Forensics: The Anatomy of Crime, Wellcome Collection - exhibition review

Everything in the Wellcome’s gripping new exhibition traces both our centuries-long fascination with unlawful death, and our determination to match killer to victim by ingenious means
Shady character: a Seventies photofit book (Picture: Wellcome Library, London)
Philippa Stockley2 March 2015

What looks like a 7ft lustrous porcelain meat plate with blood-runnels cast into it stands on two chunky legs. But this spellbinding monstrosity made by Royal Doulton was, until 1944, Rotherhithe mortuary’s dissection slab.

Everything in the Wellcome’s gripping new exhibition swirls round the corpse missing from that table, tracing both our centuries-long fascination with unlawful death, and our determination to match killer to victim by ingenious means. Even the word “morgue” comes from morguer — to peer, or gawp.

Many forensics techniques are familiar: fingerprints, first brought from Japan in 1880 by a Scot, Henry Faulds, but dismissed by Scotland Yard as useless; or fledgling identikits, that began in 1938 with books of facial parts (204 foreheads, 89 noses) and became the hardly more sophisticated photofits of the Seventies. But there are others, such as Alphonse Bertillon’s 1895 orthometer, a jointed brass device that measured the face and head of criminals.

The process of decay itself, vividly imagined in an 18th-century series of watercolours of a Japanese noblewoman’s death, led to fresh techniques, such as heat-imaging used on blowfly maggots, that help establish the time since death.

Kusozu: the death of a noble lady: one of a series of 18th-century Japanese watercolours showing the process of decay (Picture: Wellcome Library, London)

Murderous misbehaviour is richly present: here a skull like a boiled egg smashed with a two-stone spoon; there a sliver of a girl’s liver stabbed by her brother; or a photo of the grave under the coal cellar where Cora Crippen was buried in 1910 by her husband, Dr Crippen.

Of famous death-chasers some, such as Sir Bernard Spilsbury, stand out. His spidery hand-scrawled index cards detailing 20,000 post-mortems are shown for the first time. Or Bertillon, who not only invented the orthometer, but also a tripod to photograph corpses from high above.

The Wellcome’s charting of this fandango between foul play and forensics will get anyone’s synapses sparking — unless they themselves rightfully belong on that ceramic slab.

Until June 21 (020 7611 2222, wellcome.org)

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