• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

SCIENCE, PSEUDOSCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY IN FASCIST ITALY Physical Anthropology, Phrenology, Constitutional Medicine and Eugenics: The Slippery Slope to Racism Piero P. Foa,` M.D., Sc.D., Emeritus Professor of Physiology Wayne State University School of Medicine, Detroit, Michigan March 10, 2003 The history of Fascism, its rise and fall, and the consequent fate of the Ital- ian Jews have been told in films and lecture halls and analyzed by historians, political scientists and journalists, including Benito Mussolini and two of his mis- tresses, Angelica Balabanoff and Margherita ((1-10), Fig. 1, App.1.). Much has been written also about the origins and development of Physical Anthropology, Phrenology, Constitutional Medicine, Positive and Negative Eugenics and their exploitation for political purposes (see below). In this article, I will review the participation of three generations of Foas` in this period of Italian history, both as protagonists and victims. It is a story based on a collection of mementos, letters and photographs preserved in the family archives (some of them attached to this article) and enriched by bits of oral history heard from my grandfather Pio and my father Carlo. A story which describes the end of what, in retrospect, might have been considered a fool’s paradise: the total social, economic and cultural integration of the Italian Jews in the life of the Nation. It contains some hereto- fore unpublished material reproduced in the original Italian and followed by my translation into English, illustrating the effort by Mussolini and his henchmen to create a “scientific” basis for their racist policies. The idea that a person’s physical, mental and emotional characteristics are controlled by discreet and specific areas of the brain is very old. Traces of it 1 are found in the Indian and Balinese concepts of Aryuveda (Fig. 2). Pythago- ras, Plato, Socrates and, later, Galen (11,12) taught that the brain is the seat of the mind, while Albertus Magnus (13) believed that the anterior region of the brain is the seat of judgment, the posterior the seat of memory. These concepts of functional localization were extended in more recent times by the observations of J.K.S. Spurtzheim and K. Brodmann (14) and eventually by the analysis of the responses which Harvey Cushing and Wilder Penfield (15,16) obtained upon cor- tical stimulation in conscious patients during brain surgery (Fig 3, 4). Some of this work, which resurfaced in recent educational, psychologic and psychiatric litera- ture (17, Fig.5) rests upon the morphologic foundation laid by Camillo Golgi (18, App. 2, 3) and coincides with the birth of Criminal Anthropology, a science based on the belief that criminals are themselves victims of inherited or “atavistic” ab- normalities (stigmata) reminiscent of more primitive stages of human evolution. While this school of thought led to fundamental reforms of the penal codes in many Western Countries, with emphasis on rehabilitation rather than punishment, it also gave rise to Phrenology, a pseudoscience also know as Cranioscopy, Cran- iology or Physiognomy, based on the proposition that the degree of development of cortical functions are proportional to the size and development of the corre- sponding cortical areas and that, in humans, the size and contour of the cortical areas are sufficiently close to those of the outer surface of the skull to allow an evaluation of a person’s mental and emotional faculties from an examination of the size and shape of the head. It was also a time when the medical world was turning its attention to the “social diseases” (tuberculosis, alcoholism, malaria, venereal diseases) and to the need for public health remedies. My grandfather Pio, a colleague of Lombroso at the University of Turin where he chaired the De- partment of Pathologic Anatomy, joined the battle sponsoring legislation in the Senate, writing for the medical and the lay press, ignoring social taboos with lec- tures on sex education to old and young alike (19,20), and earning his badge as a pioneer in what was going to become a dispute between those who believed that the health of the Nation depended upon public health measures and education, that is upon “negative eugenics”, and those who believed in “positive eugenics” and preached birth control, compulsory sterilization and premarital certification as means to eliminate the unfit and to save the Caucasian people from contamina- tion by the Negroid races, then considered culturally and physically inferior (see below). According to A. Macalister, writing in the Encyclopedia Britannica (21), germs of phrenology can be found in the work of F.J. Galls, J.K. Spurzheim, of the French anthropologist A. Bertillion and others. Indeed, in the middle of the 19th 2 Century, Bertillion developed a system of identification based on measurements of the skull and other body parts widely used in criminal cases. While supplanted by finger-printing in the courts of law, Anthropometry remained a basic canon for the believers in Phrenology, among them the Italian Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909, Fig. 6), a Professor of Physical Anthropology, Psychology and Forensic Medicine at the University of Turin. Lombroso believed that some individuals were “born criminal” and were physically, emotionally and behaviorally a throwback to past races of mankind, easily identifiable on the basis of cranial, facial and other bod- ily features normally found in “inferior” populations such as the Hottentots, the Bushmen, the American Blacks and the Mongolians. According to Lombroso, the list of these features included a sloping forehead, large jaws, prominent cheek bones, orbital arches and lips, large ears, large and crooked nose, thick hair, asym- metry of the face and cranium, long arms, exaggerated tendon reflexes, abnormal sexual behavior, emotional instability, lack of moral sense, vindictiveness, cru- elty to humans and fondness for animals and for violent and pornographic tattoos prevalence of epilepsy, somnambulism, left handedness other “atavistic” features (22-25). The Foa` and the Lombroso families were close friends and Lombroso wrote a warm letter of introduction to Charles Richet when my father Carlo went to Paris to work in his lab at the Sorbonne (Fig. 7, App. 4). Lombroso’s daughters Paola and Gina and my mother Isa were also good friends and worked together as volunteers at the Casa del Sole, an institution for the care of sickly children who were taught to make made trinkets and sold them for the benefit of the Home (26, Fig. 8). Nevertheless, no publication or document suggest that Pio had an inter- est in Phrenology, although he honored Lombroso’s request to provide some skull and other measurements of six inmates of Turin’s insane asylum (27). Pio’s only other brush with Phrenology was related to me by my father Carlo. According to this story, while doing the autopsy on one of Lombroso’s students, Pio found an anomaly of the brain cortex, which the deceased had described as one of the “atavistic” traits of the “criminal man”. My father, then a medical student, remem- bered also that Lombroso’s lectures were always attended by overflow crowds of students and admirers and were often accompanied by the presentation of clini- cal cases. Usually these were derelicts recruited by Mr. Cabria, the savvy errand man of the Department and were selected because they had at least some of the required physical and psycho logic features (not a difficult task given the abun- dance of choices) and who, for a few lire, would manufacture a suitable criminal record and answer question about personal and family life with a stream of col- orful profanities. Lombroso’s propensity for stretching the evidence to support his hypotheses should be interpreted in the light of some medical concepts of 3 the time when many considered pellagra a contagious disease and believed that the children of cretins would be cretins, and that the progeny of alcoholics was prone to strokes, microcephaly, epilepsy and personality disorders for generations (28). Lombroso also showed ambiguity towards medianic phenomena. Having attended a session held by the popular medium Eusapia Paladino and apparently influenced by the favorable position held by celebrities such as Madame Curie, Filippo Bottazzi, Professor of Physiology at the University of Naples and other prominent scientists and intellectuals, he chose to overlook the evidence of fraud and illusion and took the position that the phenomena were real manifestations of the power of thought, writing: “I am ashamed and grieved at having opposed with so much tenacity the possibility of so-called spiritistic facts; I say facts because I am still opposed to the theory ... but facts exist and I boast of being a slave to facts”(29-40). Paladino’s sessions were attended also by my father who, in spite of repeated attempts, was unable to obtain convincing photographic evidence of the flashes of light around Paladino’s head seen by others, to record on a smoked drum the movements said to have occurred in a separate room (Fig. 9) or to ac- count for notes written in Italian and in French and attributed to the presumably illiterate person (1,Fig. 10). Lombroso received many honors and upon his death, Leonardo Bistolfi made a bronze plaque in his memory (Fig. 11). Lombroso’s teachings, carried on, among others, by Leone Lattes, Professor of Forensic Medicine at the University of Pavia (42-44), was one of the bases of “Constitutional Medicine”, whose proponents, believing in the clinical appli- cation of anthropometric measurements, described 3 major types of human be- ings: asthenic, muscular and picnic (later reduced to microsplanchnic and mega- losplanchnic), each having a propensity toward different sets of diseases. The most prominent Italian believers in Constitutional Medicine were Achille De Gio- vanni (45), one of the “four great men of Sabbioneta” (Fig.

Load more

  13

Copy Link