A Case of Child Murder: Law and Science in Nineteenth-Century Tuscany

It is unfortunate that this historic case was covered by an academic rather than by a professional writer. Guarnieri, who teaches the history of science at Stanford, has a turgid and ponderous prose style, and her innumerable scholarly digressions are less than pertinent here. She tells of the murder of four children and the attempted murder of a fifth by Carlo Grandi, a cartwright in a rural town near Florence in the years 1873-75. Aged 24, a dwarf with no head or body hair, afflicted with scoliosis, legs of different lengths and below-average intelligence, Grandi evidently killed his victims because they had mocked him. His case is important because the conflicting testimonies of psychiatrists, psychologists and physicians loomed large, but did not influence the judges, who sentenced Grandi to 20 years. Guarnieri's scholarship appears to best advantage in analyzing the primitive psychiatry of the time. (Aug.)