Synopsis: The story of the Gilded Age Chicago heiress who revolutionized forensic death investigation. As the mother of forensic science, Frances Glessner Lee is the reason why homicide detectives are a thing. She is responsible for the popularity of forensic science in television shows and pop culture. Long overlooked in the history books, this extremely detailed and thoroughly researched biography will at long last tell the story of the life and contributions of this pioneering woman.
Frances Glessner Lee (1878-1962), an upper-class socialite who was not allowed to attend university and who inherited her family’s millions at the beginning of the 1930s, discovered a passion for forensics through her brother’s friend, George Burgess Magrath. A future medical examiner and professor of pathology, Magrath inspired Lee to fund the nation’s first university department of legal medicine for the study of forensics at Harvard and spurred her late-in-life contributions to the criminal investigation field. In 1943, she was named State Police Captain of New Hampshire for her service
When Lee first went to Harvard with the idea of a department of legal medicine there was very little training for investigators, meaning that they often overlooked or mishandled key evidence, or irrevocably tampered with crime scenes. Few had any medical training that would allow them to determine cause of death. As Lee and her colleagues at Harvard worked to change this, tools were needed to help trainees scientifically approach their search for truth. Lee was a talented artist as well as criminologist, and used the craft of miniature-making that she had learned as a young girl to solve this problem. She constructed the Nutshells beginning in the 1940s to teach investigators to properly canvass a crime scene to effectively uncover and understand evidence. The equivalent to “virtual reality” in their time, her masterfully crafted dioramas feature handmade objects to render scenes with exacting accuracy and meticulous detail, as they were inspired by true-life crimes.
Every element of the dioramas—from the angle of miniscule bullet holes, the placement of latches on widows, the patterns of blood splatters, and the discoloration of painstakingly painted miniature corpses—challenges trainees’ powers of observation and deduction. The Nutshells are so effective that they are still used in training seminars today at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore.
I was interested how this society woman came to have such an interest in forensic science and how she of all people came to revolutionise it.
For starters this is an "... extremely detailed and thoroughly researched biography ...", so much so that I think it detracts from the object at hand - how and why forensics. I get that we know to know something of her background, but felt that this could quite easily have been condensed into one chapter. Another chapter could have been devoted to the history and current standing of forensics in the US before we then embark of Frances' sourjon into crime.
Alternately, this could have been a compelling look into the study and emergence of forensics in America, with a feature of Frances, as this tome does tend to veer off course with the introduction of a number of other influential characters.
Look, all in all, an interesting topic - and further reading up on the "Nutshell Studies" is highly warranted.
see also:
British Medical Journal - History & Development of Forensic Medicine
Harvard Magazine - Frances Glessner Lee
The Guardian - The Art of Murder
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