Cesare Lombroso is a prominent Italian psychiatrist and criminologist who has devoted his life to the study of the nature of insanity and the psychology of the criminal. He was the first to put forward the idea of crime as an innate property of character, drawing the attention of criminalists not to the crime committed, but to the inner world of its perpetrator. He developed a special formula by which, based on the measurement of the skull and other parts of the body, it is possible to determine the degree of a person's inclination to a criminal act. A variety of antisocial behaviours in women; He investigated the links between genius and mental anomalies on the examples of biographies of prominent personalities. Despite the peremptory judgments and sometimes fantastic conclusions, the works of Lombroso are read today with great interest. In these works, the reader can get acquainted with numerous criminal stories of the past, unexpected statistical calculations, curious facts from the life of famous people, and finally plunge into the world of clinical and psychoanalytic thought of the nineteenth century.