Frigessi cesare lombroso biography

Cesare Lombroso (–) was a prominent Italian medical doctor and intellectual in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Born of Jewish parents in Verona, Cesare Lombroso — , the Italian criminologist, was educated by the Jesuits; he received a degree in medicine from the University of Pavia in and a degree in surgery from the University of Genoa in At various times he was an army physician and in charge of the insane at several hospitals, but his major positions, all at the University of Turin, were those of professor of legal medicine and public hygiene, ; professor of psychiatry and clinical psychiatry, ; and professor of criminal anthropology, The book went through five editions in Italy and was translated into various European languages, although never into English.

Lombroso was influenced by French positivism, German materialism, and English evolutionism. Although Lombroso was aware of the importance of social and psychological factors in the causation of crime, his primary emphasis was on the concept of the atavistic criminal. He believed the atavistic criminal to be a biological throwback to an earlier stage of evolution, since inborn delinquency was not natural to contemporary mankind but peculiar to primitive races.

The atavistic criminal could be identified by various anatomical, physiological, and psychic stigmata, different kinds of inborn delinquency being identifiable by different patterns of stigmata.

This article outlines, for the first time, the main junctures in the historical memory of Cesare Lombroso and of the scholarly interpretation of his legacy.

Lombroso later modified his ideas about criminal typology. In later editions he expanded his investigations and consequently his theory, adding degeneracy as a cause of criminality and considering atavism to be a form of degeneracy. Although his theoretical linking of atavism and degeneracy was challenged by biologists, it did widen his original narrow concept of the born criminal, which had been the primary point of attack of his critics.

The insane criminal type includes the alcoholic, the mattoid, and the hysterical criminal. Further additions to the typology include the criminaloid—a criminal qualitatively similar to the born criminal but differing quantitatively from him —who had become a criminal more from precipitating external factors than from predisposing internal ones; the pseudocriminal; the habitual criminal; and the person who commits a crime of passion.

Although Lombroso did not believe that all criminal behavior is of organic origin, there is no doubt that he never completely relinquished his belief in the existence of the born criminal type. In response to suggestions by friends and attacks by critics he also came to give more attention to factors in the physical and social environment of the offender.

For example, in Crime: Its Causes and Remedies he not only revised the estimate of the born criminal to 33 percent of the criminal population but also discussed social circumstances which might be partially responsible for encouraging a variety of transmissible biological anomalies that in turn would function within and affect the social structure.

Lombroso was not entirely opposed to the death penalty but believed it should be used only as a last resort. He favored attempts to readjust the criminal and suggested a doctrine of symbiosis of crime, whereby society would make use of the labor arid aptitudes of offenders.