3. Retrospect of Criminal Anthropology

Abstract

The deeply interesting and instructive Museum of Criminal Anthropology, founded by Lacassagne in the noble university on the banks of the Rhone, is well known to all medical visitors to Lyons. It is now proposed by the Faculty of Medicine at Turin to establish a museum somewhat similar in character, though of wider scope, at the university with which Lombroso has so long been connected. All the material, so far as it can be collected, for the study of the causes, symptoms, and therapeutics of insanity and criminality will here be brought together. The medical man, the lawyer, and the philosopher will be able to examine the “palimpsests” of the asylum and the prison, the data concerning the ætiology of crime and mental perturbations, the geography of crime, etc., and the skeletons and brains of the insane and criminal will demonstrate the close connection between mental aberrations and corporal abnormalities. Such a museum must form a most valuable source of instruction in psychiatry, and it is to be hoped that the initiative of France and Italy may before long be followed in England. I may add that a Museum of Psychology—not of morbid psychology especially—was founded a few years since at Florence by Professor Mantegazza.