Gina Lombroso (1872–1944)

Gina Lombroso was born in Pavia, Italy, a daughter of Cesare Lombroso, a famous criminologist and psychiatrist, and his wife Nina De Benedetti, of a wealthy and cultured Jewish family from Alexandria, Egypt. As a small child, she moved with her family to Turin. She attended schools there and began assisting her father with his work while she was still a child. By 1894, she began to publish in her father's journal, the Archives of Psychiatry, with a series of psychological and psychiatric review articles. After graduating from the University of Turin with a degree in literature and philosophy, she enrolled in the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery at age 25 and earned her medical degree in 1901. That same year, she married Guglielmo Ferrero, a writer and historian, with whom she had two children. She eventually gave up medical work at her husband's request and turned to historical and popular science writing. Over the next decades, the couple traveled to and worked in several different countries. After her father's death in 1909, she devoted herself to the task of collecting and systematizing his papers and published his works in English in 1911. The family moved to Florence in 1916. Gina Lombroso and her husband were dedicated anti-Fascists and opponents of the Mussolini regime; they had to leave Italy and emigrated to Geneva, Switzerland. Their son Leo moved to Paris and then the USA; their daughter Nina also moved to the USA. Her older sister Paola Lombroso Carrara, who became a journalist, writer, and psychologist, followed them into exile in Geneva.