Medicalization of Social Pathologies: A Case Study on Cesare Lombroso's Theory of Crime

Medicalization is the process by which human conditions and problems come to be defined and treated as medical conditions, and thus become the subject of medical study, diagnosis, prevention, or treatment. In this process, biomedical science is used to explain social harms and provide ways to eliminate and prevent them. Cesare Lombroso, an Italian criminologist and physician and founder of the positivist school of criminology in the 19th century, was one of the pioneers of the medicalization of crime. Lombroso suggested that criminals are distinguished from noncriminals by multiple physical anomalies. In this article, we try to examine the process of medicalization of crime in his works. In the first step, we show that the basic premise of his research is based on Lamarck and Darwin's theory of evolution. He believed that the characteristics of criminals indicate an atavistic origin, that they reproduce the physical-psychological conditions of their distant ancestors. In fact, crime is a symptom of the primitive instincts that lie in the criminal, and criminals are a manifestation of returning to a primitive or subhuman type of human beings. His method at this stage was using phrenology and anthropometry. In the second step, we show that his method is based on model of thinking and reasoning in medicine. Lombroso tried to provide criteria for distinguishing criminals from normal people according to normal and abnormal in pathology.