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. 2011 Apr-Jun;26(2):97-101.

Cesare Lombroso: an anthropologist between evolution and degeneration

Affiliations

Cesare Lombroso: an anthropologist between evolution and degeneration

Paolo Mazzarello. Funct Neurol. 2011 Apr-Jun.

Abstract

Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909) was a prominent Italian medical doctor and intellectual in the second half of the nineteenth century. He became world famous for his theory that criminality, madness and genius were all sides of the same psychobiological condition: an expression of degeneration, a sort of regression along the phylogenetic scale, and an arrest at an early stage of evolution. Degeneration affected criminals especially, in particular the "born delinquent" whose development had stopped at an early stage, making them the most "atavistic" types of human being. Lombroso also advocated the theory that genius was closely linked with madness. A man of genius was a degenerate, an example of retrograde evolution in whom madness was a form of "biological compensation" for excessive intellectual development. To confirm this theory, in August 1897, Lombroso, while attending the Twelfth International Medical Congress in Moscow, decided to meet the great Russian writer Lev Tolstoy in order to directly verify, in him, his theory of degeneration in the genius. Lombroso's anthropological ideas fuelled a heated debate on the biological determinism of human behaviour.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Cesare Lombroso in military uniform (1860).
Figure 2
Figure 2
An elderly Cesare Lombroso.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Title page of the fourth edition of Genio e Follia .
Figure 4
Figure 4
Portrait of Tolstoy in L’uomo di genio by Cesare Lombroso, 6th edition 1894.

References

    1. Baima Bollone PL . Cesare Lombroso e la scoperta dell’uomo delinquente. Scarmagno (Turin): Priuli & Verlucca; 2009.
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    1. Dolza D . Essere figlie di Lombroso. Milan: Franco Angeli; 1990.
    1. Ferrio L . Antologia Lombrosiana. Pavia: Società Editrice Pavese; 1962.
    1. Frigessi D . Cesare Lombroso. Turin: Einaudi; 2003.

Personal name as subject

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