Alexandre Lacassagne

Alexandre Lacassagne was a French forensic physician who held the chair of legal medicine at Lyon and founded the journal Archives d’anthropologie criminelle. His Lyon school was the main rival to Cesare Lombroso’s Italian school: where Lombroso read criminality off the body as an inborn type, Lacassagne insisted the decisive factor was the social environment. He argued the point in portable aphorisms — the social milieu as a culture medium, the criminal as the microbe — and those aphorisms travelled far further than the theory behind them.