The Creepy Wax Covered heads of 19th Century Thieves and Murderers
The head of 19th century physician and
psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso has been preserved in a glass chamber
since his death in 1909.
The former professor of forensic medicine’s sleeping
face is now displayed in the Museum of Criminal Anthropology in Turin,
Italy, along with the wax-covered heads, brains, body parts and skulls of the
soldiers, civilians and convicts whom he studied.
As well as the skull of notorious thief and bandit
Giuseppe Villella, the exhibition includes the Gallows of Turin (used in 1865
for Turin’s last hanging) and forms part of the Museum of Man, coordinated by
Giacomo Giacobini to celebrate Lombroso’s and Turin’s influence on scientific
thinking in criminology, psychology and anthropology.
Although the exhibition opened recently, Lombroso
displayed his collection to the public as early as 1884. The spectacle grew as
scholars and doctors, who were interested in his work, sent more artifacts from
various parts of the world to support his research. In 1892, Lombroso
established the Psychiatric and Criminology Museum in Turin, where he formally
presented the labelled skulls and wax-covered heads of convicts alongside the
tools and weapons which they used to commit their crimes.
As Lombroso was interested in how physical features
could indicate whether an individual was prone to crime or ‘madness’, a
substantial number of the body parts and possessions, now largely over a
century old, were sent or claimed from asylums and prisons and there have reportedly
been requests for them to be returned to family members.
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