Cesare Lombroso and the pathology of left-handedness.

摘要

Unlike Abraham Verghese's fictional 20th-century Dr Ghosh, the theories of the Turin physician Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909) were seen by his contemporaries as anything but rubbish; rather, they were cutting-edge science. Lombroso, often referred to as the father of modern criminology, developed a comprehensive anthropology of the causes of criminality, insanity, feeblemindedness, and left-handedness. According to Lombroso, these groups shared biological regressions to primitive mentalities, which he labelled "atavism". Defectives could be identified by their physical features and behaviours that resembled that of non-human primates and "savages". Although left-handers did not necessarily evince these anatomical characteristics, their left-handedness served as evidence for Lombroso of the physical manifestation of their atavism. As "man advances in civilization and culture", he wrote in 1903, "he shows an always greater right-sidedness as compared to...women and savage races, [who] even when they are not properly left-handed have certain gestures and movements which are a species of left-handedness".