author
Gina Lombroso
1872–1944
A physician and writer who moved easily between science, social criticism, and literary life, she brought questions about crime, psychology, and women’s place in modern society to a wide audience. Her work still feels revealing for the way it links private life with big social change.
1 Audiobook
Criminal Man, According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso
by Gina Lombroso
About the author
Born in Pavia in 1872, Gina Lombroso was an Italian physician, writer, psychiatrist, and criminologist. She is often remembered for work connected to her father, the criminologist Cesare Lombroso, including collaborations that helped circulate his ideas, but she also wrote in her own voice on the condition of women and the effects of industrialization.
She was part of a lively intellectual world in Italy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sources agree that she later became Gina Lombroso-Ferrero after marrying the historian and writer Guglielmo Ferrero, and that she died in Geneva in 1944.
What makes her especially interesting to contemporary listeners is the range of her interests: medicine, psychology, social thought, and everyday modern life. Even when her work grew out of the debates of her time, it aimed to explain complicated ideas clearly and to connect them to ordinary human experience.