For the first five thousand years or so, mankind's detective work was incredibly shoddy. A criminal investigation prior to the 1800s generally meant little more than a hasty search for eyewitnesses and motives and, above all, the coercion of the accused into confessing.
That began to change in the mid-to late 1800s, as schools of forensic medicine opened up, as detectives turned to fingerprints and police departments began to collect mug shots. French chemists refined blood analysis.
By the 1890s, criminologists appeared to be on the verge of a startling breakthrough: identifying criminal body types or markers.
Internationally acclaimed Italian scientist, Cesare Lombroso, claimed that by carefully examining the physical characteristics of a suspect, i. e., every nook and cranny of the body, he could help determine guilt or innocence. [Actually, Lombroso claimed the ability to identify criminal types by analyzing their faces and general builds. For example, he believed that short, stocky men with low foreheads were often criminals.]
Imagine the implications. Say someone was accused of rape, but the eyewitness identification was a bit shaky. What if Lombroso could inspect the man's body or skull and find definitive markers revealing the man to be a rapist? Would it be the suspect's ear? His tongue? His nose hair? No body part was off-limits to these scientific pioneers.
Richard Zacks, An Underground Education, 1997
That began to change in the mid-to late 1800s, as schools of forensic medicine opened up, as detectives turned to fingerprints and police departments began to collect mug shots. French chemists refined blood analysis.
By the 1890s, criminologists appeared to be on the verge of a startling breakthrough: identifying criminal body types or markers.
Internationally acclaimed Italian scientist, Cesare Lombroso, claimed that by carefully examining the physical characteristics of a suspect, i. e., every nook and cranny of the body, he could help determine guilt or innocence. [Actually, Lombroso claimed the ability to identify criminal types by analyzing their faces and general builds. For example, he believed that short, stocky men with low foreheads were often criminals.]
Imagine the implications. Say someone was accused of rape, but the eyewitness identification was a bit shaky. What if Lombroso could inspect the man's body or skull and find definitive markers revealing the man to be a rapist? Would it be the suspect's ear? His tongue? His nose hair? No body part was off-limits to these scientific pioneers.
Richard Zacks, An Underground Education, 1997
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