Cesare Lombroso, the father of modern criminology, owes his career to a human skull. In 1871, as a young doctor at a mental asylum in Pavia, Italy, he autopsied the brain of Giuseppe Villela, a ...

These days Cesare Lombroso is often considered a figure of fun, a flamboyant crazy who insisted that a criminal — or, indeed, a genius — could be recognized by the cut of his jaw or the slope of his ...