New York City. 1914. It was a time where the coroner system — a system in which a government official is appointed as coroner — reigned in the city. Unfortunately, it was a “grossly inefficient and corrupt” system, according to the investigation of Leonard Wallstein (the city’s commissioner of accounts) that year.
Of the 65 coroners holding office at the time, “not one was thoroughly qualified by training or experience for the adequate performance of his duties,” he wrote in his report. The few who had medical degrees were “drawn from the ranks of mediocrity,” motivated only by the money they could extort from police, prosecutors, or the accused.
Thankfully, this system was replaced by the medical examiner system, which is a much more faithful system.
Unlike coroners, medical examiners were required to have some kind of post-secondary education, as well as specialized training in forensic pathology — learning to decipher clues like ligature marks, decomposition, and lividity to determine the time, manner, and cause of death.
One of the most notable people that advocated for the medical examiner system was Frances Glessner Lee.
Lee is perhaps best known for creating the “Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death,” dioramas of crime scenes in miniature — macabre dollhouses — depicting victims of arson, stabbing, hanging, carbon monoxide poisoning, and more. She handcrafted most of the furniture, clothing, and other minutiae herself to get each detail just right, accurately illustrating traces of physical evidence left at real crime scenes. Stored today at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore, the Nutshell Studies are still dusted off once a year and used as training tools for the Frances Glessner Lee Seminar in Homicide Investigation.
Learn more about her story over at Undark.
(Image Credit: Lorie Shaull/ Wikimedia Commons)