The criminal / by Havelock Ellis.

  • Havelock Ellis
Date:
1895
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The criminal / by Havelock Ellis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    we must destroy, not punish), he clearly advocated a method of dealing with the criminal which is now widely regarded as the only right and reasonable method. There can be no question, he said, of culpability or of justice in the severe sense; the question is of the necessity of society preventing crime. The measure of culpability and the measure of punishment cannot be determined by a study of the illegal act, but only by a study of the individual committing it. In his great work, Les Fonctions du Cerveau (1822), Gall has summed up his conclu- sions. It has been the misfortune of this great and truly scientific investigator to give origin to an empiric art of phrenology which took the place of the old art of physiognomy he had done so much to destroy. He has consequently, until recent years, been popularly known chiefly by his mistakes, especially perhaps by his localisation of the sexual instinct in the cere- bellum—a localisation, however, which he supported by a large body of evidence. The influence of dubious phrenological doctrines hardened into a system some- what impairs the value of Lauvergne's Les Forgats (1841), which seems to have been the first book of any importance devoted entirely to the study of convict nature, physical, moral, and intellectual. Lauvergne, who was the chief medical officer to the hospital for convicts at Toulon, appears to have been a man of humanitarian instincts, whose wit and bon- homie enabled him to maintain friendly relations with the criminals he was studying ; he had little capacity for scientific analysis, but he wrote fully of what he had seen and known, and his book contains many keen observations which have been since verified.
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