The Truth Machine (13 page)

Physiological investigations—such as delivering electric shocks to the hand, tongue, nose, breasts, and female genitalia as in the so-called “Sensitivity Test”—was designed to empirically establish women's insensitivity to pain.
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This research had some significant consequences. When their measurements were found to be greater than those taken from men, women were compared to children and were thus redefined as being “immature.”
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“What terrific criminals would children be if they had strong passions, muscular strength, and sufficient intelligence,” asserted Lombroso and Ferrero, “and if, moreover, their evil tendencies were exasperated by a morbid psychical activity! And women are big children.”
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Women were thought to possess “many traits in common with children,” including jealousy and a deficient moral sense. They were also considered “inclined to vengeances of a refined cruelty.” Like children, female offenders were occasionally allowed to serve their sentences at home. The child was a “natural criminal,” according to the recapitulationist logic. Women were also compared to sexually lascivious “savages.” Women would “seek relief in evil deeds,” the authors concluded, if their inherent “bad qualities” were intensified by “morbid activity of the psychical centres”: “when piety and maternal sentiments are wanting, and in their place are strong passions and intensely erotic tendencies, much muscular strength and a superior intelligence for the conception and execution of evil, it is clear that the innocuous semi-criminal present in the normal woman must be transformed into a born criminal more terrible than any man.”
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Having abandoned the search for physical stigmata of crime, criminology's investigation of female sensation led to a search for ordinarily invisible signs of crime within the body. From sensibility it was but a short step to sensitivity and from there to feelings and emotion. The study of blushing was a significant moment in the history of scientific study of emotion and a pivotal moment in criminology's turn to physiology. The history of shame in the nineteenth century begins with Thomas Henry Burgess's 1839 work,
The Physiology or Mechanism of Blushing
, which described blushing as a God-given “moral restraint,” a mechanism to “control the individual from violating the laws of morality.”
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For Henry Mayhew, writing in 1862, while shame was “an educated sentiment … as
thoroughly
the result of training as is a sense of decency and even virtue … the main characteristic of civilized woman,” it
was “utterly unawakened in the ruder forms of female nature… . Many of the wretched girls seen in our jails have, we verily believe, never had the sentiment educated in them, living almost the same barbarous life as they would, had they been born in the interior of Africa.”
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Gender was inescapably entangled with race, class, and mental incapacity.

In her 1866 article, “Criminal Women,” for the
Cornhill Magazine
, Mrs. M. E. Owen declared that a criminal man was “not so vile as a bad woman.” Her anthropological metaphor was a bridge to Darwin's own reconceptualization of shame: “Women of this stamp are generally so bold and unblushing in crime, so indifferent to right and wrong, so lost to all sense of shame, so destitute of the instincts of womanhood, that they be more justly compared to wild beasts than to women… . Criminal women, as a class, are found to be more uncivilized than the savage, more degraded than the slave, less true to all natural and womanly instincts than the untutored squaw of a North American Indian tribe.”
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Although Darwin considered blushing to have been caused by shyness, shame, and modesty, his aim was to establish a continuity of emotion between man and animals. “Many a person has blushed intensely when accused of some crime,” he wrote in
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
, “though completely innocent of it.”
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“A man reflecting on a crime committed in solitude, and stung by his conscience, does not blush; yet he will blush under the vivid recollection of a detected fault, or of one committed in the presence of others, the degree of blushing being closely related to the feeling of regard for those who have detected, witnessed, or suspected his fault.”
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Although he conceptualized blushing as an involuntary biological mechanism, Darwin considered it to be a vestigial and useless artifact. For Lombroso, that criminals did not blush was an indication of their dangerousness; its absence signified “a dishonest and savage life.”
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Lacking normal affective capacities, their displays of inappropriate emotions such as pleasure at another person's suffering were further evidence of their degeneration. The inability to blush was also thought to be impaired among the insane. Havelock Ellis, Charles Féré, and G. E. Partridge regarded blushing as an “erethism” of sex and the origin of shame. “Inability to blush has always been considered the accompaniment of crime and shamelessness,” wrote Ellis. “Blushing is also very rare among idiots and savages; the Spaniards used to say of the South American Indians: ‘How can one trust men who do not know how to blush?'”
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According to Darwin, emotions had been produced by natural selection,
and facial expressions of those emotions were remnants of once serviceable habits: “Every sudden emotion, including astonishment, quickens the action of the heart, and with it the respiration. Now we can breathe, as Gratiolet remarks and as appears to me to be the case, much more quietly through the open mouth than through the nostrils. Therefore, when we wish to listen intently to any sound, we either stop breathing, or breathe as quietly as possible, by opening our mouths, at the same time keeping our bodies motionless.”
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Darwin had been particularly impressed by the electrical experiments reported by Duchenne de Boulogne in his
The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression
(1862). Duchenne applied electrodes to different parts of the face in an attempt to simulate emotional expression.

What had made these investigations practicable was the prior historical construction of emotion as a biological phenomena.
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The naturalization of the emotions made it possible to consider them as measurable entities, distinct from “the passions.” By the mid-nineteenth century it was perfectly reasonable to think that emotions could be measured via the effect that they were reputed to have on the body. The origins of instrument-generated graphic representations of emotions can be traced to the mid-1860s, when the French physiologist Claude Bernard applied Étienne-Jules Marey's new cardiograph to record the heart's actions during emotional episodes.
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Based on Ludwig's kymograph, Marey's sphygmograph was one of the first instruments to translate a subjective feeling into a graphical trace.
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Bernard proposed that the slightest emotion produced a reflex impression in the heart that was “imperceptible to all, except for the physiologist” and his instrument.
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Distinguishing between feigned and sincere emotions, Bernard suggested that only the latter would activate the involuntary physiological mechanisms necessary to produce a distinguishable and characteristic graphical recording.

A sustained program of research on the emotions began in the early 1880s when the Italian physiologist Angelo Mosso initiated a mechanistic, quantitative, and instrument-based approach to the study of emotions.
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Mosso recorded the minute effects of induced emotions on laboratory animals and designed new instruments for determining the effects of emotion on the circulation. One of Mosso's experimental subjects was Michel Bertino, a thirty-seven-year-old man with a twenty mm gap in his skull.
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Mosso's experimental technique involved rebuking Bertino while the registering apparatus inscribed blood volume changes in his brain. Mosso construed the resultant “cerebral autographs” as inscriptions produced by the brain: “See how the brain writes when it guides the pen itself.”
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Étienne-Jules Marey's “polygraph taken out of its box and provided with the exploration device in a shell for the pulsation of the heart.” From Jules É. Marey,
Mémoire sur la pulsation du coeur
(1875), p. 33, fig. 16.

Mosso's work appealed to Lombroso because it had the potential to render visible the criminal's dangerousness. Particularly important was the instrument's promise to record even “those emotions that are not depicted on the face.”
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Criminology enthusiastically embraced physiological instruments, because by illuminating the dark recesses of the body they promised to undertake the work of demarcating criminals from the insane.
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Tamburini proposed that a “true psychometer” could enable comparisons between the mentally ill, and quantify the degree of alteration of the principal nervous centers. The sphygmic curves of the mad were believed to have a characteristic shape. Because the insane were thought to have less marked vascular reactions compared to intelligent subjects, instruments might aid in the detection of feigned mental illness. Lombroso thought that the instruments might be able to identify the particular physiological states that might enable an individual to commit a particular criminal act.

Criminology's authority came to depend on measurement devices. A well-appointed laboratory might list among its stock the following instruments: baristesiometer, campimeter, clinometer, craniometer, dynamometer, ergograph, esthesiometer, goniometer, Hipp's chronoscope, olfactometer, the
Schlitteninductorium
, spirometer, tachyanthropometer, thermesthesiometer.
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In spite of all this hardware, the turn to instrumentation did not produce the definitive empirical results the criminologists had hoped. But scientific instruments were not just expressions of the extension of the criminological gaze into hitherto unseen spaces; they were also tools for the fashioning of a scientific identity for criminal anthropology. These specialized techniques for reading the body furnished criminal anthropology with a “corporeal literacy that made possible an exegesis and a diagnosis.”
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An ability to manipulate scientific instruments and to gather data systematically was a crucial aspect of the construction and maintenance of scientific authority.
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Like criminological texts, which presented table after table of data and heaped anecdote upon anecdote, criminology laboratories also amassed large quantities of fetishized scientific instruments. Lombroso's descriptions of esoteric scientific instruments were not restricted to his scientific texts; they also occupied a privileged place in his more explicitly popular texts. Readers were given instructions on how to make their own instruments and make investigations with them. The tachyanthropometer, for example, was designed, as Lombroso put it, to make “the practice of anthropometry very easy, even to people who are entire strangers to the science.”
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Arthur MacDonald's goniometer, used to measure the angle of the face. From Arthur MacDonald, “Psycho-physical and Anthropometrical Instruments of Precision in the Laboratory of the Bureau of Education” (1898), chap. 5, p. 1189, fig. 84. In:
The Experimental Study of Children
, 11411204 (United States of America, Bureau of Education, Report of the Commissioner of Education, 1897–98).

Many of the experiments performed with these instruments had a theatrical dimension. A series of experiments in the early 1880s had multiple recidivists attached to a sphygmograph (on their left arms) and an induction coil (on their right) with a view to determining if electric shocks produced changes in blood pressure. Subjects were asked to listen to music or were shown images of nude women or money to see if such experiences produced physiological changes.
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Criminals were asked to perform mathematical feats or were told bad news: “Are you aware that your mother is seriously ill?” On occasion the reactions of criminals were greater than those of normal subjects. Lombroso was fascinated by the “almost total lack of vaso-motor reactions” of some of his criminal subjects. One such, Ausano, was characterized as “prognathous, tattooed, receding forehead, with marked frontal sinuses, criminal uncle, drunkard father, neurotic mother; thief since childhood … never demonstrated any reaction, neither to music, a pistol shot, unpleasant news, nor calculations; only [an image of] wine produced a slight rise [in blood pressure] for 18 pulses.”
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