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In 1598 Fortunatus Fidelis: A Brief History Of Forensics

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When people usually hear the word forensics they usually automatically visualize crime scenes filled with things that can vary from blood, bullets, fingerprints ect. Unfortunately, it is not as cut and dry as you think, you're only seeing a small piece of the picture. The subject of forensics itself is very broad and actually involves a variety of different sciences all mixed together including, biology, chemistry, genetics, toxicology, phonetics, medicine, engineering, anthropology and many more. It is one of the fields of law enforcement, were technology and crime-solving all come together as one. Gathering the information needed to figure out what happened and the methods used to connect pieces of evidence to the crime scene were also not …show more content…

Francois Demelle of France published the first treatise on systematic document in 1609. One of the first documented events of physical matching used in a court case was in Lancaster, England when John Toms was found guilty of murder just by using a torn edge of newspaper in the murder weapon (a pistol) that matched newspaper in his pocket in 1784. Over time in the 1800’s the field of forensic science saw substantial progress. In 1832 chemist James Marsh was asked to test coffee for the poison arsenic by the prosecutor in order to prove the defendant, John Bodle had killed his grandfather using this method. Even though after trial the defendant later confessed, the jury wasn’t convinced of the accuracy of the test at the time so they acquitted him. This angered and infuriated James so much he was determined to come up with a better way to test for arsenic. He successfully came up the Marsh Test which actually made arsenic poisoning murder rarer because the fear of being caught was more likely to happen. In 1880 William James Herschel and Henry Faulds published a paper in the British scientific journal Nature describing the uniqueness of each person’s

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