Lesson 2 What Keeps Us Moving Forward
A Creative Idea Sparks a Whole New Field
Criminals never leave a crime scene without leaving behind traces of their presence.
The traces might be tiny, like hairs, or more obvious, such as soil from their shoes.
So detectives carefully collect all the possible evidence.
Scientists then analyze everything and find some clues.
The clues are used to find the person who committed the crime.
This process is called forensic science.
It has evolved thanks to the contributions of many researchers.
One of the most important people in the development of modern forensic science was Frances Glessner Lee.
Frances Glessner Lee was born
Frances Glessner Lee was born into a rich family in Chicago in 1878.
She became interested in medicine at a young age.
Her dream was to attend Harvard Medical School, but, at that time, the school did not accept women.
She had no choice but to get married.
It was not until she was in her fifties that Lee was able to start a career in medicine.
Lee heard many interesting stories of real-life crime from her friend, George Burgess Magrath.
He was a medical examiner who wanted to change the investigation system.
This was because, at that time, people with no medical knowledge investigated and closed many death cases without examining the bodies.
He also had a passion for educating medical students in legal medicine.
Magrath’s passion sparked Lee’s interest in legal medicine.
Lee started studying legal medicine
Lee started studying legal medicine by reading books and speaking with experts.
She believed that medical examiner systems would be adopted more widely across the country.
Furthermore, she wanted to see more young medical students trained in legal medicine.
She decided to devote the rest of her life to developing this field.
In 1931, she persuaded Harvard University to use her fortune to make a new branch of study: legal medicine.
She also helped set up a library with rare books and documents.
She thought laws had to be changed so that medical examiners had independent power.
Public support was needed to change laws, so she used the World’s Fair held from 1939 to 1940 to educate the public about the modern medical examiner system.
She also visited the governor with the chairman of the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard.
They talked about the importance of legal medicine.
Thanks to Lee’s efforts,
Thanks to Lee’s efforts, the Legal Medicine department at Harvard began to train future medical examiners in 1940.
However, detectives were not careful with potential evidence.
By touching and stepping on things, they often destroyed clues without realizing it.
Due to this fact, analyzing the clues later was impossible.
Lee thought detectives also had to learn how to observe crime scenes from a medical point of view.
In order to educate detectives effectively, Lee came up with a creative tool.
Her idea came from her hobby: creating miniatures.
She started creating miniatures of crime scenes that were highly detailed and accurate.
Based on real criminal cases, they included details like blood stains.
Lee did not miss even the smallest detail, such as a small lamp or a label on a jar.
She wanted to train detectives to notice tiny clues.
She created around twenty miniature scenes during the 1940s and 1950s.
In 1945,
In 1945, she held a week-long seminar and gave her first lecture using her miniature crime scenes.
While reading case files, the detectives studied the details of the miniature scenes.
They looked for clues in order to determine if the scene in the miniature resulted from an accident or a violent crime.
The detectives learned to notice tiny details and to observe a scene without destroying any evidence.
By developing their observation skills, they were able to improve their ability to solve crime cases.
Lee’s training process was successful.
By 1949, the annual seminar was being attended by detectives not only from the US but also from Canada.
Special agents and military staff also attended the seminar.
Lee died in 1962, after a career of more than thirty years.
Although she had struggled to enter the field, her contributions to forensic science were significant.
It is no wonder that she was called the “mother of forensic science.”
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