Forensic science was started in the 17th century and it
was used as a unique discipline in which the principles and techniques of the
basic sciences (biology, chemistry, and physics) are used to analyze evidence,
thereby retrieving information to help solve problems related to civil and
criminal law. In this section of my blog, I will speak of the history of
forensic science and talk about the earlier uses of it, as well as some
techniques. The scope of text will be in the United States and France. The
quality of forensic science will be limited to laboratories in the United
States. Forensic science is essential and vital to solving the work for
criminal justice and crimes.
"Over the past century, forensic science has
developed into a large interdisciplinary field consisting of a number of
different but related areas as legal medicine (pathology and anthropology);
toxicology; forensic chemistry; forensic identification (including
fingerprinting and DNA analysis); questioned documents; firearms; and tool
marks" (Kobilinsky 193). Although forensic science began as early as the
6th century, it wasn't until the 17th century when it was used in courts as
evidence. For example, in the 1800s there was a case in France with a physician
named M.J.B. Orfila, he was asked to determine if a woman had poisoned her own
husband through dinner. It so happened that she did by putting arsenic in the
food and Orfila used analytical chemistry methods to determine the poison in
his body (Kobilinsky 193). With this breakthrough, it became essential for
autopsies (post-mortem examination) and it helped determine the cause and
manner of the death of patients. This was the birth of another forensic science
called forensic pathology.
A technique that rapidly became popular and then routine
in forensic science was fingerprinting. Alphonse Bertillon (1853–1914) had
attempted to capture individual identities by recording measurements of a large
number of physical characteristics, resulting in a unique profile for every
person (Kobilinsky 193). This theory failed because the lack of reliability and
the ability to establish absolute identification. William Herschel, Henry
Faulds, and Thomas Taylor began the work of fingerprinting in the early 1900s.
According to Kobilinsky, "These scientists laid the foundation for the
comparison of latent prints found at a crime scene with exemplar (known) prints
taken from an individual" (193). This lead to the Henry system in 1910 which
was a classification system.
Forensic science in crime investigation is still
relatively new as it has been used starting in the 17th century, this brings up
the question, how were crimes solved before then? We can only imagine the
amount of criminals that were let free or got away with a crime before
forensics. Without some of the techniques used now today, it makes sense that
back in ancient times around 400 BC, people decided crimes by brutality and barbarism.
Kobilinsky,
Lawrence. "Forensic Science." Encyclopedia of Law Enforcement.
Ed. Larry E. Sullivan, et al. Vol. 1: State and Local. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
Reference, 2005. 192-197. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 30 Jan.
2013.
