Description
Book SynopsisForensic science is in crisis and at a cross-roads. Movies and television dramas depict forensic heroes with high-tech tools and dazzling intellects whoinside an hour, notwithstanding commercialspiece together past-event puzzles from crime scenes and autopsies. Likewise, Sherlock Holmesthe iconic fictional detective, and the invention of forensic doctor Sir Arthur Conan Doyleis held up as a paragon of forensic and scientific inspirationdoes not reason forward as most people do, but reasons backwards. Put more plainly, rather than learning the train of events and seeing whether the resultant clues match those events, Holmes determines what happened in the past by looking at the clues. Impressive and infallible as this technique appears to beit must be recognized that infallibility lies only in works of fiction. Reasoning backward does not work in real life: reality is far less tidy.
In courtrooms everywhere, innocent people pay the price of life imitating art, of sci
Table of Contents
1. Reasoning Backwards 2. Sherlock and His Successors 3. Categorical Intuitive Deduction 4. How Detective Fiction Turned Into Medical Science 5. Good Cop, Bad Cop 6. You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know 7. Can’t Shake This Feeling 8. The Emperor Wears No Clothes 9. Broken Bones in Babies 10. The Unified Hypothesis 11. Failing the Infamous 12. The Deadly Bed 13. Failing the Numerous Not-So-Infamous 14. The Double Dip 15. Modern-Day Sherlocks 16. The Battered Football Player Syndrome 17. Tree People and Forest People 18. The Perils of Pediatric Forensic Pathology 19. Kayakers, Spider Bites, Jack the Ripper, and Speaking for the Dead 20. CSI, Adam Ruins Forensic Science, Forensic Tree Teams, and a Bridge in Melbourne 21. Confessions of a Former Chief Medical Examiner
