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Lectures on Legal Medicine (Lezioni di Medicina Legale)
This book, as the preface explains, was an attempt to present in a concise and popular form the theories of criminal anthropologists, on which the author had previously delivered a series of university lectures, and which he feared might have been erroneously or imperfectly understood by those of his hearers who were diffident or insufficiently prepared.
It is divided into three parts, criminal anthropology, mental alienation, and the relation of serious offences (assault, murder, poisoning, etc.) to legal medicine.
The first part contains a summing-up of the author's ideas on the atavistic and pathological origin of the criminal. He examines the equivalents of crime among plants, animals, savages, and children, describes the pathological causes which call forth atavistic instincts and alludes to other special kinds of degeneration peculiar to criminals. Finally, the anatomy, functions, and internal organs of the criminal are examined, and a careful study made of his intellectual manifestations and psychology. Similar studies on epileptics and the morally insane show that the three forms are only variations of the same degeneration.
We have an examination of occasional, habitual, and latent criminals, who represent an attenuated type of delinquency, following on the investigations of these serious forms, admitting of correction, prevention, or cure. It develops much later in life than the vicious propensities of instinctive criminals or may even remain latent; yet at the root we always find the same anatomical and pathological anomalies, although less marked and fewer in number.
The origin of passionate and political criminals is entirely diverse. Their criminality springs from an excess of noble passions, the impetuosity of which prevents them from exercising sober judgment and urges them to unpremeditated actions that afterwards cause them the deepest remorse.
After a rapid survey of feminine criminality and its equivalent, prostitution, the author discusses juridical and social methods of curing crime.
In the second part, mental alienation in relation to legal medicine, the author examines the anthropological and psychic characters of lunacy, which he divides into various classes: congenital mental alienation (cretinism, idiocy, imbecility, eccentricity); acquired mental alienation (mania, melancholia, paranoia, circular insanity, dementia); mental alienation in conjunction with neurosis (epilepsy, hysteria, progressive general paralysis); alienation resulting from toxic influences (alcoholism, including forms produced by indulgence in absinthe and coca, saturnine encephalopathy, pellagra). An investigation is made into the etiology of these various forms with special reference to their juridical importance.
The third part is devoted exclusively to medico-legal questions, to an examination of the various forms of violent death: by heat, electricity, starvation, hanging, strangulation, asphyxia, and poisoning, the symptoms which distinguish each type being carefully defined. This is followed by a study on wounds produced by firearms, pointed weapons or blades, on living and dead bodies, in order to determine the exact situation of the wound and the manner in which it has been inflicted. Finally, we have an examination of the different forms of poisoning.
A separate lecture treats of sexual psychopathy and offences against morality; and other lectures discuss questions of legal obstetrics: abortion, infanticide, and matrimonial questions.