History of Forensics

            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.