LOMBROSO, CESARE (1836-1909), Italian criminologist, was born on the
18th of November 1836 at Verona, of a Jewish family. He studied at
Padua, Vienna and Paris, and was in 1862 appointed professor of
psychiatry at Pavia, then director of the lunatic asylum at Pesaro, and
later professor of forensic medicine and of psychiatry at Turin, where
he eventually filled the chair of criminal anthropology. His works,
several of which have been translated into English, include _L'Uomo
delinquente_ (1889); _L'Uomo di genio_ (1888); _Genio e follia_ (1877)
and _La Donna delinquente_ (1893). In 1872 he had made the notable
discovery that the disorder known as _pellagra_ was due (but see
PELLAGRA) to a poison contained in diseased maize, eaten by the
peasants, and he returned to this subject in _La Pellagra in Italia_
(1885) and other works. Lombroso, like Giovanni Bovio (b. 1841), Enrico
Ferri (b. 1856) and Colajanni, well-known Italian criminologists, and
his sons-in-law G. Ferrero and Carrara, was strongly influenced by
Auguste Comte, and owed to him an exaggerated tendency to refer all
mental facts to biological causes. In spite of this, however, and a
serious want of accuracy and discrimination in handling evidence, his
work made an epoch in criminology; for he surpassed all his predecessors
by the wide scope and systematic character of his researches, and by the
practical conclusions he drew from them. Their net theoretical results
is that the criminal population exhibits a higher percentage of
physical, nervous and mental anomalies than non-criminals; and that
these anomalies are due partly to degeneration, partly to atavism. The
criminal is a special type of the human race, standing midway between
the lunatic and the savage. This doctrine of a "criminal type" has been
gravely criticized, but is admitted by all to contain a substratum of
truth. The practical reform to which it points is a classification of
offenders, so that the born criminal may receive a different kind of
punishment from the offender who is tempted into crime by circumstances
(see also CRIMINOLOGY). Lombroso's biological principles are much less
successful in his work on Genius, which he explains as a morbid,
degenerative condition, presenting analogies to insanity, and not
altogether alien to crime. In 1899 he published in French a book which
gives a résumé of much of his earlier work, entitled _Le Crime, causes
et remèdes_. Later works are: _Delitti vecchi e delitti nuovi_ (Turin,
1902); _Nuovi studi sul genio_ (2 vols., Palermo, 1902); and in 1908 a
work on spiritualism (Eng. trans., _After Death--What?_ 1909), to which
subject he had turned his attention during the later years of his life.
He died suddenly from a heart complaint at Turin on the 19th of October
1909.
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