I 52 THE MISMEASURE OF MAN
The assistant prosecutor spoke at great length.... All the latest catch-
phrases then in vogue in his set, everything that then was and still is
accepted as the last word in scientific wisdom was included in his speech—
heredity and congenital criminality, Lombroso and Tarde, evolution and
the struggle for existence.... "Running away with himself, isn't he?" said
the presiding judge with a smile, bending towards the austere member of
the court. "A fearful dunderhead!" said the austere member.In Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), Professor Van Helsing urges
Mina Harker to describe the evil Count: "Tell us... dry men of
science what you see with those so bright eyes." She responds: "The
Count is a criminal and of criminal type. Nordau and Lombroso
would so classify him, and qua criminal he is of imperfectly formed
mind."*
Maria Montessori expressed an embattled optimism when she
wrote in 1913 (p. 8): "The phenomenon of criminality spreads
without check or succor, and up to yesterday it aroused in us noth-
ing but repulsion and loathing. But now that science has laid its
finger upon this moral fester, it demands the cooperation of all
mankind to combat it."
The common subject of these disparate assessments is Cesare
Lombroso's theory of I'uomo delinquente—the criminal man—prob-
ably the most influential doctrine ever to emerge from the anthro-
pometric tradition. Lombroso, an Italian physician, described the
insight that led to his theory of innate criminality and to the profes-
sion he established—criminal anthropology. He had, in 1870, been
trying to discover anatomical differences between criminals and
insane men "without succeeding very well." Then, "the morning of
a gloomy day in December," he examined the skull of the famous* In his Annotated Dracula, Leonard Wolf (1975, p. 300) notes that Jonathan Harker's
initial description of Count Dracula is based directly upon Cesare Lombroso's
account of the born criminal. Wolf presents the following contrasts:
HARKER WRITES: "His [the Count's] face was... aquiline, with high bridge
of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils... ."
LOMBROSO: "[The criminal's] nose on the contrary ... is often aquiline like
the beak of a bird of prey."
HARKER: "His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the
nose... ."
LOMBROSO: "The eyebrows are bushy and tend to meet across the nose."
HARKER: "... his ears were pale and at the tops extremely pointed... ."
LOMBROSO: "with a protuberance on the upper part of the posterior margin
... a relic of the pointed ear... ."