Ian Burney

Crime scene investigation-or CSI-has captured the modern imagination. On television screens and in newspapers, we follow the exploits of forensic officers wearing protective suits and working behind police tape to identify and secure physical evidence for laboratory analysis. But where did this ensemble of investigative specialists and scientific techniques come from? In Murder and the Making of English CSI, Ian Burney and Neil Pemberton tell the engrossing history of how, in the first half of the twentieth century, novel routines, regulations, and techniques-from chain-of-custody procedures to the analysis of hair, blood, and fiber-fundamentally transformed the processing of murder scenes. Focusing on two iconic English investigations-the 1924 case of Emily Kaye, who was beaten and dismembered by her lover at a lonely beachfront holiday cottage, and the 1953 investigation into John Christie's serial murders in his dingy terraced home in London's West End-Burney and Pemberton chart the emergence of the crime scene as a new space of forensic activity. Drawing on fascinating source material ranging from how-to investigator handbooks and detective novels to crime journalism, police case reports, and courtroom transcripts, the book shows readers how, over time, the focus of murder inquiries shifted from a primarily medical and autopsy-based interest in the victim's body to one dominated by laboratory technicians laboring over minute trace evidence. Murder and the Making of English CSI reveals the compelling and untold story of how one of the most iconic features of our present-day forensic landscape came into being. It is a must-read for forensic scientists, historians, and true crime devotees alike.

This fascinating book looks at the phenomenon of murder and poisoning in the nineteenth century. Focusing on the case of William Palmer, a medical doctor who in 1856 was convicted of murder by poisoning, it examines how his case baffled toxicologists, doctors, detectives and judges. The investigation commences with an overview of the practice of toxicology in the Victorian era, and goes on to explore the demands imposed by legal testimony on scientific work to convict criminals. In addressing Palmer's trial, Burney focuses on the testimony of Alfred Swaine Taylor, a leading expert on poisons, and integrates the medical, legal and literary evidence to make sense of the trial itself and the sinister place of poison in wider Victorian society. Ian Burney has produced an exemplary work of cultural history, mixing a keen understanding of the contemporary social and cultural landscape with the scientific and medical history of the period.

In Bodies of Evidence, Ian Burney offers an important reinterpretation of the role of the scientific expert in the modern democratic state. At the core of this study lies the coroner's inquest-the ancient tribunal in English law held to account for cases of unexplained death. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, representatives of "progressive" medical science waged a determined campaign to align the methodology of the inquest with a medical model of investigation and explanation. Yet at the same time the inquest was framed within a second powerful and innovative discourse, one based on an appeal to the inquest as a time-honored bulwark of English popular liberties. Bodies of Evidence takes these parallel visions of the inquest as the point of departure for a wide-ranging examination of the historical process of negotiating expert authority in the public realm. By insisting on the dynamic interplay between the medical and political visions of the inquest, Burney calls into question many of the basic assumptions about the rise of science as a model for socially authoritative knowledge. Among this study's central and innovative claims is that traditional narratives of the rise of expertise in the nineteenth century obscure the tension between the needs of modern governance on the one hand and the politics of expanding popular participation on the other. Along the way, Bodies of Evidence elegantly evokes the workings of one of the more curious institutions of English civil society, an institution whose somber duties before death were performed with surprising (and occasionally unnerving) vitality. Bringing the concerns of the cultural historian to bear on the histories of medicine and the law and integrating the perspectives of the "new" political history and the history and sociology of scientific knowledge, Bodies of Evidence is a theoretically nuanced and empirically rich account that will have a genuinely cross-disciplinary appeal. "It is not surprising that spokesmen for an emerging medicolegal community waged a sustained campaign to frame the inquest first and foremost as a tool of applied medical inquiry. But the modern inquest was simultaneously framed within a dynamic contemporary discourse of 'historical' popular liberties. The mere fact of its having survived from at least the twelfth century (some claimed for it an earlier, Saxon pedigree) lent the inquest the trappings of an exemplary embodiment of the 'genius of English reform.'"-from Bodies of Evidence