Cesare Lombroso et l’aliéné cannibale de Cadillac

Abstract

In the fifth Italian edition of L’homme criminel (second French edition of 1895), Cesare Lombroso cites and summarizes a long article by the French psychiatrist Louis Camuset (1841-1897) who in 1887 described the clinical observation of a mentally ill patient who had been detained in the lunatic asylum at Cadillac, France, since 1855. This psychotic man who suffered from “chronic delusion” had engaged in acts of cannibalism on two occasions by eating the brain of another patient in the asylum: the first time (1862) after breaking the skull of an old man with an iron bar; the second time, 5 years later (1867), by stealing a brain from a table in the hospital's autopsy room. We give a full translation into French of the article written in Italian by Doctor Camuset and various comments about this exceptional case which, for Cesare Lombroso, illustrates the “mad criminal” (delinquente pazzo) who acts for strange motives (concezioni strane).