150 Years of Forensic Medicine in Glasgow (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988), 82113. It is important not to dismiss the importance of the adversarial system in this regard: it was why evidential uncertainties mattered. The extension of a medical witnesss role can be seen in the case of a fatal shooting in Renfrewshire in 1931. Although photographs were often taken at Littlejohns autopsies, none from that on Mrs Merrett appear to survive. No statement or deposition was ever taken from her.30 Medical and scientific evidence would thus be crucial if murder was to be proved. After interviewing her son, the police initially believed Mrs Merrett had attempted suicide. Of course, in this period before forensic science in Scotland (and England) gained an institutional base, these doctors had few options besides interesting themselves in the examination of the weapon. Although Littlejohn and Glaister had performed their experiments using targets made from both cardboard and human skin (obtained from the leg of an amputee after a recent railway accident45), they had only produced the cardboard targets in court. For example, the police constable who took possession of the pistol could not recall whether he had picked it up from the floor, from the writing bureau or whether Merrett had handed it to him.29 There is no evidence of fingerprints having been taken. The marks remained in place.39 Thus, it was unlikely that there had been any blackening on Mrs Merretts wound to begin with; otherwise it would have survived the treatment. D. The personal character of the deceased. Examining a wound to gain information about the manner of a shooting was not new in 1926. The Merrett case clearly shows the sources of uncertainty in the experimental replication of firearm wounds, including the characteristics of different target materials, the effect of moisture, and variation between different weapons and ammunition. Littlejohn took a very different view. First, the competing attempts by prosecution and defence expert witnesses to recreate the wound in a laboratory setting, in order to determine the distance from which the shot had been fired, exposed the uncertainties surrounding the application of a well-known laboratory technique for which no fully agreed-upon protocol existed. DEFINE|TERMS. A. 78Ambage and Clark, Unbuilt Bloomsbury, 293. In his evidence, he stated that, during their experiments, he and Spilsbury had found it easier to remove blackening from skin than from paper or card. Such a proposition is supported by the fact that the medical witnesses on both sides themselves covered a broad area, encroaching into the provinces of the gunsmith and, to a degree, the chemical analyst. Mechanical Trauma and Classification of Wounds Speaking in 1907, Littlejohn, who later gave evidence for the Crown in the Merrett trial, also laid emphasis on the importance of specific experiments: General experiments were of little value. The absence of a professional group of non-medical forensic scientists in Scotland (and England) meant that the medical witnesses worked alongside gunsmiths, who were not involved in criminal justice in their everyday work. In the area of forensic medicine several types of wounds are differentiated according to their origin: blunt force injury, sharp force injury, gunshot wounds, strangulation, injuries due to heat and . 59John Glaister, Sr., A Text-Book of Medical Jurisprudence and Toxicology, 4th edn (Edinburgh: E. & S. Livingstone, 1921), 378. The courtroom exchanges during Merretts trial demonstrate that this uncertainty was manifested in competing claims to experimental authority, which ultimately could not be resolved, and which provided ammunition for the lawyers cross-examinations to undermine witnesses expertise. By asking Churchill to extend his conclusions beyond the experiments performed with Spilsbury to include the bleeding wound, Aitchison stretched the gunmakers remit into the medical sphere. He also suggested that Glaister was misreading the wound regarding the direction of the shot: The direction of the wound should not be taken in its entiretyits earlier course is the true direction and as I understand that this bullet bears marks or an indentation on one side, this is some evidence of a deflection.83 Here, Churchill brought his knowledge of projectiles to bear upon the wound. In an early presentation of latent-fingerprint evidence at a 1911 trial in the United States, cited by Cole, a fingerprint examiner demonstrated his skill and the power of his technique by lifting and correctly identifying a print left by a juror on a pane of glass. The challenges of disciplining the chaotic outside world in the context of the wound-research laboratory, quite apart from the adversarial courtroom, have been well discussed.28 There were, however, particular problems associated with the Merrett case. Here, as with the Merrett case, the prosecution and defences approaches differed. Churchills comments on Glaisters report are significant not just for their content, which shows his confidence in thinking about wounding, but because of their context. HOPE Module9 _ACTIVITY _Organizing a Fitness Event for a Target Health Issue or Concern.docx. Hostile cross-examination and procedural uncertainty were bound together. He commented both on the wounds and the probable direction of fire, this latter point having been derived from markings on the victims walking stick.89 Smiths previous practice and research in Egypt had given him particularly detailed knowledge of firearms and their effects. The boundaries between the two disciplines of gunmaking and forensic medicine were hard to define. For him, the examination of weapons and ammunition was the job of the chemist, who could analyse the composition of propellants and projectiles. The professional literature of forensic medicine from this period shows that the expertise of the gunmaker was recognised and valued. Incontinence-associated dermatitis and pressure ulcers (PUs) belong to the most prevalent in geriatric settings. 29Precognition of Thomas Middlemiss, Precognition against John Donald Merrett, 1927, Crown Office Precognitions (20th Century) National Records of Scotland, AD15/27/1 (Box 1 of 2), 13. Medico - Legal Investigation of Wounds | PDF | Wound | Healing - Scribd Incontinence-associated dermatitis and pressure ulcers in - PubMed Nevertheless, cooperation between forensic medicine and others did not end when the police in Scotland expanded their own scientific capabilities. In February 1927, Edinburgh was gripped by a sensational murder trial. 12Steve Sturdy, Knowing Cases: Biomedicine in Edinburgh, 18871920, Social Studies of Science, 2007, 37, 65989. 13Victoria Bates, So Far as I Can Define without a Microscopical Examination: Venereal Disease Diagnosis in English Courts, 18501914, Social History of Medicine, 2013, 26, 3855, 46. CHAPTER X-XI CHAPTERS X & XI Rules that must always be observed by the physician in the examination of wounds: All injuries must be described, however small for it Tresor is the longest running techno club in the entire world. and transmitted securely. However, this was not the end of the matter. EDUCATION 1 Likewise, evidence from these submitted cases helped the laboratorys researchers advance their own work.12 This amalgamation of clinical and laboratory knowledge to solve problems, whether in the treatment of a patient or the understanding of a physiological phenomenon, mirrors that found between the disciplines in the Merrett case, as doctors and gunsmiths worked closely to interpret the appearance of a wound. The .gov means its official. Thus, much of the work associated with incidents such as shootings was performed by an alliance of forensic medical experts and those from disciplines such as gunmaking, whose everyday work was not linked to the investigation of crime.6. It was championed in particular by Littlejohn and Glaisters successors to their university chairs, Sydney Smith and John Glaister Jr. Their university positions may have given Littlejohn and Glaister access to better facilities than Spilsbury, allowing them to experiment without the assistance of a gunsmith, while Spilsbury needed Churchills help with this. Secondly, the case allows the examination of the working relationship of a medical expert and a gunsmith, in which disciplinary boundaries became indistinct and the wound a shared site of analysis, in a period before the separate profession of forensic science became institutionally grounded in Scotland. The study of these injuries is also called wound ballistics. They had, however, attempted to compensate for this. While Crown Office rules stipulated that a post-mortem examination must be carried out by a qualified medical practitioner, for other tasks (aside from analysis in poisoning cases, which had to be performed by one familiar with chemical researches) no specific qualifications were required.63 However, whenever a medical or other report was obtained, the names and designations of the authors were to be carefully recorded, suggesting that credentials were important, if not mandatory.64. Although the word wound does not appear in this newspaper account, the phrase the appearance of the shot as it took effect means that it was the wound to which the gunsmith referred, albeit indirectly via a photograph. Michelle Dullan MD3. Churchills expertise was also called upon during the defences preparation for the case. This, however, does not mean that these subjects are medical, for such is not the case. Conversely, he had been careful not to encroach upon the medical side of any subject, but [had] limited himself strictly to the chemical and general aspects.74 During this period in Egypt, where Lucas worked, at least one prominent medical expert did indeed rival chemists authority over the examination of weapons. The two viewpoints often coincided: The idea that early gonorrhoea could be attended by a yellowish-white discharge was evidently not only widespread in medical literature, but also part of wider lay knowledge about the signs of healthy and unhealthy bodies. Bates suggests that this brought an element of negotiation to this diagnosis, as doctors may have shared and discussed their naked-eye strategies for understanding and interpreting such discharges with parents.13 Although there are many differences between the contexts discussed by Bates and the Merrett trial (where the doctors were specialists in forensic medicine rather than general practitioners), the concept of a negotiated understanding between medical and non-medical viewpoints, producing a conclusion to be argued in court, is helpful when it comes to understanding the role of the defence experts in this case. Psychiatric reviewed he had mentioned committing suicide to some family members several months before Recent years have seen a growing body of scholarship on the history and sociology of forensic medicine and science. 7Simon A. Cole, Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 1834. In any given case, before a definite conclusion could be arrived at, experiments must be made with the particular weapon, and under the same conditions as regards the charge of powder and shot.21. 2. On the crucial question of the markings on a wound left by a near discharge, he agreed that with such a weapon blackening caused by the heat of the barrel and unconsumed powder would only be likely at a short distance, but he was unwilling to suggest exact measurements in which the blackening might appear because he had not carried out his own experiments.79. Here, experts had access to laboratory equipment, and possessed much more specialised knowledge than general practitioners.33. Berlin Syndrome (2017) Ending Explained | Haunting Tube Although opinions differed as to the precise role of gunsmiths in these investigations, doctors involvement was more controversial, at least for non-medical authors. A record of his and Spilsburys pre-trial discussions with Merretts solicitors survives among the Crown papers relating to the case. Because they performed their main set of experiments in London, where they both lived and worked, they had not initially been able to use Merretts gun or the rest of the unspent ammunition found at Buckingham Terrace. 30Roughhead, Trial of John Donald Merrett, 510, 203. Thus, in Spilsbury and Churchills professional judgements, their compromise had been acceptable. Thus, the condition of the wound had to be attested to verbally by the staff who had attended to her when she was admitted to the infirmary, since the wound does not appear to have been photographed when it was fresh.31 The defence suggested that the account of the wound by the doctors and nurses from the hospital was unreliable, or at least irrelevant, because agitation during transport to hospital could have caused blood to be dislodged from the wound (possibly taking some blackening with it) before it could be examined properly.32 Even if the experimental attempts to reproduce the wound were successful, comparing their results to the original would not be a simple matter. Showing cutthroat injury. This was reflected in the Merrett case by the division of labour between the prosecutions medical witnesses and their gunsmith, Alan MacNaughton. This article uses the particularly extensive court records from the case, contemporary textbooks and journal literature, and press reports pertaining to similar cases, to examine two major issues facing forensic medicine in this period. 97Bates, So Far as I Can Define without a Microscopical Examination. Figure 1. He was much more willing to entertain the theory of an accidental discharge, noting that, of pistols of such cheap manufacture, there is no reliance to be placed upon them.80 However, Churchill also gave his opinion on the wound itself, ostensibly a medical matter. When diagnosing diseases such as gonorrhoea in child patients, general practitioners, lacking expertise in bacteriological diagnoses or the facilities to perform them, relied, in part, upon parents observations of visual signs, such as vaginal discharge.