In Vienna, in 1856, Lombroso passed the official examination for his medical degree. Here the influence of Skoda, and Lombroso’s becoming acquainted with the early works of Virchow, did not tend to induce in him sentiments of toleration towards the vitalistic doctrines dominant at the Italian Universities or towards the narrow circle of professors owing their appointment to Austrian influence and interested in the maintenance of these doctrines. He never ceased to be affected by this early opposition to academic tradition and to academic circles; in fact, it accentuated in him a certain natural tendency to paradoxes and heresies. The inclination to exact observation,[3] acquired through his contact with German science, led him to the study, with record of weights and measurements, of cretinism in Upper Italy;[4] from this to the utilization of these methods for the instigation of an anthropometrical investigation of the population of Upper Italy; and also to the study of clinical psychiatry, at that time entirely neglected in Italy.[5] The translation of Moleschott’s epoch-making writings gave a finish to Lombroso’s conception of the world; he broke loose from the speculative tendency of the psychiatry of the day, which at that time in Germany also was assuming the most remarkable forms; he turned with repugnance from the interminable discussions regarding the freedom of the will, and began, in the case of the insane, of criminal lunatics, and of criminals, to study their pathological anatomy (assisted here by Golgi), their sensory impressions, and their anthropological—and more especially craniological—peculiarities. It is a well-known fact that from that day to our own the pathological anatomy of the psychoses has not furnished much in the way of positive results, not even to the most accomplished virtuosos of the methods of staining the fibres of the brain. Lombroso, to whom in Pavia Golgi for a long time acted as assistant, wisely refused to limit himself to the study of pathological anatomy, but always investigated side by side with this the clinical features of the psychoses and neuroses. From the first he inclined to the view that the exact measurement and description of skulls and brains would lead to the discovery of definite distinctions between sane and insane criminals, between lunatics and epileptics, etc.