Cesare Lombroso and Italian Anatomical Museums

Check out this great post about 19th Century criminologist and physiognomist Cesare Lombroso and his connection to anatomical museums housing collections of criminal brains on the Mind Hacks website. The piece was inspired by an article in Nature Magazine and gives a great history of the man and his ideas, with wonderful links.

The article that inspired the write-up is, essentially, a review of the newly reopened "Museum of Human Anatomy at the University of Turin," or "Museo di Anatomia Umana 'Luigo Rolando'." The museum sounds amazing--it has just reopened after a long renovation designed to recreate a the feel of the original museum, established in 1739 and opened to the public in 1830 and has on display, among other things, preserved brains, a collection of 19th century brain models, skulls, paintings of famous anatomists, embryological models, and death masks of the lofty and depraved. It also features a stained glass window from 1897 depicting brain slices prepared by a former university head and neuroanatomist (that's his skeleton you see above!) Carlo Giacomini. The article is really fascinating and engagingly written, peppered with almost unbelievable historical fact. Download the article, by Alison Abbot and called "Hidden Treasures: Turin's Anatomy Museum," here.

Top photo: from the article. Caption reads "closest genius: Giacomini's skeleton and unusually shaped brain." Bottom: Cesare Lombroso's "L' Homme Criminel: Revolutionnaires et Criminels Politiques..."

Thanks, Lance, for bringing this to my attention!

Anonymous [Treatise on physiognomy. (Netherlands?, ca. 1790)].

Found on the National Library of Medicine's "Historical Anatomies on the Web." Description reads:

Physiognomy is the science of relating an individual's character, personality, and temperament to the shape of his or her face, head, and/or body. The theories behind it go back to Hippocrates, who believed that physical characteristics of the human body revealed personality traits; Aristotle performed studies on how hair, limbs and facial features predicted personality and temperament. Such theories thrived throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and the noted Girolamo Cardano (1501-1576) was one of its main proponents. By the 18th century, the study of physiognomy was still taken very seriously as a medical topic, with important additions to the field made by Johann Caspar Lavater (1741-1801). Franz Josef Gall (1758-1828) attempted to make its study even more scientific by measuring human and animal craniums to find correlations between skull shape and behavior, founding the field of phrenology.

The author of this fine, manuscript treatise and sketchbook on physiognomy is unknown. The text is written in Dutch and was probably composed in the 1790s; it is possible that it was created as a dissertation by a medical student.