Criminal man : according to the classification of Cesare Lombroso / briefly summarised by Gina Lombroso Ferrero.

  • Gina Lombroso
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Criminal man : according to the classification of Cesare Lombroso / briefly summarised by Gina Lombroso Ferrero. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    comrades. His horrible work accomplished, he fell into a deep slumber, which lasted twelve hours and on awaking appeared to have no recollection of what had happened. Misdea, while representing the most ferocious type of animal, manifested, in addition, all the phenomena of epilepsy, which appeared to be hereditary in all the members of his family. It flashed across my mind that many criminal charac- teristics not attributable to atavism, such as facial asymmetry, cerebral sclerosis, impulsiveness, instan- taneousness, the periodicity of criminal acts, the desire of evil for evil’s sake, were morbid character- istics common to epilepsy, mingled with others due to atavism. Thus were traced the first clinical outlines of my work which had hitherto been entirely anthropologi- cal. The clinical outlines confirmed the anthropo- logical contours, and vice versa; for the greatest criminals showed themselves to be epileptics, and, on the other hand, epileptics manifested the same anomalies as criminals. Finally, it was shown that epilepsy frequently reproduced atavistic character- istics, including even those common to lower animals. That synthesis which mighty geniuses have often succeeded in creating by one inspiration (but at the risk of errors, for a genius is only human and in
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