The field of the history of forensic medicine has grown in recent years, and E. Claire Cage's The Science of Proof: Forensic Medicine in Modern France is a welcome addition to this sub-discipline. The book is a meticulous and comprehensive history of the involvement of “medical men” (mostly physicians and health officers) in legal cases, both during the pre-trial investigation and at the trial itself. Their scientific publications on forensic medicine, toxicology, and to a lesser extent psychiatry and entomology (the study of insects attracted to decomposing corpses in order to determine time of death) form an important source for this book, in addition to archival records of criminal cases at French assize courts.
The five chapters discuss the engagement of forensic physicians with murder investigations, especially concerning poisoning, when they performed autopsies, but also their examinations and expert evidence given in cases of infanticide and sexual assault of children. Besides these types of cases, which are familiar to historians of forensic medicine, the book also covers more original themes, which are to some extent typical for France. French doctors, for instance, examined women charged with capital offenses during the Revolution when the latter claimed to be pregnant to postpone their execution. These physicians, moreover, acted as agents for the French state in uncovering malingering in soldiers trying to get out of military service during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815), by pretending to be ill or disabled. This particular chapter on “Deception and Detection” also grippingly reveals a history of medical ethics since doctors attempted to detect fraud via methods involving pain, for example by cauterizing or burning the bodies of those suspected of feigning madness and epilepsy. These physicians inflicted pain on fraudulent soldiers to make them confess, which bordered on torture and therefore led to a debate on the ethics of forensic medicine in the late nineteenth century. Cage's attention to ethics is new in the historiography of forensic medicine and will stimulate a further exploration of this theme.
This well researched and nuanced book further presents a fascinating argument regarding the relationship between lay knowledge and expertise. Previous studies have already indicated that the boundaries between both types of knowledge were shifting and porous, particularly in the early modern period. This study confirms this finding, especially regarding the influence of cultural norms on gender and class on forensic doctors’ statements in cases of sexual assault, where children were often seen as sexually precocious and lying, and doctors protected the male bourgeois suspect (the so-called “moral proof”). But Cage also adds a layer to this discussion of knowledge. The author argues that criminals were aware of new insights in forensic medicine and science and used this knowledge to be one step ahead of the forensic experts. Poisoners, for example, eventually understood that toxicologists, helped by new technologies such as the Marsh test, could find traces of arsenic; by 1860 these perpetrators—at least according to scientific writings—resorted to poisons that were harder to detect. One wonders here if the cause of this shift really lies in criminals’ increasing knowledge of science, or if this argument reflects forensic physicians’ self-fashioning in scientific texts on the importance of forensic expertise. After all, throughout the nineteenth century, as Cage shows, forensic scientists were preoccupied with bolstering their own authority in their textbooks and public appearances. Whether forensic knowledge was really popularized is an intriguing question that deserves further study.
In addition to this dialectic between lay knowledge and expertise, the book also points to the paradox of an increasing influence of forensic doctors on investigations and court cases, while at the same time their performances frequently exposed the faults and limitations of forensic science. Besides these important contributions, the book has two weak points. First, the author does not explain which French assize courts have been studied, and how these archival legal records have been selected. No statistics on this source material are included. Second, a more extensive international comparison could have clarified how these conclusions about French forensic medicine compare to the international historiography, which in recent years has expanded significantly.
Nevertheless, this book includes many interesting findings on the history of forensic medicine, with much attention to gender, as well as to the French political, institutional, social, and geographical contexts. It confirms that the profession of forensic medicine was becoming more important in the nineteenth century, and also carefully demonstrates that the impact of this expertise was dependent on the type of legal case and that scientific knowledge was entangled with lay knowledge and cultural ideas.
