The criminal, his personnel and environment : a scientific study / by August Drähms ; with an introduction by Cesare Lombroso.
- Dr̃hms August, 1849-
- Date:
- 1900
Licence: In copyright
Credit: The criminal, his personnel and environment : a scientific study / by August Drähms ; with an introduction by Cesare Lombroso. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.
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![incident that clings to the skirts of advancing civili- zation, but is the result of distinct causes, whose genesis and amelioration through prevenient methods and the application of proper remedial agencies, it is becoming more and more the fashion of cotemporary thought to explore. As every physical ill has somewhere its disturbing causes, so in the sociological and psycho- logical spheres, each moral functional derangement and distinctively social morbidity points backward to causa- tion, and forward to the remedy. “They [criminals] are neither accidents nor anomalies in the universe,’’ says Maudsley, “ but come by law and testify to caus- ality; and it is the business of science to find out what the causes are and by what laws they work. Crimi- nology, therefore, as the patron of patho-sociology, reaches the dignity of a science by the same right of necessity that gives to the medical profession its place, the therapeutics of the one dealing with the physio- logical (neurosis), and the other with the psychological (psychosis), side of the subject. That there is a debata- ble territory between the mental and moral phases of the problem as it hedges upon the material, is undeniable. Its challenges remain unanswered in these pages, as they do to the inquiry of the ages. I have endeavored to remain as near shore as the exigencies of the case will permit, keeping distinctly in view certain well- defined landmarks by which I have cautiously sought to guide my frail bark in a dubious sea. The strictly anthropological features here brought out have been accepted mainly as the properly accredited data of trained writers, the latchets of whose shoes I am not](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21704478_0012.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
