Criminal Man, According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso

by Gina Lombroso

The susceptibility of the patient to suggestion should also be tested, to determine what value can be attached to his assertions. Sufferers from hysteria and general paralysis are like children, highly susceptible to suggestion, not necessarily of an hypnotic nature. If you tell an hysterical person with conviction that he suffers pain in a certain part of his body, is feverish or pale or something of the sort, he will inform you spontaneously after a few minutes that he feels pain or fever, etc. After a crime of a startling nature has been committed by some unknown person, it not unfrequently happens that some hysterical subject, generally a youth, who imagines he has been accused of the crime by the neighbours or his acquaintances, becomes convinced that he is really guilty and gives himself up to the police.

Speech. Special attention should be directed during the examination to the way in which the patient replies to questions and his mode of pronunciation. There may be peculiarities of pronunciation and stammering, characteristic of certain forms of mental alienation, or at any rate of some nervous anomaly; or articulation may be tremulous and forced, as in precocious dementia and chronic inebriety. In other cases the words are jumbled and confused, especially if long and difficult. In the first stages of progressive paralysis the letter r is not pronounced. To test this anomaly, which is of great importance in the diagnosis, the patient should be requested to pronounce difficult words, such as, corroborate, reread, rewrite, etc.

In order not to lose such valuable indications, in cases where personal examination is impossible, phonograph impressions of conversations between the patient and some third person will serve as a substitute.

The inquiry may reveal still more serious anomalies in the ideas, intelligence, and mental condition of the patient. Sometimes the answers given are sensible but are followed by nonsense. Other patients, especially when afflicted with melancholia, speak unwillingly, as if the words were forced from them, one by one. Idiots, cretins, and demented persons are sometimes incapable of expressing themselves. Some patients who have had apoplectic strokes substitute one word for another, "bread" for "wine," etc., or elide one part of the sentence and only repeat the last word.

Memory. To form an idea of the memory of the subject, questions should be put to him concerning recent and remote personal facts and circumstances, the year in which he or his children were born, what he had for his supper on the previous evening, etc., etc.

Visual memory may be tested by giving the patient a sheet of paper, on which are drawn various common objects, letters, or easy words. He should be allowed to look at these for five or ten seconds and requested to enumerate them after the paper has been withdrawn. In order to test the memory of sounds, the examiner should utter five or six easy words and ask the patient to repeat them immediately afterwards.

To test sense of colour, a picture on which various colours are painted is placed before the patient, as well as a skein of wool of the same shade as one of the colours in the picture, which he is requested to point out.

Handwriting is very important, particularly in distinguishing a born criminal from a lunatic, and between the various kinds of mental alienation.

Monomaniacs and mattoids (cranks) who give the police the most trouble often speak in a perfectly sane manner, but pour out all their insanity on paper, without an examination of which it is not easy to detect mental derangement. They write with rapidity and at great length. Their pockets, bags, etc., are always full of sheets of paper covered with small handwriting, sometimes scribbled in all directions. The matter is generally absurd or simply stupid, consisting of endless repetitions.

Individuals in the first stage of paralysis make orthographical errors, which coincide with their mistakes in pronunciation, like Garigaldi, instead of Garibaldi. Care must be taken to test this defect thoroughly. If the patient is fairly well-educated, his signature, which is the last to alter, is not sufficient; nor are a few lines a satisfactory test, since he can easily concentrate his attention on them, but he should be requested to write a page or two and be exhorted to make haste.