Coroners of the 19th century South helped shed light on emerging patterns of death and potential threats to public health.

Hi, I'm Shannon, the podcast producer here at C-SPAN, and this week on the Lectures and History podcast, Professor Stephen Barry of the University of Georgia,

discusses the role of the coroner as an agent of the state and talks about the records created from corner inquests.

Well, good afternoon, everybody. I'm glad to see that we're all alive and well. You all have survived now seven weeks of American history. Death and dying in U.S. history. We've reached week seven. I'm Stephen Barry,

your host for all things morbid. Today, not any grimmer than any other day in this class.

We're going to be talking about the history of death investigation, the evolution of the system

of death investigation in the United States,

which really matures and comes of age at about the dawn of the 20th century. So it is a 19th century

story of how death investigation becomes forensic science and ultimately becomes the CSI series.

Now, we all have a pretty lurid sense, I think, of death investigation that's provided

by local news, right?

This graphic is everywhere.

I found a million of these, right?

It's always the same with the police tape and the chalk outlines.

So we have a very lurid sense of death investigation from the, if it bleeds, it leads school of journalism in the United States.

But I'm going to take the evolution of this system very seriously and talk about how it's developed over time, starting with its historical importance.

Now, the most obvious area in which death investigation over time, starting with its historical importance.

Now the most obvious area in which death investigation is critically important is to our criminal

justice system, and this is the most familiar aspect, I'm sure, of death investigation

in the United States.

Coroners and medical examiners participate from the very beginning of any death investigation, right?

They are there on the scene. They pronounce a cause of death that sets the entire investigation in motion.

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