New government exhibit portrays historic trajectory of forensic medicine.

In medieval England, coroners — appointed officials with no special medical training — were required in cases of homicide and suspicious death to ‘make a view of the body,’ a practice that sometimes included the use of the bleeding corpse test, a forensic ploy based on the ancient belief that the body of a victim will bleed if touched by the murderer.

The role of the medical examiner hasn’t changed appreciably in the intervening centuries. Visual inspections of the remains are still performed, only now more sophisticated ways of examining the body and ultimately determining guilt have evolved.

A new two-year exhibit at the National Library of Medicine (NLM) traces forensic progress over the past 400 years.

The exhibition, called “Visible Proofs: Forensic Views the Body,” recalls the history of forensic medicine, displaying the evolving efforts of physicians, surgeons, and forensic specialists to translate soft views of the body or body parts into the sorts of hard evidence — visible proofs — necessary to persuade juries and judges in courts of law.

“This exhibit is unusual because it is an historical exhibition that focuses on the trajectory of forensic medicine from the 1600s to the present,” says curator Michael Sap-pol.

Sappol says the display centers on the multiple ways in which forensic medicine has developed methods of making the body visible and legible, not only in courts of law, but also in courts of scientific and public opinion.

“I don’t know of any other exhibition that has ever attempted anything like it,” he says.

Instruments used in President Abraham Lincoln's
autopsy, April 15, 1865. (National Museum of American History, Behring Center, Smithsonian Institution.)

Chart showing the spectra of different types of
blood samples from: A System of Legal
Medicine, Allan McLane Hamilton, M.D., and
Lawrence Godkin, M.D., New York, 1894.
(National Library of Medicine.)