_Signora:_
_Not only as the medical expert for the defense at the trial of the
Countess Tarnowska, but as one who has made it his life-work to
investigate the relation in women between criminal impulse and morbid
physical condition, I cannot but feel the keenest interest in this book,
in which you set forth the problem of wide human interest presented by
the case of the prisoner of Trani._
_When first I suggested to you that you should write this book--which
(apart from its interest as dealing with a_ cause célèbre _whose
protagonists are still living and well known in European society) might
bring into wider knowledge doctrines that modern physiologists and
psychologists are endeavoring to diffuse--you reminded me that the
medical elements of the problem could not in such a work be discussed or
even clearly stated. This, of course, is true, and the significance of
certain indications scattered through these pages will doubtless be lost
upon those who are not familiar with such matters. Nevertheless, it was
important that the book should be written, for if after her release
and appropriate medical treatment the Countess Tarnowska is restored, as
many of us confidently anticipate, to the complete sanity of moral
well-being, your book in the light of that essential fact will have
fulfilled a notable mission._
_It will have helped to bring home to the general consciousness the
knowledge, hitherto confined to the scientific few, that moral obliquity
in women is in most cases due to pathological causes comparatively easy
of diagnosis and of cure; that a woman-criminal may be morally redeemed
by being physically healed; and that just as alcoholism, typhus, pyemia
or other modes of toxic infection may result in delirium and
irresponsibility, so certain forms of disease in women, by setting up a
condition of persistent organic poisoning, may and very often do conduce
to mental and moral aberration and consequent crime._
_Your book, Signora, contains a truthful exposition of a group of
psychic values with which physicians and psychopathists are concerned,
and I believe that eventually it will promote the realization that even
in the darkest regions of moral degradation it is possible for science
to raise the torch of hope. Thus, though appealing for the moment to the
interest of the general reader, it will ultimately constitute a
significant document in the history of the evolution of pathological
science._
[Illustration: Signature--Prof. L. M. Bossi]
Genoa,
January 12th, 1915.