Surgeons at the Bailey

This book surveys English forensic medicine as it was in past centuries, before the days of fingerprinting, blood tests, and police photography. 1 In these pages we shall listen to medical men in the witness box at the Old Bailey, London's famed Central Criminal Court, as they tell of murder scenes inspected and bodies "opened" by the surgeon, and we shall consider evidence collected- and sometimes overlooked- that swayed judge and jury toward a verdict of guilty or not guilty. This account, less a history than a chronicle, covers the years from the Middle Ages to 1878, a long period during which forensic medicine made relatively few advances in England. This fact is the more surprising in that during the same time the science developed notably on the Continent.