Antonio Marro Explained

Antonio Marro
Birth Date:30 December 1840
Birth Place:Limone Piemonte, province of Cuneo, Piedmont
Death Place:Turin, Italy
Nationality:Italian
Known For:Phrenology

Antonio Marro (1840-1913) was an Italian psychiatrist, known for his studies on criminology and puberty.

He was born to a family of limited means, but was able to graduate with a degree in medicine and surgery from the University of Turin. After working with the Navy, he moved back to Limone Piemonte.

There, in 1880, he published his Guida all’arte della vita (Guide to the Art of Life). After the death of his first wife, he moved in 1882 with his four children to Turin where he took a position working as a physician for the judiciary and incarceration system. He became an assistant to Cesare Lombroso.[1]

He was prolific in his publications, often in collaboration with Lombroso, such as I germi della pazzia morale nei fanciulli (Origins of the moral mental illness among children, 1883) and Ambidestrismo nei pazzi e nei criminali (Ambidexterity in the deranged and criminal, 1883), Studi psicometrici sui mattoidi e pazzi morali (1885).

Some of his publications attempted to find influences that caused the mental degeneration of progeny, in hopes of finding eugenic solutions. For example, in his 1887 work on Sull’influenza dell’età dei genitori sui caratteri psicofisici dei figli (On the influence of parental age on the Psychophysical caracteristics of the children), he claimed that children of older parents were more prone to have absence of affectionate sentiments, and more likely to be criminals, swindlers and murderers.[2] It has been claimed that some of this data was supported by later investigations by other eugenics supporters such as RJ Ewart[3]

In 1885, he became medical director or the insane asylum (manicomio) of Turin. In 1888, he founded the journal of the Annals of Phrenology and Allied Sciences (Annali di freniatria e scienze affini). His focus was on making diagnoses of patients using various measurements. He also studied the pubertal development and its relationship to madness. In 1900, he founded the Istituto medico pedagogico pei fanciulli deficienti in Turin. Some of his ideas, in which intellectual and moral development follow an ontologic pathway, paralleled the Positivist criminology's notions of mental illness as a form of atavism.[4]

Works

Bibliography

Notes and References

  1. https://books.google.com/books?id=Ep1wxrUgXW4C Rivista enciclopedica contemporanea
  2. https://books.google.com/books?id=Ep1wxrUgXW4C Rivista enciclopedica contemporanea
  3. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3859143 The Influence of the Age of the Parent at Birth of Child on Eye-Colour, Stature and Intelligence
  4. https://www.aspi.unimib.it/collections/entity/detail/421/ Archivo Storico de Psiquiatria Italian

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