Criminal Mischief Episode 25: Stroll Through Forensic History

Suspense Radio

SHOW NOTES:

FORENSIC
SCIENCE TIMELINE

Prehistory: Early cave
artists and pot makers “sign” their works with a paint or impressed finger or
thumbprint.

1000 b.c.: Chinese use
fingerprints to “sign” legal documents.

3rd century BC.:
Erasistratus (c. 304–250 b.c.) and Herophilus (c. 335–280 b.c.) perform the
first autopsies in Alexandria.

2nd century AD.: Galen
(131–200 a.d.), physician to Roman gladiators, dissects both animal and humans
to search for the causes of disease.

c. 1000: Roman attorney
Quintilian shows that a bloody handprint was intended to frame a blind man for
his mother’s murder.

1194: King Richard
Plantagenet (1157–1199) officially creates the position of coroner.

1200s: First forensic
autopsies are done at the University of Bologna.

1247: Sung Tz’u publishes
Hsi Yuan Lu (The Washing Away of Wrongs), the first forensic text.

c. 1348–1350: Pope Clement
VI(1291–1352) orders autopsies on victims of the Black Death to hopefully find
a cause for the plague.

Late 1400s: Medical
schools are established in Padua and Bologna.

1500s: Ambroise Paré
(1510–1590) writes extensively on the anatomy of war and homicidal wounds.

1642: University of
Leipzig offers the first courses in forensic medicine.

1683: Antony van
Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) employs a microscope to first see living bacteria,
which he calls animalcules.

Late 1600s: Giovanni
Morgagni (1682–1771) first correlates autopsy findings to various diseases.

1685: Marcello Malpighi
first recognizes fingerprint patterns and uses the terms loops and whorls.

1775: Paul Revere
recognizes dentures he had made for his friend Dr. Joseph Warren and thus
identifies the doctor’s body in a mass grave at Bunker Hill.

1775: Carl Wilhelm Scheele
(1742–1786) develops the first test for arsenic.

1784: In what is perhaps
the first ballistic comparison, John Toms is convicted of murder based on the
match of paper wadding removed from the victim’s wound with paper found in
Tom’s pocket.

1787: Johann Metzger
develops a method for isolating arsenic.