ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the genealogical threads and history of criminal body that tests the legal and scientific truths. It focuses on nineteenth-century Italy the site of emergence, of a family of discourses and techniques to qualify and quantify the bodies of dangerous persons: criminal anthropology, legal psychiatry and forensic medicine. The chapter discusses the criminal anthropology in the discipline of history of science, which has not found its worthy of the attention given to alchemy, astrology, or phrenology. It deals with the Italian criminal anthropology that positioned itself as a modern, scientific discourse and provides links not only to evolutionary theory but also to emergence of science of statistics. The chapter serves as a contribution to historical and cultural studies of science. It works to situate the sciences of deviance in historical and cultural contexts and to read them as illegitimate or pseudoscientific that have become canonical.
