There was a very powerful subjective reason why Lombroso did not apply a strenuous criticism to the occult phenomena of Eusapia, of Pickmann, etc. His own most important ideas had at first encountered doubt from the learned world, and in many cases contempt and ridicule. For this reason he was free from the tendency, traditional in academic circles, towards an extreme reserve in relation to completely new facts and theories contrary to the dominant views, and therefore dangerous to those advocating them. On the contrary, to doubt the good faith of those who were producing the new hypnotic and other mediumistic phenomena was not only contrary to his natural disposition, incapable of any pettiness and indisposed to mistrust anything that was unusual, but it also conflicted with the tendencies resulting from his own personal experiences. In the year 1872, when he brought before the Medical Academy of Milan his experiments and investigations regarding the etiology of pellagra through the consumption of spoilt maize, he was accused by the surgeon Porta, Dean of the medical faculty of Pavia and an advocate of the interests of the great landlords, of having falsified his experiments, and of having artificially induced lesions in the animals he experimented on—the result being that the whole matter was turned to ridicule, and he and his pellagrous chickens were made fun of at the next carnival. Lombroso was accustomed to quote a verse from Dante, “Io non piangea, si dentro impetrai” (“I did not weep, but my heart was turned to stone”), in order to explain the impression left upon him by this experience. The controversies about pellagra continued for about thirty years, until at length, in the year 1902, official recognition was given to his theory by the legislation carried in that year for the prevention of the disease.[52] The _déclassé_, the Jew, the self-taught man, could not be allowed to take an equal rank in the university life amongst the sons of the well-to-do classes of Northern Italy, so closely allied with the landed interest; and for this reason the most distinguished and influential member of the academic circle described his laborious and tedious researches as falsified. It was this experience which made it psychologically impossible for him, when he came to study occult phenomena, to take into consideration the possibility of fraud. This helps us to understand how he came to enter upon these investigations, and how it was that he allowed himself in many cases to be deceived regarding the reality of the processes under observation.