In 1903, Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso pronounced left-handers prone to crime, alcoholism and degeneration; his pseudo-science shaped Western prejudice for half a century

Once feared and forcibly ‘corrected’, left-handedness was wrongly branded a sign of criminal tendencies by influential 20th-century theories. Italian doctor Cesare Lombroso’s flawed research claimed left-handedness indicated a primitive mind, leading to widespread institutional prejudice and distress for millions of children. Decades of scientific research eventually debunked these myths, revealing left-handedness as a normal biological variation, not a pathology.