Lombroso, Ezecchia-Marco (Cesare)

   (1835–1909)

   The founder of criminal anthropology, Lombroso was born in Verona into a noble Jewish family. He graduated with an M.D. at Pavia University in 1858, served in the medical corps of the Piedmont army (where he started linking soldiers’ physical types to behavior), then in 1867 became associate professor of psychiatry at Pavia, moving on in 1871 to direct the provincial asylum at Pesaro. In 1876, Lombroso received the professorship of forensic medicine at Turin University, where he would remain. In 1896, he became professor of psychiatry there, and in 1905 received the chair of criminal anthropology. He was associated with the Italian somaticist school that studied the relations between mental and physical disorders.

   Although Lombroso was occupied with many different subjects during the years, the center of his life’s work was psychiatric genetics and psychiatric anthropology. In 1864, his book Genius and Madness (Genio e Follia) appeared; Criminal Man (L’Uomo delinquente) in 1876; Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman (La donna delinquente, la prostituta e la donna normale) in 1893; and Genius and Degeneration (Genio e degenerazione) in 1898. He took a highly deterministic view of criminality and believed that such "stigmata" in physical anthropology as skull shape really did affect destiny. An avid degeneration theorist, he considered that criminals had been left a step or two behind on the phylogenetic chain. His basic finding was that criminals exhibit a greater percentage of physical and mental abnormalities than noncriminals.

   Lombroso may be considered one of the founders of the positivist school of criminology, along with fellow psychiatrists Jacques-Joseph Moreau (called "Moreau de Tours" [1804–1884]), and James C. Prichard, who in 1835 coined the term "moral insanity." It was largely Lombroso’s doing that special custodial institutions for the criminal insane were established. In sum, Lombroso began the medical tradition of "seeing evil as illness." (See also Conduct Disorder; Criminality and Psychiatry.)