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Lauren Robertson, MPT, received her BS in biology from Mills College, Oakland, in 1989, and her MPT in physical therapy from UCSF in San Francisco. She taught neuroanatomy at a community college in Santa Rosa, California, for 5 years, and has practiced geriatrics in skilled nursing, acute care, and home health settings. Robertson's specialty areas include stroke rehabilitation, balance disorders, and neurology.
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This material is taken directly from Visible Proofs: Forensic Views of the Body, issued by the National Library of Medicine of the National Institutes of Health (see References).
Upon completion of this course, you will be able to:
We, the living, instinctively recoil in the presence of death. Whether the deceased is a beloved, a friend, or a stranger, we feel the shock of death's finality. When a life is unexpectedly extinguished, we need answers and seek the cause. Today, this need is addressed in police investigations, laboratories, courtrooms, and all of the venues in which scientific medicine interacts with the law—the field of forensics.
Over the centuries, physicians, surgeons, and other professionals have struggled to develop scientific methods that translate views of bodies and body parts into "visible proofs" that can persuade judges, juries, and the public. At times, the power of forensics has been exceeded by the difficulty of the questions it seeks to answer. At best, its visible proofs testify on behalf of the victims of violent crime and against the guilty—and console, inspire, and amaze us.
Forensics is defined as something pertaining to, connected with, or used in testimony or evidence in courts of law and governmental proceedings. Forensic medicine is the field of medicine that interprets or establishes the facts pertaining to the unexplained or suspicious death of a human being or the suffering of grievous bodily harm, in civil or criminal law cases.
Forensic medicine, also called medical jurisprudence or legal medicine, emerged in the 1600s. As European nation-states and their judicial systems developed, physicians and surgeons participated more frequently in legal proceedings. By the late 1700s, medical jurisprudence had become a standard subject in the medical curriculum. In the early 1800s, Parisian medical professor Mathieu Orfila and others began intensively to study poisons and the decomposition of bodies.
To win acceptance, aspiring medical experts had to make their procedures, accomplishments, and themselves visible. In the university, laboratory, courtroom, press, and even the pages of the medical treatise, forensic medicine had a theatrical aspect. The medical witness, the eminent professor, the medical examiner, and the toxicologist all sought to dramatize their methods, findings, and professional identity.
Forensic medicine first appeared as a distinct subject in works such as Paolo Zacchia's Questiones medico-legales in 1621. These early treatises discussed medical questions commonly treated in courts: How could one determine whether an infant was stillborn or the victim of infanticide? Whether a woman was a virgin? Whether a body found in water was someone who had drowned or the victim of a disguised homicide?
The larger issues raised by the first wave of forensic treatises are still debated:
In the early 1800s, forensic medicine was not divided into distinct disciplines. Physicians and surgeons who performed autopsies and testified in court depended on a variety of sources for their income and provided expertise as needed. No regular system of payment was provided for expert testimony, laboratory analysis, or postmortem examination. Toxicology and forensic pathology were just emerging as distinct fields, and most autopsies were performed by physicians without any special training.
Statement by W. J. G. Messemer, MD at a coroner's inquisition, January 7, 1884:
I made an autopsy on the body of the deceased. He was a strong muscular man 5 feet 6 inches tall, smooth shaven and hair closely cropped. A penetrating scalp wound was found on the Right Parieto-Occipital Suture about an inch and a half in length. A pistol shot wound of the Left Breast about two inches from the median line in the intercostals space was seen…. Death in my opinion was due to Exhaustion from Traumatic Pleuro Pneumonia following Pistol Shot Wound of the Left Breast.
The juror's verdict at the same coroner's inquisition:
The said Thomas Fitzpatrick came to his death by a Pistol shot wound of the chest, said pistol being fired by Officer George Smith of 16th Precinct on the corner of 9th Avenue and Thirteenth street on December 25 '83 about 6:30 AM and we are of the opinion that said shooting was entirely unjustifiable.
In late medieval England, it became customary to transcribe the coroner's view of the body onto paper as a written inquest. Over the following centuries, the documentation associated with the coroner and the forensic medical report gradually expanded—a paper trail of transcripts, depositions, and death certificates.
Eighteenth-century Britain and America had only rudimentary policing structures, and physicians and surgeons were rarely called upon to participate in coroners' inquests and criminal proceedings. Coroners' reports and testimony were handwritten, short, and varied widely from case to case and locale to locale.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, investigations of sudden or suspicious deaths became institutionalized and bureaucratic—police departments and court systems grew exponentially; nations began to require formal death certificates to aid in the collection of mortality statistics—and coroners began to employ physicians on a regular basis.
Pathological anatomy and toxicology became more complex and sophisticated, and so did legal codes and police investigative procedures. The coroner's report became more elaborate—the entire record of an investigation—and the legal and medical language of the inquest became more technical. The format of the printed form expanded; paperwork proliferated and became more standardized. In our time, this trend has continued, aided by computerization.
Thanks to our see-no-evil coroner system, 5,000 murderers are going to commit their crimes without risk of detection in the coming year.
—TRUE MAGAZINE, 1958
The campaign to abolish the office of the coroner began, in America, in the late nineteenth century. As newspapers swelled with reports of corrupt coroners who extorted money, accepted bribes, or slanted findings to cover up murders and other crimes, progressives demanded that elected coroners be replaced by appointed medical examiners—doctors trained in forensic pathology, hired on merit.
Over the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, some jurisdictions adopted the medical examiner system. Others retained the coroner's office—although some coroners today are board-certified forensic pathologists. Unfortunately, some medical examiners, like some coroners, have not always met the highest scientific, legal, and ethical standards. Efforts to ensure the impartiality and competence of forensic investigations continue.
Cause and manner of a death are not always evident—even after visual examination and dissection of the body. Over the centuries, forensic medicine has developed technologies of visibility, ways of seeing things that would otherwise be undetectable:
But no method is infallible. The tests and procedures of forensic medicine have not always stood up to the scrutiny of judges, expert witnesses, lawyers, professional peers, and the public. Over time, the experience of forensic medicine in the courtroom has led to improvements in science, technology, and investigative procedures. But the process has been uneven—scientific experts have at times suffered embarrassment—and forensic science has not always prevailed.
A dead body tells no tales except those it whispers to the quick ear of the scientific expert, by him to be reported to the proper quarter.
—SIR ANDREW DOUGLAS MACLAGAN, Professor of Medicine, Edinburgh University, 1878
In medieval England, in cases of homicide or suspicious death, the coroner, an appointed official who had no medical training, was required to make "a view of the body," a legal, visual inspection. Since then, medical professionals have played an increasingly important role in making views of the body. Physicians and surgeons have developed methods of seeing into the body through autopsy and postmortem examination—making visible what the untrained, unequipped eye cannot see.
Preliminary incision, 1910. Charles Richard Box, MD, Post-mortem Manual: A Handbook of Morbid Anatomy and Post-mortem Technique. (London National Library of Medicine.)
In the nineteenth century, forensic pathologists began using pictures and words to show how various conditions appear in the cadaver, and to teach students and colleagues new methods of analysis. Line drawings, half-tone photography, and chromolithography, which could render coloration, texture, and subtle shading, became increasingly common as improvements in print technology made detailed illustrations cheaper to produce. The illustrations that follow are examples from the mid to late 1800s.
Murder the Result of Various Injuries Inflicted with Different Instruments (at right). On January 5th, at midday, B.K., aged 38 years, after having been heard screaming, was found in her room lying in a pool of blood and dying. Beside her stood her lover, with a bloody carving knife in his hand…. The evidence collectively considered justifies the assumption that the deceased was first felled with a flat-iron, and that as she lay prostrate upon the floor she was struck numerous additional blows with it; that at the same time her ribs were fractured by her chest being knelt upon or by her being kicked; that directly thereafter the injuries to the neck were produced by blows with the carving-knife; and that death resulted from hemorrhage. The culprit was condemned to death by hanging, but his sentence was commuted to imprisonment for life. [Murder the Result of Various Injuries, 1898. Plate 15, Figure 101. Eduard Ritter von Hofmann, MD, Atlas of Legal Medicine, Philadelphia, chromolithograph; Artist A. Schmitson. (National Library of Medicine.)]
Encircling Gunshot-wound in Brain (at right). An interesting example of deflection of the projectile from the direction of the shot, or of the so-called ricochet-shot, within the body, is the so-called encircling-shot. This is produced when a shot, striking an arched bone obliquely, travels around it. Such gun-shot wounds have been observed not only on the convexity of arched bones…but also on their concavity. The case illustrated…belongs to the latter category. The case was that of a young man who had killed himself with a shot from a revolver of 7 mm. caliber. The projectile perforated the skin of the right temporal region directly in front of the line of the growth of the hair, making a pea-sized blackened opening. It then coursed obliquely upward and backward through the temporal muscles and the great wing of the sphenoid bone into the outer part of the right Sylvian fissure; thence to the concavity of the right frontal vault. From this point it became directed anteroposteriorly around the entire convexity of the brain…. [Encircling Gunshot-wound in Brain, 1898. Plate 20. Eduard Ritter von Hofmann, MD, Atlas of Legal Medicine, Philadelphia, chromolithograph; Artist A. Schmitson. (National Library of Medicine.)]
The mass manufacture of guns in the nineteenth century led to an epidemic of gunshot wounds incurred in wars, violent crimes, suicides, and accidents. The study of gunshot wounds became an integral part of criminal investigation and forensic pathology.
Skull showing gunshot trauma (male profile), 1950s (at right). (National Museum of Health and Medicine.)
The mind of the operator should be at the tip of the knife….
—WILLIAM S. WADSWORTH, MD, American coroner's physician
Postmortem dissection, or autopsy, was among the earliest scientific methods to be used in the investigation of violent or suspicious death. Autopsy remains the core practice of forensic medicine. The postmortem examiner surveys the body's surface, opens it up with surgical instruments, removes parts for microscopic inspection and toxicological analysis, and makes a report that attempts to reconstruct the cause, manner, and mechanism of death.
The postmortem examiner visually surveys the body's surface before opening and entering the body with the help of a scalpel and other instruments. After visual examination of the body cavities, the examiner removes parts for chemical analysis, inspection with a microscope, and other tests. Tools and tool kits specially adapted for use in autopsy first appeared in the early nineteenth century.
For centuries, anatomical specimens from the bodies of crime victims have been used as teaching tools and souvenirs of interesting or important cases. These specimens demonstrated various types of traumatic wounds of the heart, kidney, and stomach.
Physicians and surgeons first gained practical knowledge of death and decomposition through handling and dissecting bodies obtained for anatomical study. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the study of the decomposed body and body parts—the effects of time, environment, and manner of death—became a vital part of forensic science.
In the nineteenth century, medico-legal researchers began studying patterns of insect colonization of the cadaver. Entomology, the study of insects, became one of the forensic sciences. By identifying the particular stages that insects go through as they develop on a dead body, and the succession of different species, forensic investigators attempt to determine where a victim died and estimate the time elapsed since death..
Adult female blow flies arrive within minutes to lay eggs on a cadaver. Each deposits about 250 eggs in the natural openings of the body and open wounds. The eggs hatch into first-stage maggots within 24 hours. These feed and then molt into second-stage maggots, which feed for several hours, and then molt into third-stage maggots. Masses of third-stage maggots may produce heat, which can raise the temperature around them more than 10° C. After more feeding, the third-stage maggots move away from the body and metamorphose into adult flies.
The Forensic Anthropology Center, at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, conducts research into the postmortem decomposition of the human body. At the center, scientists study how variations in temperature, exposure, humidity, and other environmental conditions affect cadavers and body parts. Their research has helped improve investigators' ability to estimate time of death and to identify individuals from skeletal remains.
The Center also maintains a collection of documented human skeletons and has developed software that uses data from thousands of skeletons. Statistics from the database give investigators baselines that help them estimate the race, sex, and stature of unidentified bodies.
On April 14, 1865, the assassin John Wilkes Booth shot President Abraham Lincoln during a performance at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. After the president passed away the following morning, his body was placed in a temporary coffin covered with an American flag and returned by hearse to the White House, accompanied by a cavalry escort.
At the White House, an autopsy was performed by Army Surgeons Edward Curtis and Joseph Janvier Woodward. Also in attendance were Surgeon General Joseph K. Barnes and a few military officers, medical men, and friends. During the autopsy Mary Todd Lincoln sent a messenger to request a lock of hair; a tuft was clipped from the head for her.
Dr. Curtis described the autopsy in a letter to his mother:
The room…contained but little furniture: a large, heavily curtained bed, a sofa or two, bureau, wardrobe, and chairs….Seated around the room were several general officers and some civilians, silent or conversing in whispers, and to one side, stretched upon a rough framework of boards and covered only with sheets and towels, lay—cold and immovable—what but a few hours before was the soul of a great nation. The Surgeon General was walking up and down the room when I arrived and detailed me the history of the case. He said that the President showed most wonderful tenacity of life, and, had not his wound been necessarily mortal, might have survived an injury to which most men would succumb….
Dr. Woodward and I proceeded to open the head and remove the brain down to the track of the ball. The latter had entered a little to the left of the median line at the back of the head, had passed almost directly forwards through the center of the brain and lodged. Not finding it readily, we proceeded to remove the entire brain, when, as I was lifting the latter from the cavity of the skull, suddenly the bullet dropped out through my fingers and fell, breaking the solemn silence of the room with its clatter, into an empty basin that was standing beneath. There it lay upon the white china, a little black mass no bigger than the end of my finger—dull, motionless and harmless, yet the cause of such mighty changes in the world's history as we may perhaps never realize.…
[S]ilently, in one corner of the room, I prepared the brain for weighing. As I looked at the mass of soft gray and white substance that I was carefully washing, it was impossible to realize that it was that mere clay upon whose workings, but the day before, rested the hopes of the nation. I felt more profoundly impressed than ever with the mystery of that unknown something which may be named 'vital spark' as well as anything else, whose absence or presence makes all the immeasurable difference between an inert mass of matter owning obedience to no laws but those covering the physical and chemical forces of the universe, and on the other hand, a living brain by whose silent, subtle machinery a world may be ruled.
The weighing of the brain…gave approximate results only, since there had been some loss of brain substance, in consequence of the wound, during the hours of life after the shooting. But the figures, as they were, seemed to show that the brain weight was not above the ordinary for a man of Lincoln's size.
Dr. J.J. Woodward's autopsy report, April 15, 1865:
[A]ided by Assistant Surgeon E. Curtis, U.S.A., I made…this morning an autopsy on the body of President Abraham Lincoln, with the following results:
The eyelids and surrounding parts of the face were greatly ecchymosed and the eyes somewhat protuberant from effusion of blood into the orbits.
There was a gunshot wound of the head around which the scalp was greatly thickened by hemorrhage into its tissue. The ball entered through the occipital bone about one inch to the left of the median line and just above the left lateral sinus, which it opened. It then penetrated the dura matter, passed through the left posterior lobe of the cerebrum, entered the left lateral ventricle and lodged in the white matter of the cerebrum just above the anterior portion of the left corpus striatum, where it was found.
The wound in the occipital bone was quite smooth, circular in shape, with bevelled edges. The opening through the internal table being larger than that through the external table. The track of the ball was full of clotted blood and contained several little fragments of bone with small pieces of the ball near its external orifice. The brain around the track was pultaceous and livid from capillary hemorrhage into its substance. The ventricles of the brain were full of clotted blood. A thick clot beneath the dura matter coated the right cerebral lobe.
There was a smaller clot under the dura matter [sic] of the left side. But little blood was found at the base of the brain. Both the orbital plates of the frontal bone were fractured and the fragments pushed upwards toward the brain. The dura matter [sic] over these fractures was uninjured. The orbits were gorged with blood….
The cause and manner of a death are not always evident, even after visual examination and dissection. From 1800 onward, scientific investigators continually devised procedures and instruments—technologies of visibility—to reveal what the naked eye could not see.
Chemical analysis helped detect traces of poison in the victim's body. Microscopes made it possible to see tiny lesions, crystals, and hairs. Spectroscopic analysis of blood and other materials helped match trace elements linking victim and killer.
As commercially manufactured poisons became increasingly available in the nineteenth century, poisoning became known as a "modern" and disturbingly hard-to-detect method of killing. In response, researchers developed toxicology as a specialized field of forensic medicine, and devised specific tests for poison, most notably the 1836 Marsh Test for arsenic.
In 1832 police arrested John Bodle for lacing his grandfather's coffee with poison. Chemist James Marsh tested the drink in his laboratory, and confirmed the presence of arsenic by producing a yellow precipitate of arsenic sulfide. 
But the precipitate was unstable and, by the time of trial, had deteriorated. Without forensic proof, Bodle was acquitted.
Stung by the verdict, Marsh devised a test that could better stand up in court. His 1836 Marsh Test won worldwide acclaim and became a standard procedure. But in subsequent decades Marsh's test was shown to be problematic, and in turn underwent a series of improvements.
Marsh Test Apparatus, Steel engraving, 1867 (at right). Theodore G. Wormeley, MD, Microchemistry of Poisons, Including Their Physiological, Pathological, and Legal Relations, New York. (National Library of Medicine.)
The London Medical Gazette discussed the Marsh test in 1840–1842:
The certain test of 1820 is no longer the certain test of 1840; and who can answer what this will be in 1860? Until chemistry becomes a fixed science, and the action of every possible combination of substances has been tried, how can we be sure of our facts, and confidently prove a negative? Every…test is valid, till a fallacy is discovered in it.
The Industrial Revolution introduced cheap poisons into homes, factories, and farms. To prevent accidents, poisons were sold in colorful and distinctively shaped bottles. But toxic substances were also used in widely available medical preparations, which would-be murderers could use to dispatch their victims.
Arsenic-trioxide tablets, Wm. R. Warner & Co., about 1900 (at right). Arsenic trioxide, a toxic substance employed in gold mining and other industrial processes, was also used as a medicine in the 19th and 20th centuries (it is still used today to treat leukemia and other diseases). Bottles that featured raised ridges, skulls and crossbones, and the embossed word "poison" were designed so that people could distinguish poisons from other medicines, even in the dark. (National Museum of American History, Behring Center, Smithsonian Institution.)
The new science of toxicology was plagued by difficulties. In the courtroom and laboratory, seemingly reliable tests were shown to be flawed. But, over time, toxicology's trials led to better knowledge of the action of poisons and better methods of chemical analysis.
Mid-nineteenth century improvements enabled physicians to use microscopy in criminal investigations. The microscope made it possible to view tiny lesions, crystals, and microorganisms, as well as the characteristics of hairs and fibers. By the mid twentieth century, investigators were using microscopes 
to study tissues, wounds, and fluids from victims and suspects; to identify poisons in and around the victim's body; to examine minute amounts of trace elements; and to link the victim's body to the perpetrator and crime scene.
Dr. J. J. Woodward's microscope (Light Grand American Microscope), Philadelphia; Manufacturer: Joseph Zentmayer, 1864 (at right). (National Museum of Health and Medicine, Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, Washington, D.C.)
In the 1870s, U.S. Army surgeon Joseph Janvier Woodward invented a technique of photographing objects seen under a microscope. Woodward's photomicrographs—made with a room-sized apparatus that used direct sunlight as the light source—caused a sensation when exhibited at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. After further development, photomicrography enabled forensic investigators to make visual records of what they saw. The photographs served as an aid to analysis and could be presented as evidence in the courtroom.
A photomicrograph is a photograph of a microscopic view—a photograph of what one might see looking through a microscope. In contrast, a microphotograph is a very small photograph that can only be seen with the aid of a microscope.
Woodward's photomicrography apparatus. Drawing, 1867. The Army Medical Museum catalogue, Washington, D.C.(National Library of Medicine.)
Spectroscopy was born in the mid seventeenth century, when Isaac Newton discovered that a prism divides white light into constituent colors. Subsequent researchers discovered that specific substances, subjected to flame, give off unique patterns of light that show characteristic "emission" bands and "absorption" lines when cast through a prism.
By the 1870s and 1880s, spectroscopy seemed a promising new forensic technology. Further work on spectra analysis led to spectrophotometry and, more recently, mass spectrometry. In tandem with gas chromatography, mass spectrometry is often used today to identify and match organic and inorganic substances for forensic purposes.
Spectroscope, about 1920 (at right). (National Museum of American History, Behring Center, Smithsonian Institution.)
In the 1850s, Robert Bunsen and Gustav Kirchhoff devised the first working spectroscopes. Two decades later, Georg Dragendorff and other scientists began using spectroscopy for medical research and criminal investigations.
The field of toxicology was the first to benefit. Late nineteenth-century forensic pathologists were enthusiastic about the potential uses of spectroscopic analysis to detect the presence of carbon monoxide and other poisons in blood. 
A small specimen of blood, diluted in water, absorbed light of certain colors and could be subjected to spectroscopic analysis.
This analysis could reveal the presence of carbon monoxide and other poisons. However this technique, using the naked eye to view the spectrum, was imprecise.
Chart showing the spectra of different types of blood samples, 1894 (at right). Allan McLane Hamilton, MD, and Lawrence Godkin, MD, A System of Legal Medicine, New York, 1894. (National Library of Medicine.)
In the 1940s the spectrophotometer revolutionized the laboratory. Encased in a metal container, it hid the measuring procedure inside a box. A technician placed a test tube into the instrument, closed the lid, and recorded the readings.
The DU spectrophotometer (below) measures the amount of ultraviolet light absorbed by a substance. Developed by Arnold Beckman at National Technical Laboratories to measure the amount of vitamin A in food, it came to be widely used to identify and measure a variety of substances.
The DU spectrophotometer was one of several revolutionary devices invented by Beckman: the first "black boxes" in the chemical laboratory. It revolutionized laboratory work by replacing labor-intensive and bulky (and openly visible) chemical procedures with a simple, boxed electronic instrument in which only input and output could be seen.
Beckman DU spectrophotometer, about 1950. (DeWitt Stetten, Jr., Museum of Medical Research, National Institutes of Health.)
Historians of science theorize that "black box" devices are basic to modern laboratory practice. A device and its output replace the hand, eye, and judgment of the scientist. The standardized inner workings and seemingly objective output of the black box can more easily evade or withstand legal scrutiny.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, forensic science was increasingly applied to the body of the suspect. The populations of cities and nations were growing rapidly, and so did national and colonial administrations, policing, and penal systems, which adopted (and grew through the use of) forensic methods of identification and detection. Officials searched for ways reliably to identify individual colonial subjects, prisoners, habitual criminals, and perpetrators.
The turn of the twentieth century saw the emergence of new forensic technologies and institutions—the collective project of scientists, reformers, and government officials. The growth of industry, cities, nation-states, and colonial empires, plus mass immigration, followed by urban slums gave rise to new class, ethnic, national and political divisions, new opportunities for organized and disorganized crime—and spurred reformers to agitate for, develop, and implement technologies of identification, surveillance, investigation, and analysis, of persons as well as bodies and crime scenes.
Fingerprinting and anthropometry (also called bertillonage, see next section) were developed, in part, as a way for imperial administrators, immigration officers, prison officials, and police to ascertain scientifically the identity of colonial subjects, immigrants, prostitutes, prison inmates, and recidivists. But they were also used in criminal investigations as a means of identifying criminal and victim.
With the popular press featuring lurid stories of horrific crimes and criminals, forensic scientists and reformers were well positioned to offer solutions to the problems of crime. They called for and implemented ambitious plans to establish and nurture local, regional, and national police identification and investigation bureaus, as well as morgues, crime laboratories, courses of specialized training, and professional associations. Hand in hand with the introduction of new scientific approaches to criminal investigation, the entire criminal justice system—police, prosecutors, coroners' offices, courts, prisons, and research universities—underwent an uneven and fragmentary process of institutionalization, modernization, and professionalization.
The emerging field of criminology began focusing on the physical characteristics of the criminal in the second half of the nineteenth century. In Paris, Alphonse Bertillon, a police department file clerk who was the son of an eminent medical professor, developed a rigorous method of measuring and categorizing human beings. Known as bertillonage, the system used precise measurements, photographs, and notes to make a descriptive record of individual suspects.
Alphonse Bertillon
Alphonse Bertillon (1853–1914), the son of medical professor Louis Bertillon, was a French criminologist and anthropologist who created the first system of physical measurements, photography, and record keeping that police could use to identify recidivist criminals. Before Bertillon, suspects could only be identified through eyewitness accounts and unorganized files of photographs.
Bertillon began his career as a records clerk in the Parisian police department. His obsessive love of order led him to reject the unsystematic methods used to identify suspects and motivated him to develop his own method, which combined systematic measurement and photography.
In 1883, the Parisian police adopted his anthropometric system, called "signaletics" or bertillonage. Bertillon identified individuals by measurements of the head and body; shape formations of the ear, eyebrow, mouth, eye; individual markings such as tattoos and scars; and personality characteristics.
The measurements were made into a formula that referred to a single unique individual, and recorded onto cards which also bore a photographic frontal and profile portrait of the suspect (mug shot). The cards were then systematically filed and cross-indexed, so they could be easily retrieved. In 1884, Bertillon used his method to identify 241 multiple offenders, and, after this demonstration, bertillonage was adopted by police forces in Great Britain, Europe, and the Americas.
But bertillonage was difficult to implement. The measuring tools needed frequent recalibration and maintenance; the process was labor intensive, requiring rigorously trained, highly motivated, and competent technicians, and was expensive. When individuals were measured several times, even well-trained officers made their measurements in different ways and sometimes failed to obtain the exact same numbers. Measurements could also change as the criminal aged.
Eventually, police departments began to abandon bertillonage in favor of fingerprint identification, although some elements, such as the inventorying of basic information and features, scars, tattoos, and the mug shot, were retained.
One of Bertillon's most important contributions to forensics was the systematic use of photography to document crime scenes and evidence. He devised a method of photographing crime scenes with a camera mounted on a high tripod, to document and survey the scene before it was disturbed by investigators. He also developed metric photography, which used measured grids to document the dimensions of a particular space and the objects in it.
By the mid-1890s, Bertillon had achieved international celebrity, through articles in popular publications, exhibition displays, and international expositions. He fought vociferously against those who advocated fingerprint identification—but eventually incorporated fingerprinting into his system, albeit grudgingly. He also worked to further the development of other forensic scientific techniques, such as handwriting analysis, galvanoplastic compounds to preserve footprints and other impressions, ballistics, and a dynamometer that measured the degree of force used in breaking and entering.
Every measurement slowly reveals the workings of the criminal. Careful observation and patience will reveal the truth.
—ALPHONSE BERTILLON, French criminologist
After the invention of photography, police began to keep "rogues galleries," disorganized photographic collections of suspects and convicts. What was needed was a way to retrieve images and information quickly. In 1879, Alphonse Bertillon invented a method that combined detailed measurement and classification of unique features with frontal and profile photographs of suspects—and which recorded the information on standardized cards in orderly files.
Bertillon's system was based on five primary measurements: (1) head length; (2) head breadth; (3) length of the middle finger; (4) length of the left foot; (5) length of the "cubit" (the forearm from the elbow to the extremity of the middle finger). Each principal heading was further subdivided into three classes of small, medium and large. The length of the little finger and the eye color were also recorded. Bertillon's system was later overtaken by fingerprinting, but the Bertillon mug shot endures.
Instructional diagrams, 1896 (at right). Alphonse Bertillon, "Signaletic" instructions including the theory and practice of anthropometrical identification…, Chicago. (National Library of Medicine.)
Alphonse Bertillon used photography and measurement to create a record of unique identifiers that could be used to track suspects, inmates, and repeat offenders. His system depended on a complicated filing method that cross-referenced a standardized set of identifying characteristics, making the information retrievable. From a mass of details, recorded on hundreds of thousands of cards, it was possible to sift and sort down the cards until a small stack of cards produced the combined facts of the measurements of the individual sought.
The cards were arranged to make efficient use of space. The identification process was entirely independent of names, and the final identification was confirmed by the photographs included on the individual's card. Although it was somewhat difficult to use, modernizers in many countries took it as a model system for tracking and controlling individual citizens and immigrants.
Bertillon devised a method to document and study the victim's body and circumstances of death. Using a camera on a high tripod, lens facing the ground, a police photographer made top-down views of the crime scene to record all the details in the immediate vicinity of a victim's body. Early in the twentieth century, police departments began to use Bertillon's method to photograph murder scenes.
Said Francis Galton (1892), English polymath and eugenicist:
Fingerprints…have the unique merit of retaining all their peculiarities unchanged throughout life, and afford in consequence an incomparably surer criterion of identity than any other bodily feature.
Forensic science became increasingly preoccupied with the body of the suspect in the second half of the nineteenth century. As cities, nations, and empires expanded, officials sought ways to reliably identify citizens, colonial subjects, prisoners, and habitual criminals.
The first practical application of fingerprinting as a unique individual identifier came in the 1860s. 
Sir William Herschel, a colonial administrator in British India, used fingerprints to detect false pension claims. In an 1892 case in Argentina, Juan Vucetich became the first investigator to use fingerprints to help secure a conviction for murder.
A useable classification system was necessary before forensic fingerprinting could be put to practical use. In the 1890s and early 1900s, Vucetich in Argentina, and E. R. Henry in British colonial India and Great Britain, separately devised such systems. After a series of dramatic cases proved its merits, fingerprinting spread rapidly.
Fingerprint diagram, 1940 (at right). Frederick Kuhne, The Finger Print Instructor…. Based upon the Sir E. R. Henry System of Classifying and Filing…, New York. (National Library of Medicine.)
In 1892 two boys were brutally murdered in the village of Necochea, near Buenos Aires, Argentina. Initially, suspicion fell on a man named Velasquez, a suitor of the children's mother, Francisca Rojas. But even after torture, the police could not get him to confess.
Investigators found a bloody fingerprint at the crime scene and contacted Juan Vucetich, who was developing a system of fingerprint identification for police use. Vucetich compared the fingerprints of Rojas and Velasquez with the bloody fingerprint. Francisca Rojas had denied touching the bloody bodies, but the fingerprint matched one of hers.
Confronted with the evidence, she confessed—the first successful use of fingerprint identification in a murder investigation. After the Rojas case, Vucetich improved his fingerprint system, which he called "comparative dactyloscopy." Adopted by the province of Buenos Aires in 1903, it spread rapidly throughout the Spanish-speaking world.
On September 14, 1935, Dr. Buck Ruxton, in a jealous rage, murdered his wife Isabella, in their house in Lancashire, England. He also killed Mary Rogerson, a nursemaid who probably witnessed the attack on her mistress.
Dr. Ruxton dismembered his victims, tried to destroy their fingerprints, birthmarks, and other features, and then scattered the remains. When police recovered the jumbled body parts, the case became known as the Jigsaw Murders. Circumstantial evidence implicated Ruxton, but prosecutors needed to make a precise identification of the victims. Using photonegative portraits of Mrs. Ruxton and Mary Rogerson to aid in the reconstruction, forensic pathologists John Glaister Jr. and James Couper Brash sorted and reassembled the body parts.
The team of pathologists, dentists, entomologists, and other specialists worked together to make the bodies of the victims—and perpetrator—visible and identifiable. At the same time, the figure of the forensic expert (Dr. Glaister especially) became visible in court and the press. Celebrated as a landmark of forensic science, the Ruxton case fostered public faith in scientific crime investigation.
Capt. Lee was a perfectionist in every sense of the word…. I don't think there was any detail too small or too insignificant to be given careful, painstaking consideration.
—ERLE STANLEY GARDNER, American mystery writer
Forensic science was the lifelong passion of Frances Glessner Lee, heiress to the International Harvester fortune. In the 1940s and 1950s, Mrs. Lee employed expert artisans to help her create eighteen miniature crime scenes based on actual incidents.
Inspired by the forensic dictum "convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and find the truth in a nutshell," Mrs. Lee dubbed her intricate, dollhouse-sized creations the "Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death." The Nutshells were designed as teaching aids for training crime investigators and are still used by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of Maryland, in Baltimore. For her dedication to the advancement of forensic science, Mrs. Lee received an honorary appointment as captain in the New Hampshire State Police.
Bathroom crime scene, Nutshell Collection, 1940s–1950s (at right). Photograph Courtesy of Corinne May Botz. (Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, Baltimore, Maryland.)
New technologies and methods are transforming the field of forensic science. Today scientists use DNA tests, high-performance liquid chromatography, mass spectrometry, 3-D computer imaging, and other advanced technologies to reconstruct crimes and accidents. The new forensic science can distinguish trace elements and organic materials down to the level of only a few hundred molecules.
Given the sensitivity of the instruments, forensic scientists need to adhere to rigorous procedures and standards to ensure that their results are valid and reliable—and can withstand scrutiny in courts of law and public opinion. Used carefully and evenhandedly, the new forensics can help uncover hidden crimes, convict the guilty, and exonerate the innocent. Sophisticated science now plays a key role in identifying victims of crimes, accidents, disasters, and wars—and provides reassurance, closure, and emotional support for bereaved survivors.
Forensic biologists conduct scientific analysis of blood, semen, saliva, and other forms of biological evidence. Their work provides crucial information in criminal investigations, paternity cases, and a variety of civil matters. During the past twenty years, DNA analysis has emerged as an indispensable method of identifying suspects and victims of crimes. Scientists continue to develop ever-more-sophisticated methods of identifying degraded or aged remains, along with protocols for managing data in cases where large numbers of people die or suffer injury.
British geneticist Alec Jeffreys began working in 1977 on a technique that could identify individuals through samples of their DNA. In 1984 he and his colleagues devised a way to use a newly discovered property of DNA, isolated areas of great variability between individuals called restriction fragment length polymorphisms (RFLP), for forensic identification—the original DNA fingerprint.
In 1986, police asked Jeffreys for help in finding a man who had raped and killed two girls. DNA tests exonerated the primary suspect. Through a genetic dragnet, police found the perpetrator, Colin Pitchfork, who gave himself away when he asked a friend for a substitute blood sample.
Within a year, genetic fingerprinting was making the unique molecular structures of victims and suspects visible in criminal investigations around the world. Today, RFLP-based DNA analysis is being supplanted by newer techniques of genetic identification.
Scientists and researchers continue to improve and discover new means of separating, analyzing, and identifying chemical substances. Techniques are becoming more specialized, and technologies are being combined to create ever more sensitive and sophisticated tests.
Two increasingly important approaches to chemical detection and identification are gas chromatography, a method of separating substances, and mass spectrometry, a method of measuring the mass of molecules. These techniques allow investigators to identify with reasonable certainty—admissible in a court of law—minute amounts of toxic substances found in the bodies of victims or in trace evidence collected at crime scenes.
In May of 1878, Reverend George Vosburgh, the charismatic young pastor of Jersey City's Madison Avenue Baptist Church, was indicted on charges of attempting to poison his wife Harriet. It was alleged that he repeatedly administered overdoses of tartar emetic (a commonly prescribed medicine whose active ingredient was the toxic metal antimony).
Throughout the winter of 1877–1878, the Vosburghs' marriage had been failing. The Reverend was angry that his wife had not given him any children, had undergone two abortions without his approval, and had accepted a ring from a "barman." In the midst of the quarrels between the Reverend and his wife, Mrs. Vosburgh fell gravely ill.
James Sickles, her brother, suspected that the Reverend, while attending his wife at her sickbed, was slowly poisoning her. Sickles collected samples from drinks that the Reverend had served his wife, and also a sample of her urine, and brought them to the laboratory of Dr. R. Ogden Doremus, professor of chemistry at Bellevue Medical College. Doremus found evidence of antimony in every sample.
During the trial, the professor brought his apparatus into the courtroom and performed three toxicological tests before the jury. Doremus's demonstration on the witness stand was novel and impressive. It was featured in reports in daily and weekly newspapers, and several illustrated newspapers. For a time, it seemed to sway the jury and the public.
But the Reverend's politically connected defense team cast doubt on the prosecution's case by calling disputing experts, attacking the chain of custody (Sickles couldn't prove where his samples came from), and by constructing alternative (albeit contradictory) explanations for what had occurred. At the same time, a visibly recovered and fashionably dressed Mrs. Vosburgh sat by her husband during the trial and refused to testify.
The jury found Vosburgh not guilty, despite the courtroom chemical analysis. After his acquittal, Vosburgh resumed his ministry, but he and his wife separated. A few months later, additional evidence was brought forth in the press, indicating that Vosburgh had treated his wife badly and had in fact attempted to poison her. Public support for him faded and he was forced to resign his ministry.
B. G. Brogdon, MD (1998), an American professor of radiology, defined forensic radiology:
Forensic radiology comprises the performance, interpretation, and reporting of those radiologic examinations and procedures that concern the courts and/or the law.
Radiology can make images of what is hidden inside the body and is a powerful tool for the forensic investigator. Using x-rays, computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and other technologies, radiologists can track projectile paths inside the body, help to identify victims whose remains are degraded, and create 3-D images of the human form. Forensic odontologists analyze dental radiographs and use other imaging technologies to identify deceased individuals and to examine evidence related to teeth.
Multi-slice computed tomography (MSCT) and MRI, when used with 3-D imaging technology, create vivid images of the interior of the human body. Dr. Richard Dirnhoter and Dr. Michael Thali and their team of specialists at the University of Bern's Institute of Forensic Medicine, Switzerland, are using these new imaging technologies to develop virtopsy—a bloodless and minimally invasive virtual autopsy procedure to examine bodies for causes of death.
Virtopsy detects internal bleeding, bullet paths, and hidden fractures hard to find in a traditional autopsy. The MSCT and MRI aid in picturing fracture patterns, bone and missile fragmentation, brain contusion, 3-D bullet localization, gas embolism, and blood aspiration to the lung.
Unlike traditional autopsy, virtopsy does not destroy human tissue. It can be used when religious beliefs prohibit, or families object to, the cutting open of the body. The developers of virtopsy do not envision the procedure as a replacement for traditional autopsy but as a tool to be used in cases where dissection of the body is not feasible or where forensic evidence is particularly hard to visualize.
Forensic science now plays a vital role in exposing political murders and governmental, military, and paramilitary atrocities. Forensic human rights investigations are underway in more than thirty countries, conducted by nongovernmental organizations, national truth commissions, and international tribunals. Using archaeology, forensic anthropology, pathology, odontology (the study of dentition), ballistics, computer modeling, and DNA analysis, investigators have documented mass murder and genocide, and identified victims and perpetrators.
Forensic investigations have made the "disappeared"—victims of murder and torture—visible, empowered survivors, corrected the historical record, and exposed cover-ups. In countries traumatized by brutal regimes, human rights forensics promotes democratization and the rule of law. Yet few suspected perpetrators come to trial and even fewer are convicted. In places where human rights violators retain power, forensic teams work at great personal risk, in the face of violence and intimidation.
In the Dirty War that took place between 1976 and 1983, Argentina's military regime committed massive human rights violations. Nearly 20,000 men, women, and children were "disappeared" (los desaparecidos)—abducted, tortured, raped, and murdered—with no information provided on their whereabouts.
When the junta fell, the new civilian government invited forensic scientists from the American Association for the Advancement of Science to help investigate. Outside aid was critical because many Argentinean forensic professionals were implicated in the crimes of the junta, compromised by their association with the state, or poorly trained under a regime that discouraged investigation.
In 1984 anthropologist Clyde Snow recruited a group of Argentinean university students who lacked training in forensics but were eager to learn. Together they excavated hundreds of clandestine mass graves. This painstaking work led to the formation of the Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense (Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, or EAAF in the Spanish acronym), a nongovernmental organization dedicated to using forensic science to investigate human rights abuses.
I'm not an advocate, I'm an expert. Unless you maintain…objectivity, you lose credibility. …and the best way is to let the bones speak for themselves.
—CLYDE SNOW, American forensic anthropologist
In a landmark trial in 1985, forensic testimony helped convict six of nine former Argentinean military junta leaders for the deaths of the disappeared. The forensic investigation focused on the exhumation of human remains at individual graves, using archaeological techniques and laboratory identification methods. The forensic volunteers, led by Clyde Snow, decided to present representative cases at the trial. One of the most dramatic was the case of Liliana Pereyra, a young woman who was abducted, tortured, raped, and murdered—after giving birth to a child whose identity and whereabouts are still unknown.
Bones make great witnesses, they speak softly but they never forget and they never lie….
—CLYDE SNOW, American forensic anthropologist
The Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF in the Spanish acronym) became an international phenomenon in the early 1990s, starting projects in El Salvador and the Philippines, where governmental military and paramilitary forces had committed political murders and atrocities. Since then, EAAF members have conducted investigations throughout the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Europe. Members have presented their findings as expert witnesses in criminal trials and before international tribunals and national truth commissions.
Inspired partly by EAAF, other human rights forensics groups have emerged to conduct investigations into political murder, torture, and genocide. Today, the International Forensics Program of Physicians for Human Rights, Inforce, the Latin American Forensic Anthropology Association, and local nongovernmental organizations are active in many countries.
Science and the law have always had theatrical elements. To command attention and gain acceptance, scientists demonstrate their findings and credentials, and present themselves as authorities before courts of scientific opinion, courts of law, and courts of public and private opinion. But practically from the inception of the field, another group of people have used stories about forensic science to make the body visible and legible. Writers and publishers—and later directors and producers—have made murder and the dead body, and the procedures of forensics, visible to a wider public in the form of entertaining nonfictional and fictional narratives.
Since the seventeenth century, narratives have mixed violence and murder, police and scientific investigation, and courtroom drama—and have attracted a mass audience. But the intensity of interest in forensics is now vastly greater. Forensic entertainments have achieved an unprecedented level of popularity.
The new forensic books, films, and television shows differ markedly from their predecessors:
The forensic emphasis intensifies the experience of the crime narrative. Viewers get the pleasure of seeing moral order and reason prevail over evil and death through the procedures of science and law. The distress, disorder, and moral rupture of murder are enacted within a reassuringly formulaic structure. We get to satisfy a need to see death, disorder, and evil—which loom so large in our lives, but are veiled by legal and criminal procedures, and professionalized funerary practice.
People have always been entertained by tales of violence. In the 1600s, cheap pamphlets found a mass readership with sensational accounts of heinous murders. Forensic medicine rarely played a role in these narratives. But, in succeeding centuries, science slowly became more prominent—in fictional mysteries that featured scientific detectives like Sherlock Holmes, in true-crime magazines, and in articles on scientific crime detection.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, cultural entrepreneurs began to publish accounts of real murder cases, for sale to the public. These were often nothing more than printed transcripts of trials (sometimes with testimony by physicians or surgeons), or the confession of a murderer, occasionally with the addition of a crude engraving, but sometimes they featured reportage, with varying degrees of embellishment.
This sensational pamphlet, on the murder of Sir James Standsfield by his son Philip, reports that investigators in the case used a forensic test, 
based on the ancient belief that the corpse of a victim will bleed if touched by the murderer. After the surgeons had conducted the autopsy, they concluded that James Standsfield had been murdered, and sewed up his wounds. Philip Standsfield was then made to lift his father's body.
The pamphlet states that blood from the fatal wound "sprung out upon Philip Standsfield's Hand," which was taken as a sign (from "the finger of God") that he was guilty—corroborating the considerable amount of circumstantial evidence that already weighed against him. Philip Standsfield was found guilty and hanged in the Edinburgh market square. Scholars believe that the Standsfield case was perhaps the last in Scottish law to use the bleeding corpse test.
A True Relation of a Barbarous Bloody Murther…, London, 1688 (at right). (National Library of Medicine.)
In a secret Murther, if the dead carkasse be at any time thereafter handled by the Murtherer, it will gush out of blood; as if the blood were crying to Heaven for revenge of the Murtherer.
—JAMES VI OF SCOTLAND James I of England), Dæmonologie
Henry Morton Robinson, author (1935) commented:
When Sherlock Holmes whipped out his magnifying glass to examine a flake of Latakia tobacco found on the Smyrna rug in the Boscombe Valley affair, he became not merely a very charming character in detective fiction but an exponent of a whole new way of looking at life….
Edmond Locard, a French forensic expert of the early twentieth century, remarked:
Sherlock Holmes was the first to realize the importance of dust. I merely copied his methods.
The detective story has been a staple of popular fiction since the 1840s. Influenced by the success of the Sherlock Holmes stories, the scientific detective enjoyed a brief vogue in the early 1900s. But, until recently, most fictional detectives solved their mysteries through interviews with suspects and witnesses, ending with the revelation of the killer's identity, motive, and method. The mind of the solitary brilliant detective was the technology. Today, the investigator is often part of a team that uses forensic science, at the crime scene and in the laboratory, to solve the case.
Glowing newspaper and magazine accounts of forensic technologies, real and imaginary, fueled public support for scientific crime detection. Today forensic entertainments have attained new heights of popularity. Unlike older tales of murder, modern mysteries cast the forensic scientist as the hero, display the victim's body and its interior, and solve the case through science. Audiences can experience the distress, disorder, and moral rupture of murder within the reassuring context of legal and scientific order.
National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health (NIH). (2006). Visible Proofs: Forensic Views of the Body. Retrieved January 22, 2008 from http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/visibleproofs/exhibition/.
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Photograph © 2008 Jon Klein
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