Studies in Forensic Psychiatry

When, in 1810, Franz Joseph Gall said: “The measure of culpability and the measure of punishment can not be determined by a study of the illegal act, but only by a study of the individual committing it,” he expressed an idea which has, in late years, come to be regarded as a trite truism.

This called forth as an unavoidable consequence a more lively interest on the part of various social agencies in the personality of the criminal, with the resultant gradually increasing conviction that the suppression of crime is not primarily a legal question, but is rather a problem for the physician, sociologist, and economist.