Antonio Marro
Italian psychologist (1840–1913)
Antonio Marro (1840-1913) was an Italian psychiatrist, known for his studies on criminology and puberty.
He was born to a family of limited means, but was able to graduate with a degree in medicine and surgery from the University of Turin. After working with the Navy, he moved back to Limone Piemonte.
There, in 1880, he published his Guida all’arte della vita (Guide to the Art of Life). After the death of his first wife, he moved in 1882 with his four children to Turin where he took a position working as a physician for the judiciary and incarceration system. He became an assistant to Cesare Lombroso.
He was prolific in his publications, often in collaboration with Lombroso, such as I germi della pazzia morale nei fanciulli (Origins of the moral mental illness among children, 1883) and Ambidestrismo nei pazzi e nei criminali (Ambidexterity in the deranged and criminal, 1883), Studi psicometrici sui mattoidi e pazzi morali (1885).
Some of his publications attempted to find influences that caused the mental degeneration of progeny, in hopes of finding eugenic solutions. For example, in his 1887 work on Sull’influenza dell’età dei genitori sui caratteri psicofisici dei figli (On the influence of parental age on the Psychophysical characteristics of the children), he claimed that children of older parents were more prone to have absence of affectionate sentiments, and more likely to be criminals, swindlers and murderers. It has been claimed that some of this data was supported by later investigations by other eugenics supporters such as RJ Ewart
In 1885, he became medical director or the insane asylum (manicomio) of Turin.
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This entry incorporates text from “Antonio Marro” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.