History of Forensic Science and Medicine

Following years of declining activity, 2016 marked the beginning
of increases in hate group activity and hate crimes across the United
States and Europe. According to the FBI, in 2018, anti-Semitic
homicides rose to their highest level ever, and anti-Sikh attacks
tripled. Antitransgender hate crimes rose 34%. African Americans
were the most targeted group. It is no longer vanishingly unlikely
that a physician, educator, or other caretaker may encounter a child
or adolescent with some involvement with hate speech or a hate
group, as either a target or a potential recruit. Being aware of how
involvement might take place, and the psychological consequences
of such involvement and the relationship with other behavioral
disorders, can be crucial in addressing this issue effectively within
a productive therapeutic or educational relationship.

Events involving terrorist bombings in Bali, Indonesia in 2002 and the earthquake with resultant Tsunami in Southern Asia in late 2004 have necessitated international collaborative efforts in massive disaster victim identification exercises. A critical issue involves speedy and accurate identification of the dead with repatriation to their country of origin. An essential requirement for this process is the establishment of effective and functional mortuaries to enable systematic processing of the victims with appropriate documentation and quality-control processes to ensure that identifications are correct and that processes are capable of audit. The following article outlines steps that need to be taken to set up temporary mortuaries under such circumstances, possible problems that may be encountered, and suggested solutions.

Relying on morphology in the estimation of postmortem intervalsis not always accurate for all life phases of flies, especially for immature stages. The present study demonstrates the application of cytochrome oxidase I sequences, a partial mitochondrial (mt) gene region, to differentiate forensically important fliesinAlexandria, Egypt. Thirty‑three adult flies, larvae, and pupae were collected from rabbit carcasses. Nineteen were used for genotyping. Sequence analysis revealed no significant intraspecific divergence in Diptera species. Accordingly, a neighbor-joining tree using the Kimura 2‑parameter model illustrated reciprocal morphology between species. Specimens represented five species, four genera, foursubfamilies, two families, and one order. We herein identify five different Diptera species, Chrysomya albiceps, Chrysomya megacephala, Calliphora vicina, Lucilia sericata, and Ophyra capensis, using mt DNAas a species‑specific marker for identification in a local database set‑up.

A 41-year-old woman with a past history of insulindependent diabetes mellitus, intravenous drug use and asthma was found collapsed and unresponsive at her home address. Her history also included previous hospital admissions with diabetic ketoacidosis. She was conveyed by ambulance to hospital, where she was found to be unconscious, hypotensive and acidotic with a markedly elevated blood glucose level. Resuscitative efforts were unsuccessful.

Apart from an early case report from China (13th century) and later artistic contributions, the ®rst observations on insects and other arthropods as forensic indicators were documented in Germany and France during mass exhumations in the late 1880s by Reinhard and Hofmann, whom we propose recognizing as co-founders of the discipline. After the French publication of Me Âgnin's popular book on the applied aspects of forensic entomology, the concept quickly spread to Canada and the US. At the time, researchers recognized that the lack of systematic observations of forensically important insects stood in the way of their use as indicators of postmortem interval. General advances in insect taxonomy, and ecology helped close this gap over the following decades.

Nell'inverno del 1707 a Roma circolava una storia tragica e macabra. Secondo un anonimo curiale autore di un Diario di Clemente XI (Archivio Segreto Vaticano, fondo Borghese I, 578, in data 22 febbraio), una giovane donna, dopo aver perso il bambino in un aborto, "fu creduta morta" e fu quindi portata in chiesa per il funerale. Si disse in seguito che "nel seppellirla il beccamorto la trovasse calda, e [...] ne avvisasse il parroco e marito", ma non riuscisse a farsi credere. La giovane dunque "fu sepolta dentro la cassa", ma "fu di poi trovata la detta cassa chiodata et essa tutta graffiata, chiarissimo inditio [...] che quando essa fu sepolta, non era morta come tutti hanno affermato".

A riveting true crime story that vividly recounts the birth of modern forensics.

At the end of the nineteenth century, serial murderer Joseph Vacher, known and feared as “The Killer of Shepherds,” terrorized the French countryside. He eluded authorities for years—until he ran up against prosecutor Emile Fourquet and Dr. Alexandre Lacassagne, the era’s most renowned criminologist. The two men—intelligent, bold, and full of the spirit of the age—typified the Belle Epoque, a period of scientific achievement and fascination with its promise to reveal the secrets of the human condition.

With high drama and stunning detail, Douglas Starr recounts Vacher’s infamous crime wave, interweaving the story of how Lacassagne and his colleagues were developing forensics as we know it. We see one of the earliest uses of criminal profiling, as Fourquet painstakingly collects eyewitness accounts and constructs a map of Vacher’s crimes. We follow the chilling and horrific events leading to the murderer’s arrest. And we witness the twists and turns of the crucial trial, celebrated in its day. In an attempt to disprove Vacher’s defense by reason of insanity, Fourquet recruits Lacassagne, who in the decades previous had revolutionized criminal science by refining the use of blood spatter evidence, systematizing the autopsy and doing ground-breaking research in psychology. Lacassagne’s efforts lead to a gripping courtroom denouement.

The Killer of Little Shepherds is an important contribution to the history of science and criminal justice, impressively researched and thrillingly told.

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El presente trabajo tiene como objetivo principal poner en relieve algunas de las maneras como la justicia bonaerense del siglo XIX lidió con los delitos sexuales (“delitos contra la honestidad” en la época). En este sentido, propongo hacer un recorrido somero por ciertas ideas que parecen teñir el accionar judicial y médico-legista de la época. Haré especial hincapié en el tratamiento diferenciado dado a las víctimas femeninas y masculinas (de acuerdo al sexo biológicamente percibido), explorando la forma en que éstas se fueron configurando (o no) como “víctimas aceptables”.

Each educated human have their own novel penmanship qualities which is normally inserted. Penmanship is the photo of the inner struggles continuing. The review shows that the penmanship appraisals can fill in as a viable indicator for the guess of the previously mentioned aggravations and perhaps some others too. The proficient finding of the aggravations in the area of brain science is mostly founded on indications referenced in books of analytic rule that are generally physical and mental yet semantic capacities like penmanship can likewise be utilized for something similar. It very well may be utilized as a projective method to concentrate on part that the individual oppose or at times knows nothing about to share. Graphology can be effectively utilized in crooks' profiling and understanding, that it is a suitable strategy for examination and that it can just finish the overall image of a crook's mind. Graphology inspects conduct, yet the psyche or the whys that untruth behind activities, giving data that couldn't be set up in some other manner or in such a fast time. It tends to be utilized for character appraisal in any space of human action where individuals connect.

Marijuana is the most frequently used illegal drug in the world today. Some 146 million people, or 3.7% of the population 15–64 years of age, consumed Cannabis in 2001–2003 (1). In the United States, 95 million Americans over the age of 12 have tried marijuana at least once. In 2002, an estimated 15 million Americans had used the drug in the month before a survey (2), representing 6.2% of the population age 12 years and older. Marijuana was used either alone or in combination with other drugs by 75% of the current illicit drug users. Approximately 2-3 million new users of marijuana are added each year, with about 1.1% becoming clinically dependent on it (3). In the case of young people, according to a recent survey of high school students known as Monitoring the Future, supported by the US National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and conducted yearly, at least 19% of 8th graders had tried marijuana at least once and 18% of 10th graders were “current” drug users (i.e., had used the drug within the past month before the survey). Among 12th graders, nearly 48% had tried marijuana at least once, and approx 21% were “current”marijuana users (4). Marijuana use by young people has increased or decreased at various times during the last decade, possibly as a result of its potency, which has been on the rise, although nonsignificantly from a 3% concentration of Δ9-tetrahyrocannabinol (THC; marijuana’s active chemical constituent) in 1991 to 4.4% in 1997—possibly because of changes in the perceptions of youths about marijuana’s dangers or other unknown factors. Research suggests that marijuana use usually peaks in the late teens to early 20s, and then declines in later years (5).

The Italian Paolo Zacchia (1584-1659) is considered one of the fathers of forensic medicine. From a letter sent by the physician and botanist Pietro Castelli, the article seeks to reconstruct the opinions that Zacchia expressed about monsters in his monumental "Quaestiones Medico-Legales". Although he did not seem too sure about the possibility that a hybrid could be born from the union of a man and a beast, he believed that God intervened, allowing the birth so that the abomination could be discovered. The opinion of Zacchia is related to the image that people had at the time of the relationship between humans and animals.

The non-therapeutic alteration of children’s genitals is typically discussed in two separate ethical discourses: one for girls, in which such alteration is conventionally referred to as “female genital mutilation” (or FGM), and one for boys, in which it is conventionally referred to as “male circumcision.” The former is typically regarded as objectionable or even barbaric; the latter, benign or beneficial. In this paper, however, I call into ques- tion the moral and empirical basis for such a distinction, and I argue that it is untenable. As an alternative, I propose an ethical framework for evaluating such alterations that is based upon considerations of bodily autonomy and informed consent, rather than sex or gender.

English title and abstract: Races and Degeneration. The Emergence of the Knowledge on the Abnormal Man.
This Ph-D thesis develops the twofold history of the notions of “race” and “degeneration” between the XVIIth and the XIXth century. This history is studied from two points of view: historical epistemology that is “how race and degeneration became the concepts of various knowledges (natural history, anthropology, psychiatry)”; and history of government practices, that is “how race and degeneration became problems of government”. Focusing on the historical link between these notions gives us the possibility to analyze the emergence, in the XIXth century, of a field of knowledge that dealt with what we call the “abnormal man”, that is this very specific entity which agglomerates madness, criminality and “inferior” races as deviations of human normality, in an ambiguous space between the normal and the pathological. Our thesis describes the various categories that organise this field of knowledge.  More deeply, we want to argue that the notions of race and degeneration, far from being external to humanism and universalism, far from being systematically correlated to practices of exclusion, are intimately connected to a practical and theoretical humanism and to practices of inclusion, that deal with race, madness and crime as alterations of a norm one has to regenerate, correct and improve through specific apparatus of power. Through this historical lens, we want to study all the ambiguities and aporias that lurk in the very heart of this will of inclusion and this analysis of heterogeneous realities as alterations of a norm. We show in particular how we can establish a very strong link between the insertion of the concept of “race” into natural history and monogenism; and, on the other side, how it is important to study the insertion of “race” into the political field and, more broadly, the emergence of the knowledge of the abnormal, to take into consideration its logical links with political liberalism in the beginning of XIXth century.

Common law was an all-male system, with one glaring exception: juries of matrons. If a convicted felon requested a reprieve from execution on the grounds of pregnancy, it was the responsibility of a group of twelve matrons to perform an inspection in order to determine if she was in fact pregnant. Matrons were in a position of great authority. Their verdicts were definitive: if they decided a woman was pregnant, then she was sent back to prison. Despite the significance of their role, little is known about medieval matrons and what qualified them to sit on a jury. Were they mothers? Honorable wives? Midwives? The goal of this paper is to argue that matrons had training in obstetrics. This was particularly important for medieval matrons because the quickening (that is ensoulment, signaled by the first fetal movements) did not become the focal point of the matrons' assessment until at least 1348. Before this, the diagnosis was much more medically challenging as matrons had to determine whether a felon had conceived. Overall, the medieval records demonstrate great confidence in medieval matrons and their obstetrical expertise.

Until 1876 caesarean section almost invariably ended with the death of the mother and often of the child. This book reconstructs the dramatic story of the first caesarean section designed to save both the mother and the child. An intervention that was conceived and carried out by Edoardo Porro, a professor of obstetrics at the University of Pavia and chief obstetrician at the hospital of San Matteo in Pavia. The surgery was performed on a young woman, Giulia Cavallini, whose narrow basin had condemned her to almost certain death. With a brilliant operative procedure, and overcoming many moral doubts, Edoardo Porro forever changed the history of obstetrics.

In 1786, an ordinance of the Qianlong emperor prohibited the five wards, into which Beijing city was divided, from summoning the coroner of the metropolitan prefecture of Shuntian 順天 for a death investigation, and compelled them to recruit their own. The order appears redundant since regulations governing the career of the capital's coroners had already been set forth twenty years earlier. Still, far from being a simple administrative decision, as its laconic formulation in the institutional literature might suggest, the prohibition was excerpted from a long rescript, by which the emperor blamed the eminent scholar-official Ji Yun 紀昀(1724–1805), the then imperial censor, for having borrowed a coroner from the prefecture of Shuntian. The emperor suspected that Ji Yun did so deliberately in order to take revenge against that coroner who, for an earlier murder case, had performed a check autopsy (fujian 覆檢) which had overthrown an insincere autopsy report that Ji Yun had supported so as to cover up the real perpetrator, a central official and remote relative of Agui 阿桂, a grand councilor who had the emperor’s confidence at that time.
By exploring a series of governmental communications recounting the case, the first part of this article sheds light on how forensics was immersed in the interweaving of fractional conflicts and favoritism within the capital mandarinate, and on the interplay between forensic knowledge and political concerns at the very core of the political power. Thus, the article is aimed at delineating how epistemic value of forensic knowledge served individuals' political interests in late imperial China.

The fact that insects and other arthropods contribute to the decomposition of corpses and even may help to solve killings is known for years. In China (13 th century) a killer was convicted with the help of flies. Artistic contributions, e.g. from the 15 th and 16 th century, show corpses with "worms", i.e. maggots. At the end of the 18 th and in the beginning of the 19 th century forensic doctors pointed out the significance of maggots for decomposition of corpses and soon the hour of death was determined using pupae of flies (Diptera) and larval moths (Lepidoptera) as indicators. In the eighties of the 19 th century, when REINHARD and HOFMANN documented adult flies (Phoridae) on corpses during mass exhumation, case reports began to be replaced by systematic studies and entomology became an essential part of forensic medicine and criminology. At nearly the same time the French army veterinarian MÉGNIN recognized that the colonisation of corpses, namely outside the grave, takes place in predictable waves; his book "La faune des cadavres" published in 1894 is a mile stone of the forensic entomology. Canadian (JOHNSTON & VILLENEUVE) and American (MOTTER) scientists have been influenced by MÉGNIN. Since 1895 the former studied forensically important insects on non buried corpses and in 1896 and 1897 MOTTER published observations on the fauna of exhumed corpses, the state of corpses as well as the composition of earth and the time of death of corpses in the grave. At the end of the 19 th and in the beginning of the 20 th century the Germans KLINGELHÖFFER and MASCHKA as well as the forensic doctor HOROSKIEWICZ from Krakau dealt with alleged child homicides, including the suspected use of sulphuric acid. In this context, it was shown that ants, cockroaches and freshwater arthropods could produce post-mortem artefacts suggestive of child abuse. These and many other studies laid the foundations for subsequent faunistic surveys, monographs and ecological studies of arthropods important for forensic science and for the development of modern, better and better research methods of forensic entomology. Since the 1990's, forensic entomology is taught and practiced in many countries in all continents and police academies, and international trainings for students take place since 2002 on a regular base.

The first section of this paper discusses  the Greek notions of parthenos (virgin), and parthenia (virginity). More precisely, I will revisit the arguments made in Le Corps virginal (1986: Paris: Vrin), a book translated into English, as Greek Virginity (1990: HUP).
In Greek culture, virginity is an experience of embodiment, a condition of closure and intactness, the inexperience of "the works of Aphrodite". It is NOT a mere social status, namely non-marriage. I strongly refute this reductionist interpretation, based on a simplistic notion of what is "social", and on a superficial reading of the primary sources.
But although virginity is an experience of embodiment, it does not depend upon one  single  body part. The ancient Greeks did not recognize the existence of a membrane located in a woman's vagina -- what we call the "hymen". They did not obsess on defloration and bloodshed.
The second section of the paper will advance a new hypothesis on the medical knowledge that lay in the background of the representations of virginity.
The two sections are connected as follows: while re-examining the terminology, I will argue that ancient medical writers did not include the "hymen”, in the anatomy of a healthy young woman. Soranos of Ephesus (II century CE) was the first physician to mention a membrane obstructing the vagina, but he claimed that this was just a false belief. There could be imperforation, he argued, but this could only be an anomaly.
There was no normal occlusion.
The ancient Greeks, therefore, failed to identify what modern forensic medicine calls “the physical signs of virginity”. They relied, however, on a different kind of sign of vaginal intercourse: pregnancy. As long as they could trust the conception of a child as the predictable effect of heterosexual coition, pregnancy revealed the loss of virginity. Contraception was to disturb that trust. Soranos, the first physician who discusses the anatomy of an un-penetrated woman, is also the first to provide an extensive collection of contraceptive remedies – not just abortifacients. The transition from a representation of virginity as sexual inexperience (but without the anatomical support of the "hymen") to the need to pin down sexual integrity via a membranous structure, is correlated to the increasing aware- ness that women might tamper with their bodies, and that heterosexual coition, therefore, might go unobserved.

Planned complex suicide is defined as the combination of more than one method of suicide, previously planned by the victim, to prevent failure of the first method. Herein, we present a case of planned complex suicide, committed by a black powder muzzle loading handgun and hanging. A 39-year-old man was found dead in the bathroom of his flat, hanging by the neck with a huge atypical gunshot entrance in the right temporal region of his head with extensive backspatter. The skin defects, as well as soft tissues in the subcutaneous pocket undermining, were heavily burnt. Along the wound canal were multiple bone fragments, and at the end of the path at the left temple was an embedded lead ogival projectile with a cross shaped artificial incision at its tip. The hanging was incomplete. There were no fractures of the hyoid bone and laryngeal cartilages. Cervical muscles and vessels were intact. Simon's sign was negative. Signs of asphyxia were not present. This is the first reported case of complex suicide with a black powder derringer and manipulated projectile.

1. Ippocrate, Aforismi, ed. M. Vegetti, Opere di Ippocrate (C1assici della scienza. Collezione fondata da Ludovico Geymonat), Torino, Utet, 2000, p. 423. Sull'antica medicina, che segna la piena maturità del suo pensiero: «Ma la medicina da gran tempo ormai dispone di tutti gli elementi, e il principio e la via sono stati scoperti, grazie ai quali in lungo corso di tempo sono state fatte molte ed egregie scoperte, e il resto nel futuro sarà scoperto, se qualcuno, in grado di farlo e a conoscenza di quanto è già stato scoperto, da questo prendendo le mosse porterà avanti la ricerca» 2 .

In the summer of 1826, Hannah Russell was tried for petty treason, viz. the murder of her husband, Benjamin Russell, by poisoning. Their lodger, Daniel Leney, was indicted as her accomplice. The exact circumstances surrounding the death were unclear but Hannah was known to have purchased white arsenic (arsenious oxide). A local surgeon, Thomas Evans, supported at the post-mortem examination by two further surgeons, not only reported severe corrosion of the gastrointestinal tract, but also the recovery of nearly an eighth of an ounce of arsenic from the victim’s stomach. Both accused were convicted and sentenced to death. Leney was executed, but Hannah Russell was respited because the trial judge, Sir Robert Graham, had doubts as to a direction he had given to the jury. The surgeon and paleontologist Gideon Mantell took up her case, stressing that death from arsenic could not have taken place as quickly as was alleged and maintaining that the chemical evidence of arsenic poisoning was inconclusive. He gained the support of some eminent chemists and physicians.
Subsequently, forensic toxicologists [Sir] Robert Christison and Alfred Swaine Taylor pointed out that Mantell’s arguments as to the possible time to death in arsenic poisoning were quite wrong. Moreover, Evans gave details of the analyses he and his colleagues had undertaken to Christison, who pronounced the findings sound, as indeed did Mantell after Evans and his colleagues published details of their investigations in the Sussex Advertiser. Papers in The National Archives show that Hannah was pardoned for the offence for which she was indicted, leaving it open to prefer a lesser charge. That this was never done may have been due to Mantell’s campaign, at least in part, but the pardon she did receive was due to the concern of the trial judge as to the implications of the evidence presented at trial.

Apstrakt: Evropska komisija je donijela okvirnu odluku kojom će se od 31.11.2013. godine, u državama članicama priznavati samo materijalni dokazi dobijeni u akreditovanim forenzičkim laboratorijama. Okvirna odluka Evropske Unije JHA\905\2009 je postala obavezujući dokument u krivičnim istragama država Evropske Unije. Akreditacija forenzičkih laboratorija, kao imperativ EU, podrazumijeva primjenu evropskog standarda kvaliteta ISO\IEC17025. Ovaj standard normira, sistematizuje i precizira forenzičke radnje od uzrokovanja tragova, samog ispitivanja-vjestačenja do prezentovanja nalaza i mišljenja nadležnom sudu ili tužilaštvu. Standard kvaliteta ISO\IEC 17025 je zasnovan na najboljoj praksi Evropskih forenzičkih laboratorija i kao takav predstavlja jedini pravi put ka dobijanju dokaza koji su pouzdani i provjerljivi. Crna Gora, Srbija i Bosna i Hercegovina iako nisu članice EU, aktivno su uključene u proces akreditacije svojih forenzičkih laboratorija. Akreditacija pomenutih laboratorija se obavlja pod programom EU, koji se zove EMFA-2 (Evropsko mentorstvo za forenzičku akreditaciju). U radu će detaljno biti opisan pomenuti program i način kojim akreditacija garantuje pouzdanost dokaza i dokazivanja u krivičnim istragama.

Le 10 août 1824, près de La Ferté-Alais (Essonne), Constance Debully, âgée de douze ans et demi, partie pour aller ébourgeonner des plans de vigne, a disparu. On découvre quelques jours plus tard son cadavre soigneusement dissimulé dans la « grotte de la Charbonnière ». Antoine Léger est vite retrouvé et reconnu coupable du meurtre et du viol de la petite fille, dont il avait dévoré une partie du cadavre et bu le sang. Après un procès à huis clos à la Cour d’assises de Versailles, Léger, devenu « loup-garou », est condamné à la guillotine, sans montrer la moindre émotion.
Le cas d’Antoine Léger puise dans l’horreur sa lumière sombre, susceptible d’éclairer une histoire de ce que l’on peut nommer le mal. Cette étude a voulu être attentive au cheminement qui fait du crime d’Antoine Léger une affaire judiciaire, puis un cas médical intéressant plusieurs générations de psychiatres, à un moment où l’on scrute l’intériorité des criminels et les ressorts moraux des actions humaines : de Georget, contemporain de l’affaire, qui défend l’idée d’un acte fou, jusqu’à Krafft-Ebing qui à la fin du siècle inscrit la jouissance du mal qu’il nomme sadisme dans une conception neuve du psychisme. Laurence Guignard rassemble la série des textes qui ont mobilisé le cas Léger, montrant combien l’étiologie de la perversité puis des perversions a constitué un axe fécond de l’histoire de la psychiatrie.
Ce recueil rassemble la série des textes qui ont mobilisé le cas

Lumières et Révolution, "vies fragiles", doctrines et pratiques du droit de punir, vérité du corps et de l'âme : autour de quatre champs principaux qui jalonnent l'oeuvre imposante de Michel Porret, ce livre rend hommage à l'historien du droit de punir, des représentations, des cultures politiques et juridiques de la modernité. Grand historien de la vie sociale, Michel Porret restitue avec la même exigence de méthode les existences anonymes dans toute leur dignité en même temps qu'il dialogue avec les voix majeures qui ont contribué, entre le temps des Lumières et celui du positivisme scientifique, à penser la condition humaine. Les contributions réunies ici prolongent et développent cette entreprise intellectuelle féconde où histoire et responsabilité morale marchent de concert, entre enseignement universitaire, recherche scientifique et vie de la cité.

En esta tesina analizo el rol jugado por el perito médico en los delitos sexuales entre 1850 y 1890 en Buenos Aires. El punto central es mostrar como ayuda a crear a la 'victima aceptable' sea hombre o mujer. Para hacer esto, explico la pericia médica en sí y muestro como este va mucho más allá de su deber para asegurarse de no estar ayudando al varón o la mujer a ocultar una perversión como la homosexualidad o la masturbación. Al mismo tiempo muestro que los crímenes sexuales son tratados en una forma particular respecto de otros tipos de delitos por la justicia de ese momento. Finalmente, en el último capítulo, intento mostrar como los conocimientos y la práctica jurídica se combinan con el saber y el ejercicio de la medicina para intentar definir la niñez y su sexualidad

By the dawn of the sixteenth century, the testimony of medical experts in legal settings as to the cause of death based on the examination of the corpse was well-established, especially in Italian cities closely allied with medical schools such as Venice and Bologna. The firsthand accounts of the process employed by these medical experts in making their evaluations as found in the legal records of the day were relatively terse, but medical and anatomical writings around the same time offer more detail about exactly how various parts of the body were examined in a wide variety of contexts. These medical accounts, which became more and more detailed as the century progressed, often contained references to efforts to determine the cause of death in cases similar to those found in legal documents, and by examining the two a fairly accurate picture of the techniques and methods used in both cases can be developed. In this paper, I trace the changing nature of dissection practices as developed in anatomical and medical works and  relate them to forensic cases.

“It is difficult to judge in cases of uncertain self-killing.” The Discourse on Suicide in Forensic Medicine (1780–1850)

The aim of this article is to explore and contextualize the normative approach to suicide in the emerging discourse of forensic medicine between the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century. Viewed through the lenses of processes, such as the medicalization and pathologization of “madness” beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century, which provided one of the most characteristic contexts of the discourse on suicide, the article examines how Hungarian authors and/or translators of textbooks, dissertations, and medical treatises aimed at partially challenging earlier views and methods of handling the problem of suicide. By focusing on three main themes, namely the increasingly valorized pathological knowledge used in judicial procedures, the sociocultural and communal contexts, and the semantic dimension of the discourse, the article also points out the contradictory nature of the discourse that partially contributed to the medicalization and decriminalization of suicide, but at the same time also perpetuated some of the most persistent prejudices and the ambivalence surrounding the act of intentionally taking one’s own life.

This article explores the history of forensic science in terms of ideologies and institutions rather than developing technique. It presents an analytical framework for characterising forensic institutions and practices, past and present. That framework highlights the distinct issues of means of witness, accredited testimony, and the reaching of juridical decisions. The article applies the framework by comparing four forensic 'formations,' (or 'cultures') which have been prominent at various times and places in the western world from the early modern period onward: these are the central European heritage of the Caroline code, a eugenically-oriented forensic enterprise of late nineteenth-century America, the forensic perspective in nineteenth-century British India, and the representation of forensic certainty in contemporary American popular culture. The article concludes with a critique of what seems an increasingly common expectation: that forensic science evolves independently of legal institutions, and can ultimately displace them.

Forensic entomology is basically a science that is based on the scientific study of the invasion and succession pattern of arthropods with their developmental stages of different species found on the decomposed cadavers during legal investigations. The developmental rate of Lucilia sericata and Chrysomya megacephala was studied in beef liver for the correlation of time duration in each phase with the temperature and climate. The obtained data belong to L. sericata at temperatures between 22°C and 26°C (mean -24°C) and relative humidity 50% ±10% and C. megacephala at temperatures between 23°C and 27°C (mean -25°C) and relative humidity 55% ±10%. From the analysis of results, it was observed that in the climatic conditions of the study area, time since death assessment involving L. sericata was found to be with a potential of maximum 10-11 days and C. megacephala with 8-9 days. The data emerged as results from the present work would be beneficial for investigations involving decomposed dead body remains for the assessment of time since death.

This article examines two forensic casebooks from nineteenth century China. Forensic cases are among the favored sources for progressive narratives sketching out the development of forensic knowledge as a process through which anomalies are detected and explained, and new facts are ultimately incorporated into the existing corpus of knowledge. This article is aimed at providing an alternative view. It first argues that cases revealing a serious discrepancy vis-à-vis the official manual for autopsies are extremely few. It later demonstrates that, instead of accumulating facts challenging the authoritative manual, forensic case compilers primarily addressed the question of weighing evidence. They singled out cases which shed light on how to make a decision in the face of several competing, but already-known symptoms. Each case displays how the weighing process worked out depending on its particular and unrepeatable circumstantial configuration, with no intent to convey generalizable information. Collecting precedents is thus not intended to form new claims as opposed to the canonical manual, but to make it more applicable to a complex reality. Forensic case compilers, therefore, did not evaluate the official manual in terms of correctness or inaccuracy, exhaustiveness or deficiency. What really mattered was flexibility in using the book depending on the actual circumstances.

This article explores the articulation of a novel forensic object-the 'crime scene'-and its corresponding expert-the investigating officer. Through a detailed engagement with the work of the late nineteenthcentury Austrian jurist and criminalist Hans Gross, it analyses the dynamic and reflexive nature of this model of 'CSI', emphasising the material, physical, psychological and instrumental means through which the crime scene as a delineated space, and its investigator as a disciplined agent operating within it, jointly came into being. It has a further, historiographic, aim: to move away from the commonplace emphasis in histories of forensics on fin-de-siècle criminology and toward its comparatively underexplored contemporary, criminalistics. In so doing, it opens up new ways of thinking about the crime scene as a defining feature of our present-day forensic culture that recognise its historical contingency and the complex processes at work in its creation and development.

colloque international. Pièces à conviction. Pour une épistémologie de la matérialité judiciaire et policière : XVe-XXIe siècles. colloque organisé par l’équipe Damoclès et l’Université de Genève, 26-27-28 avril 2018

Abstract :
Crime occulte, appartenant à la catégorie des « crimes cachés » de part ses modalités d’exécutions clandestines, l’empoisonnement reste, jusqu’au développement de la toxicologie moderne, un crime extrêmement difficile à démasquer. Face à l’absence fréquente de témoignages de visu et à la difficulté d’établir le corps du délit, les traces matérielles laissées par l’empoisonneur tiennent, plus que pour tout autre crime, une place grandissante au sein de la procédure judiciaire moderne. La disparition, la collecte mais aussi l’exploitation judiciaire des fragments du crime deviennent dès lors un enjeu central des affaires de poison. Carrefour pour l’histoire du droit et de la médecine, du fait de son université prestigieuse, Bologne représente un terrain de recherches idéal pour appréhender les problématiques de la pièce à conviction dans la culture juridique occidentale. A travers l’étude d’une cinquantaine d’affaires issues des fonds judiciaires bolonais (XVIe-XVIIe siècles), cette intervention propose d’analyser les caractéristiques, les permanences et les évolutions du statut de la pièce à conviction dans le contexte si particulier de l’empoisonnement criminel.

Here we present methods for distinguishing tail hairs of African elephants (Loxodonta africana), Asian elephants (Elephas maximus), and giraffes (Giraffa camelopardalis) from forensic contexts. Such hairs are commonly used to manufacture jewelry artifacts that are often sold illegally in the international wildlife trade. Tail hairs from these three species are easily confused macroscopically, and morphological methods for distinguishing African and Asian tail hairs have not been published. We used cross section analysis and light microscopy to analyze the tail hair morphology of 18 individual African elephants, 18 Asian elephants, and 40 giraffes. We found that cross-sectional shape, pigment placement, and pigment density are useful morphological features for distinguishing the three species. These observations provide wildlife forensic scientists with an important analytical tool for enforcing legislation and international treaties regulating the trade in elephant parts.

This article uses a notorious criminal trial, that of John Donald Merrett for the murder of his mother, as a case study to explore forensic medicine’s treatment of gunshot wounding in pre-war Scotland. This topic, which has hitherto received little attention from historians, provides insight into two issues facing the discipline at this time. First, the competing attempts by prosecution and defence expert witnesses to recreate the wound in a laboratory setting, in order to determine the distance from which the shot had been fired, exposed the uncertainties surrounding the application of a well-known laboratory technique for which no fully agreed-upon protocol existed. Secondly, the case allows the examination of the working relationship of a medical expert and a gunsmith, in which disciplinary boundaries became indistinct and the wound a shared site of analysis, in a period before the separate profession of forensic science became institutionally grounded in Scotland.