This is an excerpt from the new book The Killer of Little Shepherds: A True Crime Story and the Birth of Forensic Science, by Douglas Starr.
When Alexandre Lacassagne arrived at the Institute of Legal Medicine in Lyon in 1881, he set about bringing the study of forensics into the modern era. It would be a new kind of practice, based on practical training, extensive research and translating that research into standardized procedures. It did not carry the glory of Pasteur’s discoveries or the history-changing paradigms of Darwin’s. Perhaps for those reasons his name is forgotten. But in terms of human benefits—villains brought to justice, innocent people freed, the overall civilizing affect on society—the impact of Lacassagne’s work was immense.
Lacassagne believed medical students' education was overly theoretical and lecture-based; he felt that what students really needed was practical experience. Under his tutelage, students assisted in eighty or more criminal autopsies every year. Each session followed a rigid protocol. Lacassagne or his lab chief would start by describing the known facts of the case—where and when the body was found, whether authorities suspected foul play and what they assumed to be the cause of death. Then he would distribute “observation pages”—charts that laid out the procedures they planned to employ. Designed as a kind of flow sheet, these pages would proscribe the steps that Lacassagne, his lab chief and students would follow in investigating each possible cause of death, with a series of observations to check off along the way. Each series of observations would lead to the next... and so on, until they arrived at a conclusion.
To do such exacting work required a well-equipped facility, and Lacassagne created one of the world’s most advanced criminal laboratories. The ground floor housed a modern amphitheater for dissections, with a rotating table in the center and semi-circular galleries that could hold up to 100 observers. An elevator brought corpses up from the basement and lowered the remains after the dissections. Adjacent to the operating theater was a laboratory containing microscopes and spectroscopic equipment.
