The People's Pathologist

Shedunnit

Caroline Crampton

Arts, Books

4.9 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 27 January 2021

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Before there was CSI, there was Bernard Spilsbury. No major spoilers about clues or endings in this episode. However, there is some mention or discussion of the books listed below. Please be aware there is a brief mention of suicide at the end. Sources and further information: — The Florence Maybrick episodes of this podcast: part one and part two — Taylor’s Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence by Alfred Swaine Taylor — Busman’s Honeymoon by Dorothy L. Sayers — The Poisoned Chocolates Case by Anthony Berkeley — The Red Thumb Mark by R. Austin Freeman — The Crippen episode of this podcast — The Father of Forensics: How Sir Bernard Spilsbury Invented Modern CSI by Colin Evans >— “Trial Of Thomas Smethurst”, British Medical Journal, August 27, 1859 — “The Case of Thomas Smethurst, Convicted of the Crime of Murder”, The Lancet, September 1859 — The Magnificent Spilsbury and the Case of the Brides in the Bath by Jane Robbins — The "Brides in the Bath" episode of this podcast — Bernard Spilsbury’s index cards at the Wellcome Collection — Some Cases of Sir Bernard Spilsbury and Others : Death Under The Microscope by Harold Dearden — Bernard Spilsbury: His Life and Cases by Douglas G. Browne and E.V. Tullett — “The rise and fall of celebrity pathology” by Ian Burney and Neil Pemberton in the British Medical Journal, December 2010 — “Bruised Witness: Bernard Spilsbury and the Performance of Early Twentieth-Century English Forensic Pathology” in Medical History, January 2011 Thanks to today’s sponsor, Best Fiends. You can download Best Fiends free on the Apple App Store or Google Play. To be the first to know about future developments with the podcast, sign up for the newsletter at shedunnitshow.com/newsletter, Facebook, Tumblr and Instagram as @ShedunnitShow, and you can find it in all major podcast apps. Make sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss the next episode. Click here to do that now in your app of choice. Find a full transcript of this episode at shedunnitshow.com/thepeoplespathologisttranscript. Music by Audioblocks and Blue Dot Sessions. See shedunnitshow.com/musiccredits for more details. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:28.0	subject to eligibility exclusions and terms.
0:30.0	The murder mystery is a form that brings forth certainty from uncertainty.
0:39.0	The job of the detective is to sort through the chaotic mass of clues and testimony
0:45.3	to create an ordered coherent narrative of how a crime was committed.
0:50.0	Medical evidence forms a vital part of this process,
0:53.6	often creating the parameters for a murder investigation
0:56.5	with an estimation of the time of death.
0:58.8	At the same time as detective fiction was growing in popularity in Britain in the first few decades of the 20th century.
1:05.0	The field of medical jurisprudence was undergoing a quiet revolution.
1:10.0	From the disordered contradictory mess of Victorian toxicology was emerging the new field of forensic pathology, which proposed a scientific and evidence-based approach to the problem of understanding death.
1:22.0	The pathologist is now a permanent fixture of any kind of crime drama,
1:27.0	from CSI to silent witness and more,
1:30.0	and that can all be traced back to one man,
1:32.0	who was forging his reputation in the mortuary,
1:35.2	while the Golden Age of Detective Fiction was just getting started.
	...

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