“I would not wait for them to commit crime”: Cesare Lombroso’s criminal anthropology in Croatia

Croatia is a Central European and Mediterranean country with a long maritime border with Italy. Throughout history, it was not only goods but also knowledge and medical practices that were exchanged over its borders. Following archival sources, individual informal networks, professional publications, daily newspapers, and public lectures, we aimed to present main channels by which Croatian intellectuals embraced Lombroso’s criminal anthropology at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. We illuminated the fact that the adoption of Cesare Lombroso’s concepts stimulated the joint engagement and communication of medical and legal realms in Croatia. Our analysis exposed the traces of Lombroso’s ideas within the reform of the penal code, thus influencing forensic psychiatric practice. We showed how those ideas were translated into policy, politically exploited, and pitched into discussions employing rhetorical techniques, which led to the stigmatization of certain groups of people, particularly patients suffering from epilepsy. Our results also showed that, contrary to other countries that formed Austria-Hungary, the discussions about Lombroso’s criminology waned in Croatia after the First World War. We believe that our results can close the gap on this topic, adding the evidence about the spread and influence of Lombroso’s concepts within Austria-Hungary in the analyzed period.