G.D. Falksen's Blog, page 214
September 22, 2018
The time of the Pumpkining is upon us.
The time of the Pumpkining is upon us.
victorian-crime:
The Autopsy and Forensic Examination in...
The Autopsy and Forensic Examination in 1888
It would be wrong to assume that the standards of forensic investigation practiced by medical men during the period of the Whitechapel murders were crude or to suggest that the surgeons were not competent in their conduct of autopsies. An examination of contemporaneous medical texts convincingly reveals an appreciation of the need for thorough and objective investigation of crime scene and bodies, and for the accurate documentation of the findings. These texts give valuable insight into the approach and techniques employed by the surgeons engaged in examining the bodies of the Whitechapel murder victims, and also allows for interpretation of the terminology commonly employed.
During the course of this evaluation I have looked at many pertinent medical books that were published in the United Kingdom toward the end of the nineteenth century. Such texts would undoubtedly reflect the state of knowledge of forensic science during the period of the Whitechapel murders. Indeed, we can hypothesise that some of these texts would almost certainly have been owned by or consulted by Doctors Phillips and Bond and their colleagues.
In 1899, J A P Price defined ‘autopsia’ (autopsy) as ‘a term curiously applied to post-mortem examination or inspection of the body after death’; his definition of ‘Post-mortem’ was, ‘an uncouth expression for the opening and examination of the dead body’. Price also confirmed that ‘Sectio is not satisfactory’, and that autopsia was ‘unintelligible.’ The term Sectio cadaveris meant merely the dissection of a dead body and was clearly inadequate. Price obviously was not too sure what to call the procedure although he passed no judgement either way on ‘necropsia’ (necropsy). Just to confuse the issue further, ‘necroscopy’ was also to be found in the same 1899 edition of the dictionary as another name for a post-mortem examination, but fortunately it never found a way into regular usage.
