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Cesare Lombroso was born in Verona, as an Austrian subject, on November 6, 1835, and was the second child in a family of five. His father Aron sprang from a Venetian mercantile family, whose origin can be traced back to a colony of North African Jews, trading with Leghorn, Genoa, and Venice. Again and again members of the Lombroso family settled in one or other of these ports. The branch to which he himself belonged had lived for several centuries in Venice and the Venetian territories on the mainland, of which from the year 1448 onwards Verona formed a part; they were patrician merchants, to whom the French occupation, occurring before Lombroso’s father grew up, had brought full and equal privileges of citizenship.^[1] Several members of this Venetian family were distinguished by characteristic and vigorous action on behalf of the cause of enlightenment. In Virginia, North America, in the seventeenth century, the brother of a direct ancestor of Cesare Lombroso, at a great risk to himself of being burned alive, protested most energetically against the belief in witchcraft, and declared that the reputed witches were “hysterical” merely.

The French emancipation of Upper Italy was followed in 1814 by the Austrian reaction, but the family suffered at this time from the decline in economic prosperity (interrupted for a while in 1830, when Venice became a free port) upon which its own well-being and patrician position had been dependent.

The formation of the Hapsburg Kingdom of Lombardy and Venice put an end for the time being to equality of civil rights for the Jews; and Verona was one of the few towns of the district in which Jewish boys were allowed to attend the Gymnasium (public school), now removed from the control of the freethinkers, and handed over to that of the Jesuits.

When Lombroso’s mother, Zefira Levi, married Aron Lombroso in the year 1830, she stipulated that her children must be brought up in a place in which it would be possible for them to attend the higher schools.

The marriage with Zefira Levi, who belonged to a rich family engaged in the higher branch of industrial life, did not suffice to prevent the onset of poverty; and the youth of the five children of the marriage was passed in narrow circumstances. The mother, richly endowed both in mind and in character, and deeply concerned regarding the upbringing and culture of her children, remained her son’s confidant. She nourished in him the love of freedom and the sense of independence, both of which were dominant in her parental home at Chieri, one of the centres of activity of the Carbonari. Chieri, an industrial town of Piedmont, lay beyond the sphere of influence of Haynau and Radetzky, who, with the aid of their Croats and Tschechs, encouraged the feudal and clerical reaction in Venice, Verona, and Milan.

Lombroso’s father was an amateur as regards practical life, a man who had grown up under the influence of the French spirit and in a perfectly free social state, a man of great goodness of heart, but as little fitted to cope with the influences of the economic decay of the Venetian State as he was with those of the Austrian reign of terror.

During Lombroso’s childhood there occurred a conspiracy on the part of certain Veronese patriots against the Austrian occupation, which was suppressed by the wholesale hanging and shooting of the conspirators; and when he was only thirteen years of age there took place the temporary freeing of Milan and Venice from the Austrian yoke (1848), an event in which the young men of Milan, the second largest town of the old Venetian Republic, played a lively part.

Lombroso’s revolutionary tendencies in the field of science, and his small respect for what was traditionally established, were doubtless dependent upon the joint effect of the inherited tendencies and the youthful impressions I have described. An important additional factor in his development was his family’s loss of fortune, consequent upon the political disturbances in Italy, which lasted until the re-establishment of the Austrian dominion. It was only the courage and capacity of the mother which saved the children from sinking into the ranks of the proletariat; but some loss of social position was inevitable, and the effect of this on Lombroso’s distinctive temperament may be traced in the fact that he was a rebel from youth onwards, and strongly opposed the (vitalistic) doctrines professed at the Universities by the sons of the well-to-do. Thus it was also that he ventured a serious attack upon the interests of the great landed proprietors of Upper Italy by his descriptions of agrarian poverty and his bold exposition of the causes of pellagra.

The influence of the philosopher Vico, whose works were eagerly studied in secret at the Gymnasium (public school) of Verona, made him acquainted at an early date with the importance of the principle of organic development in relation to the structure and life of human society. Vico was studied in secret, because the Gymnasium was under the control of Jesuits with Austrian sympathies, who deliberately discouraged all advanced ideas. In 1861 Lombroso wrote in his diary as follows: “It may be said of my schooldays without exaggeration that I was thrust back into an environment of persistent medievalism—not the later sentimental revival of the Middle Ages in romance and drama—but into the conditions that prevailed prior to 1789, literally restored by the might of the bayonets of 1814. The memory of this forcible discipline, which did violence to the inborn logical spirit, and visited with severe punishment any protests against its methods, is so hateful to me that even now it visits me in dreams like a nightmare.” At the time of the introduction of Italian scholastic methods into the lands under Austrian rule, the well-known utterance of the Kaiser Franz is said to have originated: “I want, not educated, but obedient subjects.”

While still at school, Lombroso was also introduced to the evolutionary idea by the writings and the powerful personal influence of the physician Marzolo, who endeavoured by means of comparative philology to explain the origin of the earliest religious and legal institutions. Ceccarel, Marzolo’s biographer, in his first work on this investigator, published in 1870 (by Priuli of Treviso), writes as follows: “In 1850, when the first volume of Marzolo’s ‘Monumenti storici rivelati dall’ analisi della parola’ was published, certain periodicals reviewed the book in the most favourable terms. But the writer himself was disappointed by their remarks, for he saw that his well-meaning critics had not really understood his ideas. Then one day he read in a journal published in Verona an article in which full justice was done to his book; he desired to make the acquaintance of this critic, whose name was unknown to him, and whose real understanding of Marzolo’s views had delighted the latter for the first time in several years, and had at length rewarded him for his long and arduous labours. He imagined that the writer of the notice must be an advanced but lonely scientific thinker, one who owing to his private circumstances or on account of the disturbed times had hitherto lived in retirement. But when the writer of the review came to see Marzolo at Treviso, it proved to be a youth only sixteen years of age—Cesare Lombroso—the first in all Italy to recognize the genius of Marzolo, bringing the love of a son and the devotion of a disciple.”

At the outset of Lombroso’s studies he was greatly influenced by reading Burdach’s “Handbuch der Physiologie,” a work rich in anthropological ideas. At the University of Pavia, Panizza^[2] was the only man who had much effect in shaping Lombroso’s mental development.

During the decade 1850 to 1860, on the other hand, Lombroso, as a self-taught man, was simultaneously influenced by three great contemporary and complementary tendencies—that of French positivism, that of German materialism, and that of English evolutionism. With the last-named he became acquainted through French intermediation. He never had any clinical instruction in psychiatry. He read the works of Charuigi, Griesinger, and the great psychiatrists of the school of Esquirol.

Lombroso’s attitude towards German materialism, by which in youth he was so powerfully influenced, is shown most clearly by two utterances of his regarding Moleschott. The first of these occurs in the preface to his Italian edition of Moleschott’s “Kreislauf des Lebens,” a translation not published till 1869, though written in the early sixties. (In the year 1854 Moleschott was expelled from Heidelberg on account of the publication of this work; from 1861 to 1879 he was professor of physiology in Turin.) The passage runs as follows (II.-III.): “At a late hour, perhaps, and yet when the time was ripe, and unquestionably with greater sincerity and fervour than has been the case with the other Latin peoples, Italy took part in the scientific movement of which this book formed the starting-point. But just because she was so tardy an adherent, and in the endeavour, as it were, to make up for lost time, some persons in this country are apt to go too far; not only do they contest the old prejudices and the false authorities, but they also deny or misunderstand facts, simply for the reason that those in the other camp admit these facts, or because these facts appear to support the old doctrines. Thus they often follow leaders who are not entirely to be trusted, such as Büchner, Renan, and Reich; and they mistake declamations and confused rhapsodies for sound arguments, oppose fanaticism with fanaticism, and offer to their enemies the tools needed for the reconstruction of the buildings which have just been razed to the ground.”

The other passage occurs in his obituary notice on Moleschott, written in 1893: “The whole course of modern science shows that the impulse it received from the life-work of Moleschott is destined, not only to persist, but to make further and more rapid progress. Moreover, the reputed philanthropists, whose objection was not so much to the truth itself as to the injurious consequences which they believed would follow from its publication, must see to-day that certain truths, however dangerous and alarming they may at first appear, lead ultimately to the general advantage, and to the advantage even of that morality on which it was at first supposed they would have a damaging effect. It no longer distresses us when we see that morality, thanks to social physics and political economy, must descend from its glittering but fragile metaphysical altar, in order to find in utility a modest but secure foundation, from which it becomes possible to render harmless or to diminish that crime which hitherto has mocked at penal methods.”

In Vienna, in 1856, Lombroso passed the official examination for his medical degree. Here the influence of Skoda, and Lombroso’s becoming acquainted with the early works of Virchow, did not tend to induce in him sentiments of toleration towards the vitalistic doctrines dominant at the Italian Universities or towards the narrow circle of professors owing their appointment to Austrian influence and interested in the maintenance of these doctrines. He never ceased to be affected by this early opposition to academic tradition and to academic circles; in fact, it accentuated in him a certain natural tendency to paradoxes and heresies.

The inclination to exact observation,^[3] acquired through his contact with German science, led him to the study, with record of weights and measurements, of cretinism in Upper Italy;^[4] from this to the utilization of these methods for the instigation of an anthropometrical investigation of the population of Upper Italy; and also to the study of clinical psychiatry, at that time entirely neglected in Italy.^[5] The translation of Moleschott’s epoch-making writings gave a finish to Lombroso’s conception of the world; he broke loose from the speculative tendency of the psychiatry of the day, which at that time in Germany also was assuming the most remarkable forms; he turned with repugnance from the interminable discussions regarding the freedom of the will, and began, in the case of the insane, of criminal lunatics, and of criminals, to study their pathological anatomy (assisted here by Golgi), their sensory impressions, and their anthropological—and more especially craniological—peculiarities.

It is a well-known fact that from that day to our own the pathological anatomy of the psychoses has not furnished much in the way of positive results, not even to the most accomplished virtuosos of the methods of staining the fibres of the brain. Lombroso, to whom in Pavia Golgi for a long time acted as assistant, wisely refused to limit himself to the study of pathological anatomy, but always investigated side by side with this the clinical features of the psychoses and neuroses.

From the first he inclined to the view that the exact measurement and description of skulls and brains would lead to the discovery of definite distinctions between sane and insane criminals, between lunatics and epileptics, etc.

Whilst he never ignored clinical observation and the study of the sensory functions, he gave the first place to weights and measurements: these were to him the guarantees of an exact method of procedure; and he was led to borrow the instruments and methods of anthropology on account of his postulate for an anthropology of lunatics and criminals. In his interpretation of the facts thus obtained he was guided chiefly by the sane materialism of Moleschott and by the Darwinian idea of the variability of races. As a disciple of Vico, he saw nothing absurd in the view that an apparently purely social phenomenon, such as crime, can be organically caused.

The chance discovery of theromorphism (the expression is Virchow’s, and denotes the presence in man of certain bodily peculiarities of one of the lower animals) in the skulls of certain criminals, in the year 1870, finally gave rise to the formulation of a uniform hypothesis regarding the nature of criminality. Before the publication, in 1871, of the elements of this theory, Lombroso was able to devote a year to the study of the inmates of a large prison, being at the time Medical Superintendent of the Provincial Asylum at Pesaro, where there was also a large penitentiary. During the years 1871 to 1876, when he was once more lecturer and professor-extraordinary at Pavia^[6]—years during which he published his studies on pellagra, and, in addition, a number of anthropological and purely psychiatric works—he was also much occupied with the anatomical post-mortem study of the bodies of criminals. After 1876, when he came to Turin^[7] as professor of forensic medicine, being also physician to the great prison in that town for prisoners awaiting trial, he was able to examine most minutely, according to his own methods, two hundred prisoners every year, whilst a much greater number were subjected at least to ordinary clinical examination. This inconsiderable and very poorly-paid official position led him, without abandoning his unwearied researches into pellagra, to devote his chief attention day by day to the subject of criminal anthropology.

It was in the course of these investigations, and of the controversies to which the publication of his results gave rise, that he first became acquainted with the work of his predecessors in the same field. This has been demonstrated to me by incontrovertible evidence.

As predecessors must be named some of the adherents of Gall’s theories regarding the skull: the French physiologist and physician, Despine; the French psychiatrist, Morel; and three English medical men—one, the psychiatrist and distinguished anthropologist, Prichard, the other two prison surgeons, Nicolson and Bruce Thomson.

Gall is apt to be judged, very unjustly, only by his errors; for he was, in truth, the originator of the principle of the localization of the functions of the brain, and gave the first impulse to the scientific study of criminals, though he did not himself make any definite discoveries in this field. His pupil, Lauvergne, prison surgeon at Toulon during a long period of years, examined thousands of criminals, and left interesting plaster-casts of skulls; certain types were admirably described by him. Despine made a thorough study of the psychology of the criminal, and showed that the principal characteristics of the habitual criminal are idleness, irresolution, and lessened sensibility, both mental and physical. Supplementary to Despine’s investigations was the great work of Lucas upon heredity, in which he demonstrated the hereditary transmissibility of the disposition to theft, murder, rape, and arson, and furnished extensive materials regarding the congenital nature of the tendency to crime.

Morel’s work lacked thorough analysis, and was also destitute of a firm biological foundation; but it was based upon extensive materials, and was animated by a certain instinct for what was important. His “Traité des Dégénérescences” was published in 1859. Thus originated the catchword “degeneration,” which remains current to-day, without having even yet acquired any definite signification. Now it is used to denote the neuropathic constitution; now, again, to denote the hereditary predisposition to psychoses. According to some this predisposition is latent, and manifests itself only by physical stigmata of degeneration; others regard the degenerate as being mentally as well as physically abnormal, and as suffering, either before the onset of actual insanity or in the entire absence of the latter from mutability of mood and temper, obsessive ideas, moral defects, and one-sided intellectual endowment; yet others use the term “degeneration” to denote a vague diathesis—a mingling of tendencies to disturbances of metabolism and to neuropathies.

More recent French investigators distinguish between “higher” and “lower” degenerates, and include in these categories almost the entire province of mental disturbances, severe neuroses, and criminality. German investigators go so far as to explain that most human beings are degenerates, and Moebius held that the repulsiveness of the majority of his fellow-creatures spoke in favour of this view.

Morel, through the vagueness of his definition of degeneration (“déviation maladive du type humain”), was himself partly to blame for the unsatisfactory development of the whole doctrine. He had correctly observed that unfavourable conditions of life—for example, the lack of legislative enactments for the protection of factory workers during the middle of the last century—transformed the entire outward appearance of those exposed to such conditions; but he failed to distinguish between inherited and acquired characteristics, nor did he ask himself if and how acquired characteristics are inherited; and he omitted to determine at the outset of his inquiry what were the precise characteristics of the type, deviations from which he was recording. With the exception of Lombroso, those who, after Morel, dealt with the problem of degeneration ignored the fact that these problems transcend the narrow limits of pathology to trespass on the wider province of biology, and failed to see that the problems in question are those of human variability, of the laws of inheritance, and other anthropological questions. Prichard, the distinguished ethnologist, widely regarded (in company with the English prison surgeons Thomson and Nicolson) as a predecessor of Lombroso, was the first to detect what is typical in the outward appearance of old “gaol-birds,” and to put forward, in explanation of confirmed criminality, the conception of moral insanity. This moral monstrosity was to be regarded as correlated with the abnormal physical characteristics.

Lombroso found it necessary again and again to elaborate the doctrine of moral insanity; and in the long-continued campaign against the misunderstandings to which his theory of the homo delinquens was exposed, that doctrine played a much more important part than Morel’s theory of degeneration.

It is incorrect to speak of Prichard and Morel as predecessors of Lombroso, in a sense implying that the latter was influenced by either of the two former in the inception or development of his teachings. Just as little is it true of Gall, whose work was justly estimated by Lombroso as early as the year 1853, as we learn from his brief work on the correlation between sexual and cerebral development—“Di un fenomeno fisiologico commune ad alcuni nevrotteri.”^[8]