is Bridgewater State Hospital, which is located in the United States. Other examples of these institutions are Matteawan State Hospital and Danvers State Hospital. Most have closed down, but the concept is kept alive with modern correctional facilities like Cook County Jail. This facility houses the largest population of prisoners with mental illness in the United States. However, criminal insane asylums did exist outside of Italy while Lombroso was establishing them within the country. His influence on the asylum was at first regional, but eventually percolated to other countries who adopted some of Lombroso's measures for treating the criminally insane.
In addition to influencing criminal atavism, Lombroso wrote a book called Genio e Follia, in which he discussed the link between genius and insanity. He believed that genius was an evolutionarily beneficial form of insanity, stemming from the same root as other mental illnesses. This hypothesis led to his request to examine Leo Tolstoy for degenerate qualities during his attendance at the 12th International Medical Congress in Moscow in 1897. The meeting went poorly, and Tolstoy's novel Resurrection shows great disdain for Lombroso's methodology.
Towards the end of his life, Lombroso began to study pellagra, a disease which Joseph Goldberger simultaneously was researching, in rural Italy. He postulated that pellagra came from a nutrition deficit, officially proven by Goldberger. This disease also found its roots in the same poverty that caused cretinism, which Lombroso studied at the start of his medical career. Furthermore, before Lombroso's death the Italian government passed a law in 1904 standardizing treatment in mental asylums and codifying procedural admittance for mentally ill criminals. This law gave psychiatrists free rein within the criminal insane asylum, validating the field of psychiatry through giving the psychiatrists the sole authority to define and treat the causes of criminal behavior (a position which Lombroso argued for from his early teaching days to his death).
The Man of Genius
Lombroso believed that genius was closely related to madness. In his attempts to develop these notions, while in Moscow in 1897 he traveled to Yasnaya Polyana to meet Lev Tolstoy in hopes of elucidating and providing evidence for his theory of genius reverting or degenerating into insanity.
Lombroso published The Man of Genius in 1889, a book which argued that artistic genius was a form of hereditary insanity. In order to support this assertion, he began assembling a large collection of "psychiatric art". He published an article on the subject in 1880 in which he isolated thirteen typical features of the "art of the insane." Although his criteria are generally regarded as outdated today, his work inspired later writers on the subject, particularly Hans Prinzhorn.
In his exploration of geniuses descending into madness, Lombroso stated that he could only find six men who did not exhibit symptoms of "degeneration" or madness: Galileo, Da Vinci, Voltaire, Machiavelli, Michelangelo and Darwin. By contrast, Lombroso cited that men such as Shakespeare, Plato, Aristotle, Mozart and Dante all displayed "degenerate symptoms". In order to classify geniuses as "degenerate," or insane, Lombroso judged each genius by whether they exhibited "degenerate symptoms," such as precocity, longevity, versatility and inspiration. Lombroso supplemented these psychological observations with skeletal and cranial measurements, including facial angles, "abnormalities" in bone structure, and volumes of brain fluid. Measurements of skulls taken included those from Immanuel Kant, Alessandro Volta, Ugo Foscolo, and Ambrogio Fusinieri.
Lombroso listed the following geniuses, among others, as "sickly and weak during childhood": Demosthenes, Francis Bacon, Descartes, Isaac Newton, John Locke, Adam Smith, Robert Boyle, Alexander Pope, John Flaxman, Nelson, Albrecht von Haller, Körner and Blaise Pascal. In his explanation of the connection between genius and the "degenerative marker" of height, Lombroso cites the following people: Robert and Elizabeth Browning, Henrik Ibsen, George Eliot, Thiers, Louis Blanc and Algernon Charles Swinburne, among others. He continues by listing the only "great men of tall stature" that he knows of, including Petrarch, Friedrich Schiller, Foscolo, Bismarck, Charlemagne, Dumas, George Washington, Peter the Great, and Voltaire. Lombroso further cited certain personality traits as markers of degeneracy, such as "a fondness for special words" and "the inspiration of genius".
Spiritualism
Later in his life Lombroso began investigating mediumship. Although originally skeptical, he later became a believer in spiritualism. As an atheist Lombroso discusses his views on the paranormal and spiritualism in his book After Death – What? (1909) which he believed the existence of spirits and claimed the medium Eusapia Palladino was genuine. The article "Exit Eusapia!" was published in the British Medical Journal on November 9, 1895. The article questioned the scientific legitimacy of the Society for Psychical Research for investigating Palladino a medium who had a reputation of being a fraud and imposter and was surprised that Lombroso had been deceived by Palladino.
The anthropologist Edward Clodd wrote "[Lombroso] swallowed the lot at a gulp, from table raps to materialisation of the departed, spirit photographs and spirit voices; every story, old or new, alike from savage and civilised sources, confirming his will to believe." Lombroso's daughter Gina Ferrero wrote that during the later years of his life Lombroso suffered from arteriosclerosis and his mental and physical health was wrecked. The skeptic Joseph McCabe wrote that because of this it was not surprising that Palladino managed to fool Lombroso into believing spiritualism by her tricks.
Literary impact
Historian Daniel Pick argues that Lombroso serves "as a curious footnote to late-nineteenth-century literary studies," due to his referencing in famous books of the time. Jacques in Émile Zola's The Beast Within is described as having a jaw that juts forward on the bottom. It is emphasized especially at the end of the book when he is overwhelmed by the desire to kill. The anarchist Karl Yundt in Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, delivers a speech denouncing Lombroso. The assistant prosecutor in Leo Tolstoy's Resurrection uses Lombroso's theories to accuse Maslova of being a congenital criminal. In Bram Stoker's Dracula, Count Dracula is described as having a physical appearance Lombroso would describe as criminal.
Selected Works
Original Italian
- 1859 Ricerche sul cretinismo in Lombardia
- 1864 Genio e follia
- 1865 Studi clinici sulle mallatie mentali
- 1871 L'uomo bianco e l'uomo di colore
- 1873 Sulla microcefala e sul cretinismo con applicazione alla medicina legale
- 1876 L'uomo delinquente
- 1879 Considerazioni al processo Passannante
- 1881 L'amore nel suicidio e nel delitto
- 1888 L'uomo di genio in rapporto alla psichiatria
- 1891 Palimsesti del carcere
- 1892 Trattato della pellagra
- 1894 Le più recenti scoperte ed applicazioni della psichiatria ed antropologia criminale
- 1894 Gli anarchici
- 1894 L'antisemitismo e le scienze moderne
- 1897 Genio e degenerazione
- 1898 Les Conquêtes récentes de la psychiatrie
- 1899 Le crime; causes et remédes
- 1900 Lezioni de medicina legale
- 1902 Delitti vecchi e delitti nuovi
- 1909 Ricerche sui fenomeni ipnotici e spiritici
In 1906, a collection of papers on Lombroso was published in Turin as L'opera di Cesare Lombroso nella scienza e nelle sue applicazioni.
English translations
- 1891 The Man of Genius, Walter Scott.
- 1895 The Female Offender. The 1895 English translation was a partial translation which left out the entire section on the normal woman and which, in true Victorian fashion, sanitised Lombroso's language.
- 1899 Crime: Its Causes and Remedies
- 1909 After Death - What?
- 1911 Criminal Man, According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso
- 2004 The Criminal Anthropological Writings of Cesare Lombroso
- 2006 Criminal Man. Translated by Nicole Hahn Rafter and Mary Gibson.
Selected articles
- "Illustrative Studies in Criminal Anthropology", The Monist, Vol. I, No. 2, 1890.
- "The Physiognomy of the Anarchists", The Monist, Vol. I, No. 3, 1890.
- "Innovation and Inertia in the World of Psychology", The Monist, Vol. I, No. 3, 1890.
- "The Modern Literature of Italy Since the Year 1870", The Monist, Vol. I, No. 3, 1890.
- "Criminal Anthropology Applied to Pedagogy", The Monist, Vol. VI, No. 1, October 1895.
- "The Heredity of Acquired Characteristics," The Forum, Vol. XXIV, 1898.
- "Was Columbus Morally Irresponsible?," The Forum, Vol. XXVII, 1899.
- "Why Criminals of Genius Have No Type," The International Quarterly, Vol. VI, 1902.
Introductions
- MacDonald, Arthur. Criminology, Introduction by Cesare Lombroso, Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1893.
- Drahms, August. The Criminal, Introduction by Cesare Lombroso, The Macmillan Company, 1900.
