Visible Proofs: Forensic Medicine History on Display
By: Douglas Page
Issue: August/September 2006
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.)
The timing of the exhibition exploits the public’s current fascination
with the forensic sciences, as seen in the waves of popular crime television
shows, novels, and movies. The difference is, the “Visible Proofs” exhibit
is rooted entirely in fact.
Items on display at the NLM include surgical instruments used in the autopsy
of Abraham Lincoln; some of the first medical treatises on forensics, dating
back to the 1600s; the heart of a 26 year old man with a bullet hole in it;
a stomach poisoned by arsenic; a kidney punctured by a fatal knife wound; fingerprints
from the 1892 Francisca Rojas case in Argentina — the first investigation
to use fingerprints to help secure a conviction for murder; and film clips
of actual forensic autopsies.
Another part of the exhibit shows how American
anthropologist Clyde Snow and a group of Argentinean students invented the
field of human rights forensics in the mid 1980s. Evidence uncovered in their
excavations of mass graves led to the conviction of members of Argentina's
murderous military junta, an effort that subsequently became the model for
investigations of political and ethnic murders and atrocities around the globe.
DNA profiling plays a prominent role in the exhibit. Of particular interest
is the Kirk Bloodsworth exhibit. In 1993, Blood-sworth, a Maryland crab fisherman,
became the first condemned murderer on death row to be exonerated by DNA evidence,
with support from the Innocence Project, a nonprofit legal clinic formed to
promote the use of DNA analysis to clear the innocent.
The exhibit also explains how DNA evidence identified the Vietnam War's “Unknown
Soldier” as Lt. Michael Blassie of St. Louis, Missouri.
“From what
I can see, visitors tend to be especially drawn to material related to human
remains, such as the forensic autopsy training films, an interactive display
that gives a lesson on forensic autopsy. Another popular area is the Nutshell
Studies of Unexplained Death — amazingly detailed dollhouse recreations
of actual crime scenes, made in the 1940s and 1950s,” Sappol says.
The Lincoln autopsy tools (metacarpal saw, doubleended probe, tongue tie,
small bone forceps) used the morning after his death by Army surgeons, while
relatively visually uncom-pelling, also seem to be a popular draw.
A huge amount of forensic material was excluded due to space limitations.
The show’s footprint is only about 5000 sq. ft., but Sappol says they
could easily have filled up four times as much.
“We didn’t include
material on lie detectors, truth serum, or manuals of how to testify in court,” he
says. “Because it’s an exhibition and not a book we focused on
visual aspects of forensics, things we could show, so we excluded some material
of historical significance that wasn’t very visually interesting.”
Also,
since NLM is a medical institution, it was decided to focus on forensic medicine,
broadly construed to include fingerprints, anthropometry, forensic anthropology,
and forensic chemistry, which historically arose out of medical colleges.
“There
is nothing here on tiretracks, analysis of fires, or other interesting forensic
topics,” Sappol says.
The National Library of Medicine, the world's largest
medical library, is located on the campus of the National Institutes of Health
(NIH) in Bethesda,
Maryland.
The NIH is an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services.
“Visible
Proofs: Forensic Views of the Body” is located on the first floor of
the Library, Building 38, at Rockville Pike and Center Drive, approximately
300 yards from the Medical Center stop on Metro’s Red Line.
The exhibit is free and open to the public 8:30 a.m.-5:00 p.m., Monday-Friday
and 8:30 a.m.-2:00 p.m. Saturdays through February 16, 2008. NLM is closed
Sundays and federal holidays. For directions, security policies, and other
visitor information, consult the Library’s Web site: www.nlm.nih.gov/about/visitor.html.
Heart of a 26-year-old man,
perforated by a bullet, New
York, 1937. Death attributed to
homicide.(New York City Medical
Examiner's Collection, National Museum of
Health and Medicine, Armed Forces Institute of
Pathology, Washington, D.C.)
Early 20th century Bertillon Card. Police departments through-
out Europe and the United States adopted Bertillon’s system of
criminal identification in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The suspect's full-face and profile photographs appear on one
side of the card; name, measurements, and other information
are on the reverse.(New York City Municipal Archives.)
Douglas Page writes about forensic science and medicine from Pine Mountain,
California. He can be reached at douglaspage@earthlink.net
