Neil Pemberton

Bloodhounds as Detectives

ABSTRACT This article explores the nineteenth-century origins of the sniffer dog in one of the most notorious homicide investigations in British history, focusing on Scotland Yards attempts to use the reputed olfactory powers of pure-bred English bloodhounds in the hunt for Londons East End serial murderer Jack the Ripper in 1888. This episode has been historiographically overlooked in part because the dogs were never actually deployed. However, the failure to unleash dogs on the Rippers trail turns out to be critically significant, opening up a space through which the historical contingencies and social meanings of dog-breeding and training practices can be explored and scrutinized. As a crime-solving tool, utilized for the purpose of investigating metropolitan crime, canine detection posed distinct problems. Proponents of bloodhound detection had to contend with various cultural, material and practical challenges, in order to guarantee the canines as reliable hunters in an environment that was contaminated by slum odour.

Bruised Witness: Bernard Spilsbury and the Performance of Early Twentieth-Century English Forensic Pathology

This article explores the status, apparatus and character of forensic pathology in the inter-war period, with a special emphasis on the ‘people’s pathologist’, Bernard Spilsbury. The broad expert and public profile of forensic pathology, of which Spilsbury was the most prominent contemporary representative, will be outlined and discussed. In so doing, close attention will be paid to the courtroom strategies by which he and other experts translated their isolated post-mortem encounters with the dead body into effective testimony. Pathologists built a high-profile practice that transfixed the popular, legal and scientific imagination, and this article also explores, through the celebrated 1925 murder trial of Norman Thorne, how Spilsbury’s courtroom performance focused critical attention on the practices of pathology itself, which threatened to destabilise the status of forensic pathology. In particular, the Thorne case raised questions about the interrelation between bruising and putrefaction as sources of interpretative anxiety. Here, the question of practice is vital, especially in understanding how Spilsbury’s findings clashed with those of rival pathologists whose autopsies centred on a corpse that had undergone further putrefactive changes and that had thereby mutated as an evidentiary object. Examining how pathologists dealt with interpretative problems raised by the instability of their core investigative object enables an analysis of the ways in which pathological investigation of homicide was inflected with a series of conceptual, professional and cultural difficulties stemming in significant ways from the materiality of the corpse itself. This article presents early findings of a larger study of twentieth-century English homicide investigation which focuses on the interaction between two dominant forensic regimes: the first, outlined in part here, is a body-centred forensics, associated with the lone, ‘celebrity’ pathologist, his scalpel and the mortuary slab; the second is a ‘forensics of things’ centred on the laboratory and its associated technologies of trace analysis (hair, blood, fibres), deployed in closed technician-dominated spaces and in the regimentally managed crime scene. Future work will seek to illuminate the shifting landscape of English forensics by following the historical interplay between these two powerful investigative models.

Walking Alone: Aiding the War and Civilian Blind in the Inter-war Period

This article explores changing attitudes towards types of aids for blind people in the interwar period. The authors focus particularly on the dispute over the relative value of the guide dog, as an aid to blind ex-servicemen and civilians. Historians of disability have neglected the history of assistive technologies and the ways in which ‘norms’ and divisions can be enacted or undone through these aids. The controversy over the choice of aids is positioned as a dispute over what constituted normality and difference in the interwar period.

Making space for criminalistics: Hans Gross and fin-de-siècle CSI

This article explores the articulation of a novel forensic object—the ‘crime scene’—and its corresponding expert—the investigating officer. Through a detailed engagement with the work of the late nineteenth-century Austrian jurist and criminalist Hans Gross, it analyses the dynamic and reflexive nature of this model of ‘CSI’, emphasising the material, physical, psychological and instrumental means through which the crime scene as a delineated space, and its investigator as a disciplined agent operating within it, jointly came into being. It has a further, historiographic, aim: to move away from the commonplace emphasis in histories of forensics on fin-de-siècle criminology and toward its comparatively under-explored contemporary, criminalistics. In so doing, it opens up new ways of thinking about the crime scene as a defining feature of our present-day forensic culture that recognise its historical contingency and the complex processes at work in its creation and development.

The bloodhound's nose knows? dogs and detection in Anglo-American culture.

The figure of the English bloodhound is often portrayed both positively and negatively as an efficient man-hunter. This article traces the cultural, social and forensic functions of the first attempts to use bloodhounds for police investigation, and argues that the analysis of these developments, which took place at the turn of the twentieth century, further our understanding of the diverse practices and cultures of fin de siècle forensics. Arguing that their dogs could trail tracks of human scent, English pedigree bloodhound breeders promoted and imagined novel ways of detecting and thinking forensically, with which they made claims to social authority in matters of crime and detection. Yet, English bloodhounds were unstable carriers of forensic meaning making their use for tracking criminals deeply problematic: for example, the name of the breed itself invoked a long-line of social and cultural associations. In showing this, we can see how the practices of canine forensics had their roots in a complex history, involving genteel leisure, changing cultural understandings of scent, and shifting dog-keeping mores.

Re-imagining Bleeders: The Medical Leech in the Nineteenth Century Bloodletting Encounter

While some historians have noted the absence of animals in medical history, few have made the animal the central object of their historical gaze. Twenty years ago W.F. Bynum urged medical historians to follow historians of science in paying attention to the role of non-human animals in the material practices of medicine.1 Yet few have responded to his call. In this paper we again ask the question: what work can the non-human animal achieve for the history of medicine? We do so in the light of the conceptual possibilities opened up by the rapidly emerging field of ‘animal studies’. This interdisciplinary and sophisticated body of work has, in various ways, revealed the value of the ‘animal’ as a tool for exploring the co-constitution of species identity.2 We asked ourselves, surely, in our present biomedical world, this must be an area that we as medical historians are best placed to comment on; and what better place to start than the well-known, yet surprisingly little-studied, medical leech?

The invention of the basset hound: breed, blood and the late Victorian dog fancy, 1865–1900

In this article the authors explore the practices and conceptualisations of British dog breeding and the showing of pedigree dogs by the ‘the dog fancy’, focusing specifically on the story of a single breed: the basset hound. This was not simply a story of British dog fanciers appropriating a French dog breed; indeed, this was impossible because the very notion of a dog ‘breed’, defined by conformation and legitimated by pedigree, was in the process of invention. They show how the British dog-show fancy chose one, from many and varied types of French hound, to be the basset hound, and how this choice was legitimated by reference to an imagined history, where the British dog fancy rescued a noble animal from French indifference to breed and blood. The chosen physical form was standardised to arbitrary ideal, but was by means no static. In the spirit of the times, it was ‘improved’, first by the empirical methods of animal breeders, using pedigrees to secure good and pure ‘blood’, and then by the application of science, particularly artificial insemination and hereditarian theories.

TEN RILLINGTON PLACE AND THE CHANGING POLITICS OF ABORTION IN MODERN BRITAIN.

This article addresses the social, cultural, and political history of backstreet abortion in post-war Britain, focusing on the murders of Beryl Evans and her daughter Geraldine, at Ten Rillington Place in 1949. It shows how the commonplace connection of John Christie to abortion and Beryl Evans death was not a given in the wider public, legal, political, and forensic imagination of the time, reflecting the multi-layered and shifting meanings of abortion from the date of the original trials in the late 1940s and 1950s, through the subsequent judicial and literary reinvestigations of the case in the 1960s, to its cinematic interpretation in the 1970s. Exploring the language of abortion used in these different contexts, the article reveals changes in the gendering of abortionists, the increasing power and presence of abortion activists and other social reformers, the changing representation of working-class women and men, and the increasing critique of the practice of backstreet abortion. The case is also made for a kind of societal blind spot on abortion at the time of both the Evans and Christie trials; in particular, a reluctance to come to terms with the concept of the male abortionist, which distorted the criminal investigations and the trials themselves. Only when public acceptance for legalizing abortion grew in the more liberal climate of the 1960s and beyond did a revisionist understanding of the murder of Beryl Evans, in which abortion came to be positioned as a central element, gain a sustained hearing.

The rise and fall of celebrity pathology

What has happened to the thoughtful, bowler-hatted figure of the forensic pathologist, the spectacular but fallible artist of battered flesh?

Dogs and modernity: dogs in history and culture

In 2011, the biologist John Bradshaw reflected that dogs had been ‘man’s best friend’ for thousands of years. Versatile and companionate, dogs had adapted to the myriad roles humans had assigned them over time: dogs and humans had ‘rubbed along pretty well’, despite not entirely understanding each other. As the senior partners in the relationship, Bradshaw charged humans with responsibility for safeguarding the human–canine relationship in the future. The on-going revisions of canine science, disseminated through academic and mainstream media, will be incorporated into the ‘folk psychology’ of dog keeping. Human understanding and misunderstanding of dogs has sprung, argued Bradshaw, from attempts by scientists from the late nineteenth century onwards to explain and regulate the dog. Of course, biology and canine science can only take us part of the way. In order to comprehend the ways in which we have lived, and indeed continue to live, with dogs we must scrutinise the broader contexts in which these inter-species relationships were established, performed, experienced and/or represented. This special dossier will suggest that the polyvalent forms and meanings of the human–dog bond were subject to change in ways that can be understood historically and that illuminate many aspects of the social, cultural, scientific and political history of the modern period. This special dossier traces some of the shifts in human understandings and manipulation of dogs from the late nineteenth century to track the changing dynamics of human–dog relationships in the modern period. Since Harriet Ritvo’s ground breaking Animal Estate: the English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (1987), there has been an ‘animal turn’ in social and cultural history. Historical accounts of nineteenth-century animal–human relationships often characterise the relationship between animals and urban space in terms of increasing degrees of separation, changes which, it is argued, endangered new ways of seeing ‘nature’, in particular the notion of the urban as a purified space of ‘culture’ rather than nature. As they have been primarily written with livestock in mind, rather than dogs, historians often speak of how the nineteenth century witnessed the ‘de-animalisation’ or ‘Great Separation’ of urban spaces: in which animal populations were removed, disciplined or re-ordered. Aside from work by scholars such as Harriet Ritvo, Kathleen Kete and Grier, historians have tended to overlook dog–human relationships, perhaps, not seeing these relationships as reliable registers of cultural and social norms and identities. Taking a broad view across animal issues in the nineteenth century, Ritvo assessed the location of animals within human aspirations and social structures, while Kathleen Kete explored pet-keeping among bourgeois Parisians. Analysis of dogs within the Victorian