40 Facts About Cesare Lombroso

Cesare Lombroso was an Italian eugenicist, criminologist, phrenologist, physician, and founder of the Italian school of criminology.

Cesare Lombroso is considered the founder of modern criminal anthropology by changing the Western notions of individual responsibility.

Cesare Lombroso's father was Aronne Lombroso, a tradesman from Verona, and his mother was Zeffora 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.

Cesare Lombroso initially worked as an army surgeon, beginning in 1859 when he enlisted as a volunteer.

Cesare Lombroso claimed that he developed the theory of atavistic criminality during this period.

Cesare Lombroso became professor of forensic medicine and hygiene at Turin in 1878.

Cesare Lombroso became a professor of psychiatry and of criminal anthropology at Turin University.

Cesare Lombroso postulated that criminals represented a reversion to a primitive or subhuman type of person characterized by physical features reminiscent of apes, lower primates, and early humans and to some extent preserved, he said, in modern "savages".

For Cesare Lombroso, the "born criminal" character was embodied by Vittorio Pini, a famous Italian anarchist who engaged in a series of sensationalist robberies and was one of the founders of illegalism.

Cesare Lombroso chose him to be the archetype of that idea he was developing.

Besides the "born criminal", Cesare Lombroso described "criminaloids", or occasional criminals, criminals by passion, moral imbeciles, and criminal epileptics.

Cesare Lombroso recognized the diminished role of organic factors in many habitual offenders and referred to the delicate balance between predisposing factors and precipitating factors such as one's environment, opportunity, or poverty.

In Criminal Woman, as introduced in an English translation by Nicole Hahn Rafter and Mary Gibson, Cesare Lombroso used his theory of atavism to explain women's criminal offending.

Cesare Lombroso did not engage in rigorous statistical comparisons of criminals and non-criminals.

Cesare Lombroso's theories were disapproved throughout Europe, especially in schools of medicine: notably by Alexandre Lacassagne in France.

Self-proclaimed the founder of modern scientific psychiatry, Cesare Lombroso is purported to have coined the term criminology.

Cesare Lombroso's graduating thesis from the University of Pavia dealt with "endemic cretinism".

Cesare Lombroso's theory has been cited as possibly "the most influential doctrine" in all areas studying human behaviour, and indeed, its impact extended far and wide.

In particular, Cesare Lombroso began searching for a relationship between tattoos and an agglomeration of symptoms eut.

Cesare Lombroso believed that tattoos indicated a certain type of criminal.

Cesare Lombroso propagated the idea that left-handedness leads to other disabilities, by linking left-handedness with neurodegeneration and alcoholism.

Cesare 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.

Cesare Lombroso's 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.

However, criminal insane asylums did exist outside of Italy while Cesare Lombroso was establishing them within the country.

Cesare Lombroso believed that genius was an evolutionarily beneficial form of insanity, stemming from the same root as other mental illnesses.

Towards the end of his life, Cesare Lombroso began to study pellagra, a disease which Joseph Goldberger simultaneously was researching, in rural Italy.

Cesare Lombroso postulated that pellagra came from a nutrition deficit, officially proven by Goldberger.

Cesare Lombroso published The Man of Genius in 1889, a book which argued that artistic genius was a form of hereditary insanity.

Cesare Lombroso supplemented these psychological observations with skeletal and cranial measurements, including facial angles, "abnormalities" in bone structure, and volumes of brain fluid.

In commenting on skull measurements, Cesare Lombroso made observations such as, "I have noted several characters which anthropologists consider to belong to the lower races, such as prominence of the styloid apophysis".

Cesare Lombroso connected geniuses to various health disorders as well, by listing signs of degeneration in chapter two of his work, some of which include abnormalities and discrepancies in height and pallor.

Cesare 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, Korner and Blaise Pascal.

Cesare Lombroso 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.

Cesare Lombroso further cited certain personality traits as markers of degeneracy, such as "a fondness for special words" and "the inspiration of genius".

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 Cesare Lombroso had been deceived by Palladino.

The anthropologist Edward Clodd wrote "[Cesare 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".

The sceptic Joseph McCabe wrote that because of this it was not surprising that Palladino managed to fool Cesare Lombroso into believing spiritualism by her tricks.

Historian Daniel Pick argues that Cesare Lombroso serves "as a curious footnote to late-nineteenth-century literary studies", due to his referencing in famous books of the time.

In Ian Fleming's 1955 James Bond novel Moonraker, Bond mockingly describes the villainous, facially scarred Hugo Drax as a man with whom Cesare Lombroso would have been delighted.