Linked Life Data

21729591

Source:http://linkedlifedata.com/resource/pubmed/id/21729591

Statements in which the resource exists as a subject.
PredicateObject
rdf:type
lifeskim:mentions
pubmed:issue
2
pubmed:dateCreated
2011-7-6
pubmed:abstractText
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.
pubmed:language
eng
pubmed:journal
pubmed:citationSubset
IM
pubmed:status
MEDLINE
pubmed:issn
0393-5264
pubmed:author
pubmed:issnType
Print
pubmed:volume
26
pubmed:owner
NLM
pubmed:authorsComplete
Y
pubmed:pagination
97-101
pubmed:meshHeading
pubmed:articleTitle
Cesare Lombroso: an anthropologist between evolution and degeneration.
pubmed:affiliation
University History Museum and Department of Experimental Medicine, University of Pavia, Italy. paolo.mazzarello@unipv.it
pubmed:publicationType
Journal Article, Biography, Historical Article, Portraits