Ebook: Lethal Witness. Sir Bernard Spilsbury, Honorary Pathologist

The man who brought forensic pathology out of the laboratory Sir Bernard Spilsbury was an early-twentieth-century British forensic pathologist who gained fame by testifying in classic murder cases, beginning in 1910 with the Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen trial. His expert court testimony he identified Crippen's victim by detailed microscopic study of a scar convinced the lay jury of Crippen's guilt. Considered the father of modern forensic pathology, Spilsbury became well known after he provided crucial prosecutorial evidence in the Brides in the Bath case (where a nurse nearly drowned in a laboratory experiment designed to prove his theories), the Blazing Car and Brighton Trunk murders, and the Hay-on-Wye arsenic poisoning trial. Knighted in 1923, Spilsbury performed 20,000 postmortem examinations and became the first and only Honorary Pathologist to the Home Office.

Controversial and dramatic, Lethal Witness charts Spilsbury's rise and fall as a media star, revealing how he put...