Lecture 2: Key Figures in Forensic Science

Ambroise Paré

French barber-surgeon; pioneer of surgical techniques and battlefield medicine.

Fortunatus Fidelis

Italian physician; first to write a formal treatise on forensic medicine.

François-Emmanuel Fodéré

Considered the father of forensic medicine; wrote one of the first comprehensive studies of legal medicine.

Mathieu Orfila

Father of toxicology; published first scientific treatise on poisons.

Alphonse Bertillon

Developed anthropometry (Bertillonage) for personal identification; father of criminal identification.

Rudolf Virchow

Father of modern pathology; first forensic investigation of human hair.

Alexandre Lacassagne

Father of scientific detection; first to try individualizing bullets to gun barrels.

Sir Francis Galton

Father of fingerprints; published Fingerprints and created classification system.

Hans Gross

Founding father of criminalistics; coined the term "criminalistics."

Eduard Piotrowski

Father of bloodstain pattern analysis; studied blunt trauma blood patterns.

Edmond Locard

Father of forensic science; established first crime lab; "every contact leaves a trace."

Albert S. Osborn

Father of questioned document examination; author of Questioned Documents.

Leone Lattes

Developed first antibody test for ABO blood groups; forensic blood typing pioneer.

Bernard Spilsbury

British pathologist; became famous as "real-life Sherlock Holmes."

August Vollmer

Built the first U.S. crime lab in 1923 (LAPD); pioneer of modern policing.

Calvin Goddard

Father of forensic ballistics; perfected the comparison microscope for firearms.

Frances Glessner Lee

Mother of forensic science; created crime scene dioramas for training investigators.

Walter McCrone

Father of forensic microscopy; advanced light and electron microscopy in forensics.

Herbert MacDonell

Father of modern bloodstain pattern analysis.

Drs. Alfred Taylor and Samuel Wilks

Published classic paper on determining time of death from body cooling.

George Popp

Pioneer of forensic botany and geological forensics; solved famous cases with soil analysis.