PERSONAL IDENTITY,
INCLUDING
THE METHODS USED FOR ITS DETERMINATION IN THE DEAD AND LIVING.
BY
IRVING C. ROSSE, A.M., M.D., F.R.G.S. (Eng.),
Professor of Nervous Diseases, Georgetown University; Membre du
Congrès International d’Anthropologie Criminelle, etc.
Identity is the determination of the individuality of a person. In jurisprudence the term is applied to the recognition of a person who is the object of a judicial action. The establishment of the individuality of a person is known as absolute identity; while the relations of a person with some particular act is known as relative identity.
The great number and variety of facts concerned in the investigation of questions of identity are of considerable gravity and importance in their juridical bearing, and at the same time they are among the most interesting and most useful of the applications of modern medicine to the purposes of the law.[569]
Among the varied researches of legal medicine looking to an interpretation of facts, no other question occurs in which the solution depends more upon morphological and anatomical knowledge, and none is more dependent upon purely objective, visible, tangible facts.
Personal identity often constitutes the entire subject-matter of dispute in a civil case. Upon it may depend the question of absence or of marriage, of kinship or of filiation involving the possession of an estate, in which case the court often requires the most subtle of scientific evidence to assist in its decision. Many anthropological and medical facts, now appropriated by criminology and penal science, are useful in proving not only the present but in attesting future identity, thereby preventing in great measure the dissimulation of prisoners, deserters, false claimants to life insurance, fraudulent pensioners, and the like.
Such matters are of daily occurrence. The special agents of the U. S. Pension Office detect and cause the punishment of many fraudulent claimants. Stratagems and conspiracies to defraud life-insurance companies go much further than mere substitution. Instead of a “fraudulent” a positive death may come up for investigation, and in order to defraud an insurance company of a large amount, a body may even be procured by homicide to consummate the deception, as was done in the Goss-Udderzook tragedy near Baltimore in 1872.
A celebrated case now before the Supreme Court of the United States and involving the question of personal identity is that of the Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York, the New York Life Insurance Company, and the Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance Company of Hartford, Connecticut (Consolidated), plaintiffs in error, vs. Sallie E. Hillmon.
It is pre-eminently in criminal trials that the personal identity of the victim often constitutes an essential connecting link. Before it can move, the law requires, at the outset, proof of the individuality of both the author of a crime and of the victim. I shall, therefore, not touch upon such elusive individuals as Charlie Ross and Jack the Ripper, but limit my remarks to a synthetical exposition of the best-known facts regarding identification of the dead body and the interpretation of its organic remains.
The identity of a living person, or even our own identity, is often a difficult point to establish. It may also require medical evidence, oftentimes of a most involved character, to establish the fact of death. Hence the medico-legal process of connecting a dead body, or the remains or traces of the same, with a human being once known to have lived and moved on earth, is beset with difficulties that may give rise to still greater antagonisms of evidence. The question of personal identity is one of the hardest that could possibly come before a court. Celebrated cases and judicial errors have given it great notoriety. There are consequently few questions in forensic medicine that require more attention and sagacity, and none upon which the medical legist should pronounce with more reserve and circumspection. Medical men are absolutely the only persons qualified to assist in resolving the really delicate question of personal identity; yet the physician and the lawyer pursue the same line of logic and of inquiry. As the former must have a subject to dissect or to operate upon, so must the lawyer in pursuing a criminal investigation first prove a visible material substance known in legal phraseology as the corpus delicti, which he must connect with some personality, with some human being once known to have lived. In this important process the physician’s testimony being the indispensable guide of the court’s inference, he should limit himself to purely anatomical and material knowledge. The medical expert has absolutely nothing to do with guilt or innocence, as that is a question for the jury. He should, above all things, be absolutely free from prejudice, suspicion, or undue suggestion, and should remember that in thus sinking his personality his sole function as a skilled witness in cases of identity is to furnish testimony which, when taken in connection with other evidence in the case, may establish such a corpus delicti as would justify the inference of a crime.
A nice point may arise as to dispensing with the proof from the body itself, when the substantial general fact of a homicide is proved aliunde, as in the case of a criminal causing the disappearance of his victim’s body by means of its decomposition in lime or other chemical menstrua, or by submerging it in an unfathomable spot in the sea. Under circumstances such as the following: a person is seen to enter a building and is not seen to leave it, although all means of egress therefrom are watched; another person is seen to ignite the building, which thereupon burns down, and the charred remains of a human body are found in the ruins; the proof of identity from the body itself might be dispensed with in view of the substantial general fact of a homicide having been committed. In a delicate case where the man of art hesitates and finds no corpus delicti, the investigation of imprints and stains may give a clew of great value to the expert. Yet it is only upon absolute evidence, and in the strongest possible case, that the fundamental principle of the corpus delicti is disregarded.
In the case of Ruloff, the child’s body was not produced and no trace of it could be alleged to have been found; nevertheless the prisoner was found guilty of murder. This case was speedily overruled (18 N. Y., 179), on the ground that a dangerous precedent had been pronounced.
So indispensable is the showing of the corpus delicti in cases of recognition that lawyers have come to regard even the judicial confession of an accused as often the flimsiest and most unsatisfactory kind of evidence. Numerous cases of demonstrated fallibility of confessions are cited in the books, where the statement was utterly lacking in anything except motive or hallucination. In the Proceedings of the New York Medico-Legal Society, December 6th, 1876, Mr. James Appleton Morgan mentions the case of a German servant-girl who assured her mistress, whose little boy, a child of seven, had just died and been buried, that she (the servant) had poisoned the boy. The servant swore to her crime and was taken into custody, and it was only when no poison was discovered upon exhuming the child’s body and examining its stomach that against her own protest she was acquitted of the possibility of the crime. Another case of the kind that has had medico-legal notoriety was tried a few years ago before a court in Brittany. The accused declared that he had killed his servant and thrown the body in a pond. His guilt seemed certain, when the alleged victim put in an appearance, thus reducing the evidence to the strange hallucination that had prompted the confession.
But the most wonderful of these is the celebrated case of Boorn, in which medico-legal evidence took no part. In view of the seeming hopelessness of his case, the accused confessed to murder in expectation of mercy from the court, but was finally acquitted on the alleged victim walking into court and confronting the man who had sworn to having killed him.
Although wisdom and experience point to the necessity of showing something corporal and material in cases involving questions of life and death, yet very small traces or minute remains of a human body may, in certain circumstances, constitute a corpus delicti that may lead to trial if not to conviction. In 1868 the Lambert case, for murder on the high seas, was tried before Judge Benedict in the United States Court, the only corpus delicti alleged being a large pool of blood and brains found on the forecastle of a ship at sea, out of sight of land or other vessel. Circumstances, acts, and words pointed strongly to the murder of one of the crew, who was believed to have been brained with an axe and thrown overboard. Notwithstanding the fact that animosity was known to exist between the accused and the missing man, it further appeared that the accused, in a state of great excitement, had followed the missing man forward and returned alone with a hatchet in his hand, yet the jury in this instance were not satisfied as to the establishment of a corpus delicti beyond a reasonable doubt and accordingly failed to convict.
Two classical cases, that of Gardelle and of Dr. Webster, mentioned in many of the books, stand forth as instances of conviction where fragments of the human body were recognized after attempts to destroy them by intense heat. The conviction of Dr. Webster rested almost entirely upon medico-legal evidence; but it is probable that upon the same circumstantial evidence the increased industry of counsel would have so rung the changes in regard to its uncertain and unsafe nature, and would have so used the knowledge gained from advanced discoveries in the regions of the probabilities of science, as to have secured the acquittal of the prisoner had the trial taken place at the present time.
A similar affair of great medico-legal interest is the Goss-Udderzook tragedy, already referred to, an account of which is given by Drs. Lewis and Bombaugh among the “Remarkable Stratagems and Conspiracies for Defrauding Life Insurance Companies,” New York and London, 1878.
The medical jurist will no doubt find cremation a formidable barrier in elucidating the question of identity, although the entire destruction of a dead body is a matter of extreme difficulty.
In the case of calcination chemical analysis of the ash would detect the phosphate of lime, but this would throw no light upon the subject, since the ash of human bones and that of the lower animals is identical. If the burnt bone is entire, the state of the epiphyses may enlighten the question of the determination of age. The following two cases, in which fragments or portions of bone had been submitted to the action of fire, show how medical training and some knowledge of comparative anatomy may contribute to the establishment of guilt or may attest innocence.
In the case of The Queen vs. John Henry Wilson, for murder, the accused burnt his step-father in a lime-kiln for over a week, and on strewing ashes from the kiln fine fragments of bone picked up were afterward identified as human. At the trial identity rested on the fact of finding two buttons and a buckle, which were recognized as part of the deceased’s wearing apparel when last seen.
In the second case, that of a young woman supposed to be in the family way who should not have been, it was thought that she had been confined and made away with the infant. Under this supposition the premises where she lived were searched by the chief constable, who found in the stove some bones and fragments of bones that had been burnt. On examination by a qualified medical man, the fragments turned out to be not human bones, but those of some other animal, presumably those of a pig and of a chicken, which the family, who lived in a tenement-house without a back yard, had put in the stove to get rid of the refuse.[570]
In deciding whether certain bones are human or not, the medical jurist should exercise great caution in venturing an opinion as to the precise animal of which he may believe they formed a part. There is no great difficulty in detecting the smallest fragments of bone by means of the microscope, but we cannot say with safety whether the fragments belonged to a mouse, a man, or an elephant. A real difficulty occurs in recognizing the nature and origin of the bony remains when only a small fragment or a single bone is submitted for report. If a sufficient portion of the skeleton be submitted it can be easily recognized as human, as in the imbedded remains of the troglodyte found in the limestone deposit of Luray Cave, Virginia, and only in the exceptional case of the bones of one of the manlike apes could a difficulty of distinction arise. The characteristic signs that distinguish a gorilla skeleton, for instance, are the smaller thumb; notable length of tibia and of radius, although this relative length of extremities has been remarked in negroes; small facial angle, 30° to 40° in the monkey, 70° to 80° in man; very inferior cranial capacity, the maximum in a gorilla being 550 cubic centimetres, while the minimum in the human species is from 970 with a maximum of 1,500 to 1,900 centimetres; a low index of the foramen magnum; convexity of the squamo-parietal suture, and larger and more salient canines and incisors. The volume of the endocranium in the female gorilla, like that of the human species, is smaller than that of the male; this difference being almost 80 c.c. for the anthropoid female.
In studying the osseous system it should be remembered that certain modifying elements, as artificial compression, pathological deformities, posthumous distortions, and hygrometric conditions, may affect particularly the skull, and if due allowance be not made for these the study may lead to glaring absurdities. Not longer ago than 1725 there was found in a quarry at Œningen the skull of a fossil batrachian compressed into rude resemblance to the human cranium, which was announced to the world as Scheuchzer’s “Homo diluvii testis et theoscopos,” and as the remains of one of the sinful antediluvians who perished in the Noachic deluge.
An important point may arise in questions of identification of bones as to the oldness: whether they are old or recent. The first indication is furnished by the presence or by the absence of the soft parts. The existence of the periosteum and of the spinal marrow is the most persistent proof of a recent state; but these alone with the soft parts are usually destroyed in two or three years. In ordinary circumstances a body becomes skeletonized in about ten years, although in exceptional cases the cadaver may resist decomposition after many years.[571]
This summer in transferring an old cemetery in Georgetown, D. C., the remains of the grandmother of one of the writer’s patients were found in such a state of preservation as to be easily recognized after fifty years of burial. More recently, in unearthing the remains of an old graveyard in East Washington, a striking peculiarity was noticed in the fact that many bodies of young people buried in recent years when taken up consisted of a few blackened bones and shreds of grave-clothes. while the remains of many older people buried long before the Civil War were found in an excellent state of preservation. One of these was a Mr. Fullin, who died from the effects of a sunstroke forty years ago and was buried in a metallic case. An old lady who attended his funeral was present when his remains were unearthed and said they looked as natural as when he was laid away in 1852. The features were well preserved and even the white linen of the shroud was unsoiled.
Alterations in the texture of the bone, such as that caused by dryness and by diminution in the proportion of organic matter, may be ascertained by histological examination, and one of the characters of age may be furnished by taking into consideration the specific weight. Placing the skull at an average density of 1,649, that of an infant would be 1,515, an adult 1,726, and that of old age 1,636.
Ascertaining the proportion of organic and inorganic matter, the phosphates and carbonates, by chemical means may furnish an additional help in the interpretation of the remains.
With all these diagnostic methods it may still be impossible to establish identity either absolute or relative, even where a whole skeleton is in question. The evidence may, however, be of great juridical use to the accused, as in the case of Van Solen, tried for the murder of Dr. Henry Harcourt, where the collective facts pointed to the identification of a body dead two years. The jury, however, after a second trial, were instructed to acquit unless they were certain that the remains were Harcourt’s. They acquitted, as no one decided and apparent feature was known to have existed by which the remains could be identified beyond a doubt.[572]
Where an entire human skeleton has been discovered, the objects of inquiry here, as in the case of fragments or remains, are to establish the identity of the victim and that of the author of the act, and to collect all available information relative to the nature of the death and to the diverse circumstances attending the commission of the deed.
In gathering evidence from the examination of the skeleton or of isolated bones, with a view to find out the probable cause of death of the person of whom they form a part, a great variety of questions will arise for consideration, such as those relating to race, stature, age, sex, and trade or occupation; the exterior signs furnished by dentition; the traces of congenital peculiarity or of injury, and the signs of disease either hereditary or acquired.
The question of race in connection with the subject of identification is of more than usual importance in the United States, owing to our motley population, composed as it is of aboriginal Americans, Chinamen, negroes, and of Europeans and their descendants. I well remember the first human bones that I saw exhumed. They were discovered in digging the foundation of a building near a kitchen-midden on one of the tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay. The apparent oldness of the bones and the finding of stone arrow-heads, tomahawks, and fragments of aboriginal pottery in the immediate vicinity were additional accessory facts that strengthened the presumption of the bones being those of a Choptank Indian.
Roughly speaking, there is not much trouble in recognizing the platycnemic tibiæ of the mound-builder, the skull of a Flathead Indian, an Inca skull, a negro skull, or even the skull peculiar to the lower order of Irish.
In many very old skulls a considerable portion of hair is often found attached. This of course may lend assistance in the matter of race identity. A few years since I undertook at the Smithsonian Institution a series of micro-photographs of the structure and arrangement of hair, with a view to race classification as suggested by Professor Huxley. Various specimens of hair from the yellow races were compared with that of fair and of blue-eyed persons, with the hair of negroes, with reindeer hair, and with the hair-like appendage found on the fringy extremity of the baleen plates in the mouth of a “bowhead” whale. The experiments, though far from satisfactory, were sufficiently conclusive to enable one to recognize approximately the horse-like hair of some of the yellow races, that of the negro, and that of a blond Caucasian.
Beyond the forementioned characteristics, the task of race recognition from observation of the skull is one of great difficulty and perplexity with illusory results. A considerable experience of several years with the large collection of skulls in the Army Medical Museum enables me to speak advisedly on this point.[573]
Although the technical procedures of craniometry require special measurements and employ an arsenal of special instruments, the results are far from conclusive as regards the determination of human types. Time and space do not permit the mention even in epitome of the various methods most relied upon by trained craniologists. Among the oldest operations of cephalometry, as well as the most incomplete, is the measurement of the so-called facial angle, which is employed to distinguish the skull of a lower order of animal from that of the negro and the white man. This angle, acute in the skulls of the lower animals, approaches a right angle as we ascend the zoological scale; being from 30° to 65° in the various apes; 75° in the Mongolian; about 70° in the negro, and between 80° and 90° for whites. The prognathous (projecting) jaws of the negro cranium are distinctive, as well as the shape of the nasal opening, which in the black is an equilateral triangle, while it is isosceles in the white. The books usually speak of the Eskimo skull as pyramidal, which in point of fact is not true. Inspection and examination of a large collection of Eskimo crania has changed and greatly modified some of the previous notions of the conventional Eskimo skull. From more than one hundred, collected in the vicinity of Bering Strait,[574] I find that the skulls present very considerable variations among themselves; some being brachycephalic, others dolichocephalic. In many the facial angle is 80°, and in one instance 84°, which exceeds that observed by me in many German skulls. Nor is the prominence of the zygomatic arches such a constant difference in the configuration as to justify one in speaking of the skull as pyramidal. On the contrary, in many of the specimens lines drawn from the most projecting part of the zygomatic arch and touching the sides of the frontal bone, instead of forming a triangle on being elongated, might, like the asymptotes of a parabola, be extended to infinity and never meet. The index of the foramen magnum in these skulls is about the same as that of European crania. The internal capacity shows marked difference, the cubic contents of the endocranium averaging that of the French or Germans.
As some modern writers lay great stress on the measurement of the cranial capacity, not only as an aid to race identification, but as an adjunct in the study of the criminal and insane classes, it may not be amiss to give the salient facts relative thereto.
It is admitted that the cranial capacity may vary with the intellectual state, hydrocephalic skulls, of course, being excluded. Microcephalic adults give a figure inferior to that of gorillas, some being as low as 419 c.c. Andaman Islanders and autochthonous Australians appear, in respect to cranial capacity, to be most badly off. The capacity of an Andaman has been found as low as 1,094 c.c.; while that of Australians (autochthonous) and of some American tribes show an average capacity of 1,224 c.c. in the normal as well as in their deformed crania. The cranial capacity increases in the yellow races and attains its maximum in the white races. In the middle European race 1,500 c.c. may be accepted as the average; 1,750 c.c. is the maximum, and anything above is macrocephalic; while the minimum is 1,206 c.c., which is rather too low than too high. According to Topinard’s nomenclature of the cranial capacity, macrocephalic in the adult European male are those having a capacity of 1,950 c.c. and above; a large skull is one of 1,950 to 1,650 c.c.; average or ordinary, 1,650 to 1,450 c.c.; small, 1,450 to 1,150 c.c.; microcephalic 1,150 c.c. and below. It would seem that the skulls of the insane are below the type, a measurement of sixteen male skulls giving an average of only 1,449 c.c. Scotchmen head the list with the most voluminous skulls, and according to a tabular statement made up from Welcker, Aitken, Broca, and Meigs, the English come next, with a capacity of 1,572 c.c. Then follow Eskimo, 1,483 c.c.; Germans, 1,448 c.c.; French, 1,403 to 1,461 c.c.; South African negroes, 1,372 c.c.; Ancient Peruvians, 1,361 c.c.; Malay, 1,328 c.c.; Mexican, 1,290 c.c.; Hottentot and Polynesian, each 1,230 c.c.; Australians, 1,364 c.c.; and Nubians, 1,313 c.c. The cranial capacity in man, like that of the anthropoid apes, varies according to sex, the difference being so great that it is necessary to measure separately.
In the troglodyte skulls of prehistoric times the variation is not more than 99.5 c.c.; but in the contemporaneous races the difference varies from 143 to 220 c.c. French craniologists usually speak of the Auvernats as possessing the highest cerebral capacity (1,523 c.c.), and mention the skull of a Parisian of 1,900 c.c. as the highest known. Some Eskimo skulls, however, measure from 1,650 to 1,715 c.c., and two eurycephalic Indian skulls in the anatomical section of the Army Medical Museum measure respectively 1,785 and 1,920 c.c.
Mr. Havelock Ellis, speaking of the psychic characteristics of criminals, says that the lower human races present a far larger proportion of anatomical abnormities than the ordinary European population; and Sir William Turner writes of the skulls collected during the Challenger expedition that although their number is certainly too limited to base any broad generalization on, as to the relative frequency of occurrence of particular variations in the different races, there is obviously a larger proportion of important variations than would occur in a corresponding number of skulls of the white races. Thus, for example, the squamo-frontal articulation is found in less than two per cent of European skulls, while it is found in twenty per cent of negroes, according to Ecker, and 16.9 in Australian skulls, according to Virchow. Again, the spheno-pterygoid foramen is found in 4.8 per cent of European skulls and in 20 per cent of American Indians; 30 per cent in Africans; 32 per cent in Asiatics, and 50 per cent in Australians. The wormian bones are also more common among the lower races; as a rule, the cranial sutures coalesce much earlier and the teeth are more precocious.
Photography, though of undoubted service in craniometry, has been applied as a crucial test in the matter of identity and found wanting. It is objected to on the ground that it has no character of precision, and that photographs of the skull have the common defect of being central, not orthogonal projections, such as anthropometry requires. Besides, the lenses of cameras are not uniformly perfect. Anatomists know, moreover, that salient differences in any collection of crania prevent methodical enumeration and constitute the stumbling-block of ethnic craniology. Cephalometry shows, further, that dolichocephalic, mesaticephalic, and brachycephalic skulls do not belong exclusively to the white, the yellow, or the black race, but exist among the three as a result of evolution.
On this subject Professor Lombroso, among the foremost contemporaneous medico-legal writers, cites the cranial asymmetry of Pericles, of Romagnosi, of Bichat, of Kant, of Chenevix, and of Dante, who presented an abnormal development of the left parietal bone and two osteomata on the frontal bone. Besides, there is the Neanderthaloid skull of Robert Bruce and the ultra-dolichocephaly noticeable in the skull of O’Connell, which contrasts with the mesocephaly of the Irish. The median occipital fossa is noticeable in the skull of Scarpa, while Volta’s skull shows several characteristics which anthropologists consider to belong to the lower races, such as prominence of the styloid apophyses, simplicity of the coronal suture, traces of the median frontal suture, obtuse facial angle (73°), and moreover the remarkable cranial sclerosis, which at places attains a thickness of 16 mm. (five-eighths of an inch). Further mention is made of the submicrocephaly in Descartes, Tissot, Hoffman, Schumann, and others.
De Quatrefages noted the greatest degree of macrocephaly in a lunatic, the next in a man of genius. Cranial capacity in men of genius is usually above the average, having been found as high as 1,660 c.c. in Thackeray, 1,830 c.c. in Cuvier, and 2,012 c.c. in Tourgueneff. The capacity is often found above the average in insanity, but numerous exceptions occur in which it drops below the ordinary average, as in the submicrocephalic skulls of Liebig, Döllinger, Hausmann, Gambetta, Dante, and Shelley.
From what has just been said, it follows that skull measurements for medico-legal purposes have no more significance than the fact that some men are taller and some shorter than others. The medical jurist should, therefore, not be too dogmatic in drawing conclusions as to race from the skull alone. To complete the diagnosis in the matter of skeletal race peculiarity, the splay foot of the negro with the unusual backward projection of the heel-bone, as well as the greater relative length of the tibia and of the radius, may be taken into consideration. There are other characteristics of the lower jaw and of the facial bones generally, the study of which leads up to the realm of transcendental anatomy; so their further consideration would hardly appeal to the “dispassionate, sympathetic, contemplative jury” of our enlightened countrymen.
When we have the entire skeleton to deal with, the height or stature may be determined with a reasonable degree of certainty by allowing from one to two inches for the soft parts. Most of the proportions given in works on artistic anatomy approach mathematical exactness. For instance, if both upper and lower extremities are extended after the manner of spokes in a wheel, and a point corresponding to the umbilicus be taken as a centre, the circumference of a circle described therefrom should touch the bottom of the feet and the tips of the middle fingers. When the arms are extended horizontally the line included in the middle-finger tips equals the height in the generality of men, although in exceptional cases it may vary. The negro giant, Nelson Pickett, is reported to have been eight feet four inches high, while his outstretched arms measured nine feet from tip to tip. Ordinarily the upper part of the symphysis pubis is the centre of the body. Some anatomists contend that this important point is really below the symphysis in the average man. The length of the foot about equals that of the head. According to Quetelet, its length is just one-ninth of the body in women, a little more than one-ninth in men. The conventional representation of the human foot with a second longer toe is, according to Professor Flower (see “Fashion in Deformity”), of negro origin and does not represent what is most usual in our race and time. Statistics of measurements made in England by several observers on hundreds of barefooted children fail to show one instance in which the second toe is the longer.[575]
Taken singly the bones may enable an approximate estimate of the height of the person when alive; but it should be remembered in connection with this subject that the height is not a fixed quantity, since it differs according to upright or recumbent position, also before and after a night’s rest. Moreover, the alleged height of the deceased may have been taken in boots and is probably incorrect.
Many tables of measurements have been constructed for the purpose of determining the height from the dimensions of the bones; but the relation that exists between the total height and the dimensions of different bones varies according to age, sex, asymmetry, and individual peculiarities, hence the tables will not bear the critical examination that warrants their use with assured correctness, even in a majority of cases. The femur is the bone that gives the best results in these measurements. Isolated fragments have been included in the enumeration; the nose and the middle finger multiplied by 32 and by 19 or 20 giving the approximate height. While the foregoing calculations will not bear scientific scrutiny, they are of sufficient importance to be taken in connection with other facts in determining the probable length of the skeleton. Among the most trustworthy of these tables are those of Dr. Dwight, of Harvard University.
The age is a still more difficult matter to state precisely. Even during life one may be as much as ten years out in guessing the age of an adult, while the error may be from fifteen to twenty years in the case of a corpse. Dr. Tourdes mentions a case where the age was guessed as sixty and sixty-five in a deceased person aged eighty-five.
The state of the osseous system and the condition and number of the teeth, which strictly speaking are not bone, are among the surest guides in the determination of age. The signs furnished thereby may vary according to the periods of increase, maturity, and decline.
During fœtal life and even at the epoch of birth the bone centres are few. The distal end of the femur, the proximal end of the tibia, and the astragalus are ossified at birth. Points of ossification appear in successive order of development. The exact period at which the bones begin to ossify and the progress of bony union being detailed in standard works on anatomy, it would be superfluous to repeat them here. These changes are, however, not absolutely certain as to time and order, as the tip of the acromion process of the scapula sometimes remains ununited throughout life; the ossification of the sternum and of the costal cartilages is very uncertain, while the teeth, like certain railway trains, are only due when they arrive.
From the character of the progress of consolidation of the skeleton the age may be estimated with a reasonable approach to accuracy up to twenty-five or thirty years, which is the stationary period as regards alteration in the osseous system. Above this period it is difficult to arrive at the age. About forty the cranial sutures[576] begin to disappear, although the time of the closure of the sutures varies within large limits; the coccyx becomes consolidated; ossification begins in the thyroid cartilage and in that of the first rib (although this state of the rib is regarded by many as pathological); the lower jaw, which in the fœtus and in infancy formed an obtuse angle, now assumes nearly a right angle. As senility progresses toward decrepitude, the bones become lighter and more brittle, owing to fatty atrophy, and their medullary canal larger; the jaw returns to its infantile shape from loss of teeth and atrophy of the alveolar processes; the bodies of the vertebræ (according to some authorities) bevel off in front; osteophytes are formed, and the neck of the femur approaches the horizontal. (See Abortion and Infanticide.)
In the matter of sex there should be no difficulty, after noting the proof furnished by the aggregate characteristics of both male and female skeletons. The points of contrast between the two skeletons are not so striking before the age of puberty. Generally speaking the cranial capacity of an adult woman is less, although it is contended that since the great majority of males of the human species are taller, heavier, and larger than the females, it follows that if due allowance be made for these variations, it will appear that the brain capacity of woman is relatively very little, if at all, inferior to that of man. The mastoid processes of the female skull are smaller; the lower jaw-bone is relatively smaller and lighter; the ribs are lighter and compressed; the spine is relatively longer; the collar and shoulder bones and the sternum[577] are smaller and lighter; there is a less pronounced angle in the femur, the neck of which approaches a right angle, while smallness of the patella in front and narrowness of the articulating surfaces of the tibia and femur, which in man form the lateral prominences, are said to make the knee-joint in women a sexual characteristic. But it is the striking contrast in the pelvis that furnishes a sexual significance that is of greater value than all the rest of the skeleton together. From a glance at the text-book account of the pelvis, it does not appear that much anatomical knowledge is necessary to identify the important points that give shape to the female pelvis. Its greater diameter (except the vertical), larger and more curved sacrum and coccyx, and great spread of the arch of the pubes are well-nigh incontestible signs. The differences as detailed in the books can be objected to only on the possibility of a so-called hermaphrodite pelvis in one of the other sex. We sometimes see a very large pelvis in a subject who by a teratological freak became a man. Masculine characteristics are, however, oftener found in women than feminine characteristics in men; hence the conclusion that the presence of feminine characteristics leaves but little doubt as to the sex, but that certain masculine indications, while giving a great probability for the male sex, are not absolutely decisive. (See Hermaphroditism.)
The finding of fœtal bones around or about the supposed female skeleton is suggestive. It could not be inferred from this fact alone that the woman was or was not pregnant at the time of death, since the absence of fœtal remains on the one hand might imply their entire decomposition in advance of those of the adult; on the other hand, the indiscriminate habit of undertakers, who often bury still-borns with adults, may account for their presence.
The trade or occupation leaves but few marks on the bones that are useful in the matter of identification. It is in the recent and well-preserved cadaver, or, better still, in the living subject, that the professional signs are of importance. As a rule, the relatively larger scapulæ point to the fact of a day-laborer; necrosis of the lower jaw suggests a worker in phosphorus; worn and discolored teeth a user of tobacco, and aurification of the teeth might suggest the previous social condition. Gold crowns and fillings and dental prosthesis generally are among the most common and, at the same time, among the most useful signs of identification. By this means the bones of persons killed by Indians on the Western plains have been recognized years afterward. The traveller Powell, massacred in Abyssinia, was recognized in this way. From the presence of artificial teeth and the mechanical appliances for fixing them, dentists may recognize their own work beyond a doubt. One of the most common-hackneyed of these cases is that of Professor Webster.[578] Later cases, in which this kind of proof established convincing and conclusive identification, are those of Dr. Cronin, assassinated in Chicago in 1889, and of the bomb-thrower, Norcross. Every now and then accounts appear in the daily press of corpses having been recognized by inspection of the teeth. In Washington, only a short time since, the remains of an unknown man were exhumed from the Potter’s Field for judicial reasons. The unrecognized body had been found in the Potomac in an advanced stage of decomposition. From the signs furnished by the teeth the remains were identified as those of a person who had disappeared mysteriously and under circumstances that pointed to his having been murdered at a Virginian gambling den, and his body thrown into the river. In connection with this subject the Goss-Udderzook tragedy is of instructive interest.
In every important case a cast of the mouth should be taken, in order to set at rest any question that may subsequently arise as to the condition of the jaw, the absence of teeth, their irregularity or other dental peculiarities. A cast of the mouth of the deceased in the Hillmon case showed all the teeth to be regular and perfect, while it is alleged that Hillmon’s teeth were just the opposite. External signs furnished by dentition may assist greatly in fixing both age and identity. The evolution of the human dental system has been so well studied from intra-uterine life to old age that we may approximately tell the age, especially of children, from the teeth alone. This sign, so valuable in childhood, loses its value as the dentition progresses. Elaborate tables and dental formulæ to be found elsewhere deal with the two periods of dentition, the relative position and number of the teeth, and the like.
At birth the jaws show points of ossification only; but children are sometimes born with central incisors, as the writer has, in common with others, noted in several instances. The first dentition takes place from the seventh to the thirtieth month; the second between four and five years. In rachitic children these periods are later; but a syphilitic taint may hasten their development. The twenty-eight teeth characterize early youth. Wisdom teeth appear between eighteen and twenty-five, sometimes as late as thirty years. The presence of thirty-two teeth indicates maturity. This number is sometimes exceeded. Dr. Tidy, in his work on “Legal Medicine,” reports having seen several children between six and seven years with forty-eight teeth. Instances are recorded of cutting the teeth at advanced age, seventy and one hundred and eighteen years; of adults who have never had teeth; of supernumerary teeth, and of a third dentition. What purported to be a third dentition came under my notice some years ago, in the person of an old negro “voodoo doctor.” A more recent case, said to have occurred in an old man of seventy-four, at Seymour, Ind., is reported in the Weekly Medical Review, St. Louis, Mo., April 16th, 1892, p. 314.
The pathological signs furnished by the teeth should, of course, be looked upon as a personal characteristic that may lend additional light in the question of identity.
But congenital peculiarities or injuries of other parts of the skeleton are studied to greater advantage in determining proof or disproof of identity. We may recognize cranial asymmetry; the peculiar conformation of the idiot skull; the prognathous skull of the negro; the pyramidal skull of some of the yellow races, and the oval head of the white man; besides the ethnic artificial deformities already touched upon in considering the question of race. A metopic cranium, a cleft palate, a deformed spine or pelvis, a larger left scapula—indicative of left-handedness; a shortened extremity; bowed legs, club foot, the presence of extra fingers or toes, and the relative length of the fingers are each and all valuable facts in judiciary anthropology. In women of Spanish extraction the fifth finger is almost as long as the fourth—a fact so well known that glove-makers take advantage of it in sending gloves to Mexico, the Antilles, or to South America.
An estimate of the length of the hand seems to be a matter of difficulty, notwithstanding the extensive observation of high authority. In the majority of cases the ring-finger is longer than the index.
Important evidence is furnished from the existence of injuries such as fractures, whether old or recent; the marks of gunshot wounds, of trephining, amputation, excision, or other surgical operation on the bones. The remains of an old, ununited fracture in his left humerus enabled Sir William Fergusson to verify and settle all doubt as to the identity of the body of the great missionary and explorer, Dr. Livingston.[579] The existence of an injury may constitute evidence of great importance to the accused, as happened in the case of an English gentleman charged with murder, where the trial turned on the deposit of callus in a broken rib, the only bone produced in court. From the state of this callus there could be no doubt that the fracture must have been produced about eight or ten days before death, and could not have belonged to the deceased. There was, therefore, complete failure of the identity, and the accused was discharged.[580]
On the other hand, circumstances may arise in which the existence or not of an injury is a fact of great importance to the prosecution. Among other specimens in the Army Medical Museum at Washington, the bones of the forearm of Wirtz, executed for inhuman treatment of prisoners during the Civil War, show no remains or trace of fracture; yet it was claimed in defence at the trial that he could not have been guilty of the atrocities attributed to him, for the reason that this arm was disabled from a fracture.
Disease of the bones, whether hereditary or acquired, is an essential descriptive element in reconstituting individuality. Caries and necrosis, rickets, spinal disease, ankylosis, and other external manifestations of bone lesion may furnish pointers of such value as often to be incontestible. They are so evident as not to require detailed mention; but much care in such cases is necessary to distinguish between disease, decay, and violence, and artefacta. The last may have resulted from the axe or spade of the grave-digger or from post-mortem lesions made at the necropsy, as in the remains of the notorious Beau Hickman of Washington, whose body on being exhumed showed that sundry amputations and reamputations had been made on the principal limbs. Having died in a public hospital, the cadaver had been utilized in rehearsal of these operations previous to its burial in the Potter’s Field.
Injuries of the phalanges, known as “baseball fingers,” are valuable indications. This was one of the facts of identification in the celebrated Cronin case.
The condition of the exhumed bones may throw some light on the question as to the probable length of time they have been under ground, as well as the probable cause of death. If the bones were entirely denuded of soft parts we should hardly expect them to be those of a corpse buried only three or four months previously. The noting of such an injury as a fracture inflicted by some sharp instrument on a skull found in a cesspool was sufficient, with other evidence of a general character, to convict a prisoner tried at the Derby Lent Assizes in 1847.
In all cases of the kind under consideration, special attention should be paid to the surroundings, every little detail of which should be noted with the utmost accuracy; for such articles as clothes, jewelry, buttons, and in fact anything that may furnish an inference,[581] may not only throw light on the identity of the person, but otherwise assist justice. Cases are recorded in which the identity has been established principally by the clothing found with the skeleton. In Taylor’s “Medical Jurisprudence” a case is mentioned where the skeleton, portions of clothes, buttons, and boots of a Cornish miner were identified after twenty-six years’ submersion in water. Somewhat similar circumstances, a few years ago, enabled the arctic explorer, Lieutenant Schwatka, and others to identify the remains of Lieutenant Irving, of the ill-fated Franklin party.
In exceptional circumstances, as that of great cold, for instance, organic remains may be preserved indefinitely. Visitors to the Junior United Service Club in London may remember the mammoth bones discovered in digging the foundation of the club-house. Accounts of remarkable preservation of bodies discovered a long time after the occurrence of Alpine accidents, and the finding of well-preserved mammoth remains in the Siberian ice, are matters of common knowledge. A few years since, in assisting to take the remains of a mammoth from an ice cliff in Escholtz Bay, Alaska, I came across the skull of a musk-ox and the rib of a reindeer which showed the deformity and callus of a united fracture, yet there are geological reasons for believing that thousands of years must have elapsed since these remains were entombed in the ice.
A precaution to be taken in judicial investigation of bones is to ascertain whether they belong to more than one body, as they may have been put together with a view to deceive. Each bone should be examined separately, to ascertain whether it is a right or left bone or belongs to the same skeleton. They should be put together with intelligence and care, and if incomplete parts of a skeleton they may be laid in sand or putty and photographed, or the medical man may go further and, Agassiz-like, reconstruct the skeleton from the fragments. In the case of a fracture the bones should be sawn longitudinally in order to study the callus.
Since the hair and nails resist decomposition an unusually long time, and are even believed to grow after somatic death, they may be considered as accessories of such value in the question that occupies us as to make it possible to verify certain characteristics regarding the remains of the cadaver even after years of inhumation. For instance, hypertrophy of the great toe-nail, the length and color of the hair, baldness, or a long beard might furnish evidence of the best kind. Both hair and nails may, however, change after death. A case is mentioned[582] in which the hair changed from a dark brown to red after twenty years of burial. Accredited cases of the growth of hair after death are also on record. Dr. Caldwell, of Iowa, states that he was present in 1862 at the exhumation of a body which had been buried for four years. He found that the coffin had given at the joints and that the hair protruded through the openings. He had evidence to show that the deceased was shaved before burial, nevertheless the hair of the head measured eighteen inches, the whiskers eight inches, and the hair of the breast four to six inches.[583] Quite recently in unearthing the remains of an old cemetery in Washington, D. C., a number of persons noticed that when the body of a young girl, supposed to be about twelve or thirteen years of age, was taken up it was found that her hair had grown until it extended from her crown to her feet. Many careful observations seem to prove the molecular life of the hair and nails after somatic death. It suffices to quote the well-known case mentioned in Ogston’s “Medical Jurisprudence,” of several medical students who were brought to trial for having in custody the dead body of an idiot boy. When found on the dissecting-table the body was so disfigured that there was only one means left of proving its identity. The boy had a whim during life of permitting his nails to grow, and had not allowed them to be cut for many years previous to his death. They had completely curled round the tips of his fingers and toes till they had thus come to extend along the palmar and plantar surfaces in a strange way. The counsel for the prosecution availed himself of the knowledge of this fact, and his proof seemed to be complete, when a medical man came forward and gave in evidence that it was not an unusual circumstance for the nails to grow for several inches after death. This astounding statement so nonplussed the judge that the case was allowed to drop as not proven.
In exceptional cases the hair may be green. I saw a case some years since, for which no cause could be assigned, and only a few days ago I saw another in a man who worked in a brass-foundry. At the Cronin trial a barber, who had counted the victim among his customers, recognized the shape of the head and texture of the hair. Subsequent evidence of medical experts was conclusive as to the identity of hair found clinging to a trunk, the hair cut from the head of the murdered man, and that of a single hair discovered on a cake of soap. This single strand, being lighter in color in some portions than in others, seemed to indicate that it could not have come from the head of the deceased, whose hair was brown. But it was shown that hair placed on soap or other alkaline substances becomes bleached in a manner similar to the color of a single thread. This evidence of vital importance linked the hair found in the trunk with that cut from Dr. Cronin’s head, and went far toward proving that one of the murderers had washed his hands with the soap after the deed had been done.
Reviewing the signs furnished by the osseous system, it will be seen that the study of the skeleton alone is beyond contradiction more satisfactory and more important in establishing identity than that of all the other organs. Consequently a correct interpretation of the facts observed and judicious application of the rules deducible therefrom may in the matter of a human skeleton put its identity beyond a reasonable doubt. But the expert should remember that as no two cases are just alike, unexpected questions and unforeseen features may present themselves, giving to each case merits of its own. At best the medical man’s conclusions will be probabilities, not certainties; therefore his expressions of opinion should be the more guarded, as upon it may hang the life of an innocent man.
Many of the foregoing remarks on the identity of the skeleton apply in cases where mutilated remains or a portion only of the body has been recovered. Circumstances often occur in which bodies may require identification after having been drowned and partly eaten by fishes or crabs, or after having been partly eaten by buzzards, or torn into fragments by animals, as has happened in the remains of a dead infant partly devoured by a dog, and in the case of a farmer who died in the woods and was subsequently eaten by his own hogs. After accidents and fires where many persons perish; after a railway disaster where bodies have been mangled, drowned, burnt, and frozen, all in the same accident; or after an explosion from steam or gas or in a mine, or from gunpowder, dynamite, or other substance, the human remains are generally in such a state as to defy all attempts at recognition.
To dispose of a dead body in order to avoid detection, criminals will mutilate, disfigure, and chop into fragments the remains, which they afterward place in a trunk, a wardrobe, or throw into a sewer or other hiding-place. Scarcely a year passes that judiciary medicine is not concerned with cases of the kind. The frequency of such crimes has been attributed by some to the so-called contagion of murder; others offer the simple law of the series in explanation; others still believe that imitation is the principal cause. While there is no doubt a grain of truth in each of these, less philosophic minds will look upon such a beastly proceeding as a mark of the complete satisfaction sought by the destructive instinct.
Why such things should be is of less concern than the fact that criminal mutilation of the dead body is not confined to any age or country. Though more frequent in the last fifteen years, it takes up quite a space in the history of human cruelty. The violent passion, wrath, and vengeance that caused the prophet Isaiah to be sawn in two at the age of one hundred years by order of Manasses and Agag cut into pieces by Samuel have not materially changed in the days of Jack the Ripper; and we find such crimes in antipodal parts of the world, among varied sociological conditions, no matter whether it be the North American Indian, who scalps and mutilates his enemy and places the severed penis in the mouth, or the civilized European, who cuts up the body of his victim and serves it in a curry at a feast of assembled friends.[584]
This new point of judiciary medicine has lately been elaborated by European writers under the title of Dépeçage Criminel, a term which applies to the operation resorted to by an assassin having for its end the getting rid of the body of the victim and to render more difficult the establishment of its identity.
The cleverness of experts scarcely keeps pace nowadays with the more complicated proceedings adopted by criminals. In fact, at a trial of this kind truth and science are often the under dogs in a fight, than which none in forensic medicine is longer and more embarrassing. To cause a rapid disappearance of the proofs of a homicide, with a view to escape the investigations of justice, murderers have been known literally to make hash of the victim which was subsequently eaten by themselves and others. Gruner relates the case of a man who, having killed and cut into pieces his victim, boiled and roasted the fragments and ate them with his wife. Such examples, however, suggest morbid rather than passional phenomena, which manifestly call for rigid scrutiny into the mental state of the culprit, who may be more of a lunatic than a malefactor.
In cases of infanticide new-born children are sometimes cut into pieces and the fragments burnt in order to facilitate the disappearance of the cadaver. There does not appear to be, however, any well-authenticated instance of the operation having been done on a living child. Generally the dismemberment is done in order to cause more ready disappearance of the remains.
The medico-legal problem to be solved in cases of criminal mutilation is to establish the identity of the victim and that of the author of the crime.
Many apparently trivial circumstances may assist in the formation of an opinion as to the identity of the culprit. If the victim be an adult, a man is the author of the deed; if an infant, a woman, the mother, is almost always the guilty one. The London Lancet (May 30th, 1863, p. 617) reports a case in which the body of a child, of apparently four to six months, was found in the sewage of a water-closet, minus an arm cut off below the shoulder, presumably that a vaccination-mark might not be adduced as evidence. A young woman was suspected. Several women deposed having seen a dusky-brown mother’s mark near the child’s navel. After steeping in pure water a portion of the skin said to include the mark, and after washing, the mark gradually reappeared at the end of three days, perfectly distinct. It was recognized by witnesses and produced at the trial as corroborative evidence. The accused was found guilty.
In a case of infanticide at Tarare, in 1884, the upper extremity of a fœtus was found to have been disarticulated after the manner of carving the wing of a fowl. This having suggested to Dr. Lacassagne a cook as the author of the crime, she was speedily discovered and convicted. A few years later an analogous case occurred in Florence and was reported by Dr. A. Montalti.
The instrument used for mutilating the body may furnish a suggestion of identity, to be dispelled or affirmed upon further investigation. The mode of section observed in various instances has led to the recognition of a butcher as the culprit. An expert would have but little trouble in distinguishing the hacking and mangling of a body from the careful cutting and preservation of muscles and blood-vessels in dissections made by medical students, whom the public, by the way, invariably suspect in cases of mutilation. If it can be ascertained that the instrument used was operated either by a left-handed person or by an ambidexter, such a fact may prove of importance. Sometimes the fragments are tied or sewn up in a package. The manner in which the knot is tied may indicate the occupation of the culprit. In one case the regularity of the sewing revealed that it was the work of a woman. Examination of the remains of clothing and of neighboring objects where the crime was committed may result in the identification of the victim or of the murderer. Indeed, it is the careful noting of trivial facts and their combination that is so valuable in all investigations of this class. A compound fact made up of minor facts, which considered severally would possess but little value, may sometimes solve the puzzle in a case where no single fact of conclusive value is obtainable.
Having collected as much of the mutilated remains as possible, the first step toward identification is to replace the pieces in anatomical order, to note carefully their correspondence or otherwise, and to ascertain whether the fragments belong to the same body or to two or several individuals. This is often a delicate and difficult matter, especially where decomposition is advanced or where the horror has been pushed to its utmost limits, as in the case of a fratricide committed in France by several persons, who fragmented the cadaver with a saw and hatchet; boiled the remains and fed them to hogs; and, after crushing the bones with a hammer, threw the fragments into a deep gorge. Again, the body may be divided into numerous pieces, a hundred or more, and disposed of in widely different localities, as in a pond, a manure-heap, a river, or a cesspool. The chopped-up remains of infants have been boiled in lye and afterward thrown into a privy or put in a barrel of vinegar. A mother has also been known to cook with cabbage the dismembered remains of her six-months’ child and serve it at a meal of which both she and her husband partook.
Numerous counterparts of such cases happening in late years could be cited where the object was to favor the disappearance of the cadaver, and in which the establishment of the identity turned on the examination of some small part of the organism; the uterus, the spermatic cord, the lobe of the ear, the hair, or the teeth furnishing a positive demonstration that led to judiciary results.
Putrefaction goes on very fast in a corpse that has been mutilated; but it is slower in parts which, on being separated just after death, have become bloodless in consequence of the hemorrhage. After submersion the outward signs of putrefaction put a notable obstacle in the way of identification, and after drowning the body becomes rapidly unrecognizable.
Supposing it impossible to reconstitute the cadaver in all its essential parts, it is always possible, by following the instructions already given for examining the skeleton, to infer from one or several parts of the cadaver the sex, age, height, and sometimes pathological peculiarities of the victim. Examination of the skeleton and teeth is of capital importance in an investigation of this class. The indications furnished thereby having already been touched upon, and being about all that we are justified in saying, it is only necessary to repeat that many of the details relative to these special indications are so confusing as to suggest caution in using the statistical tables of even high authority, as the observations they rest on are not of sufficient extent to deserve confidence.
A survey of the head, limbs, trunk, and genital parts will give the most useful indications. The HEAD, in fact, is the surest index for justice, and one that lends promptness in the discovery of the assassin. Typical illustrations of this occur in the Goss-Udderzook case and in the recent example of the bomb-thrower, Norcross. In the case of a woman murdered by her husband at Antwerp in 1877 and cut into one hundred and fifty-three pieces and her remains thrown into a privy, the color of the hair, the lobule of a torn ear, and the uterus of a woman having had children furnished special signs that led to identity and condemnation. Examination of the brain and its membranes, though furnishing no very notable characteristics in the matter of identification, may nevertheless be regarded as a natural corollary to that of the skull. Brain weight, which is greatest between thirty and forty years, 1,200 to 1,450 grams in man, 1,100 to 1,500 in woman, diminishes toward the sixtieth year. It is said that the diminution takes place a few years sooner in the opposite sex. The estimated loss of weight in a person of eighty years is admitted to be from 90 to 150 grams. Another sign of age is the tendency to degeneration found in the pineal gland, the cortical substance, the optic and striate thalami, and in the brain capillaries.
The state of the eyes, if not too decomposed, may still become a sign of identity. For instance, the color of the iris, an arcus senilis, a pterygium, a cataract or an operation for the same, an iridectomy, etc., are signs that occasion may utilize.
The TRUNK may show, as it has in several instances, incised wounds that caused death before the mutilation. Besides, the organs therein contained may by their weight, dimension, and tissue alteration indicate the progress of age and of degeneration. Modifications of the circulatory and respiratory apparatus are obviously characteristic. As age advances the only organ whose weight increases with the number of years, the heart, may become hypertrophied or dilated; its coronary arteries may undergo an alteration; the pericardium thickens, and in fact arterial atheroma and degeneration generally may begin between thirty-five and forty years. It should, however, be borne in mind that these signs of senility may come much later or even not at all. In a man of eighty-four years Tourdes found no notable tissue lesion; in another of one hundred and four Lobstein found no trace of ossification of the arteries of the trunk and upper extremities, and in Thomas Parr, aged one hundred and fifty-two years, Harvey found absolutely no lesion of this kind. Although toward eighty years the heart increases in weight in both sexes, the opposite has been observed in exceptional cases. Placing the average weight of this organ in the adult at 266 grams for men, 220 for women, it will be found that progress in weight gives toward the eightieth year an increase of 90 grams for men and 60 for women. Yet a case of cardiac atrophy is reported in a woman of eighty whose heart weighed but 170 grams.
Diminished weight of the lungs becomes accentuated with years. Especially is this the case after pseudo-melanosis and senile emphysema. The state of the lungs of stone-cutters and miners and various thoracic and abdominal diseases may likewise become signs of identity. A cirrhosed liver, an enlarged spleen, a senile kidney, and the like, are sufficiently obvious in their bearings on this question.
Like the trunk, the ARMS AND LEGS, in cases of the class under consideration, show but few traces of disfigurement other than the fact of their having been disjointed. The manner in which the sections were made and the proceedings employed for the disarticulation would equally affirm an experienced hand or the reverse. Such facts have of late years assisted in the discovery and condemnation both of a farmer and of a medical student, and also in the case of the cook already mentioned, who cut off her child’s arm after the manner of carving the wing of a fowl. The existence of deformity, injury, and disease in the limbs should, of course, claim attention, but their relativity in an investigation of the kind is too apparent to require further comment.
Mutilation of the GENITAL ORGANS is not so common. Persons familiar with border warfare have observed the savage custom of cutting off the victim’s penis and placing it in his mouth. In more civilized communities the culprits are generally women in whom hatred and ferocity prompt an act that marks the evident satisfaction sought by the destructive instinct. Sometimes, however, the genital organs have been cut from the cadaver of a woman, presumably for the purpose of concealing traces of rape that may have preceded the murder. The signs furnished by the female genital organs as to virginity, maternity, and the menopause are so easily demonstrated at the necropsy as to become positive proofs of identity. The uterus loses both in size and weight with age. This along with hard, atrophied, and germless ovaries attests the stoppage of menstruation. The question of identity may turn on the age at which menstruation ceases, as happened in an action of ejectment in the case of Doe on the demise of Clark vs. Tatom. The period known as change of life, when the uterus and ovaries lose their function, though placed at forty-five and fifty years, is quite uncertain. In spite of averages, menstruation is occasionally continued to seventy and upward.[585]
The signs furnished by the genital organs of the male are of less importance. Atrophy and diminished weight of the testicles and rarity or absence of the spermatozoids are indications of senility; although spermatozoids have been observed at ninety-four years. The structure of the spermatic cord at different periods of life from the last of intra-uterine to the first of extra-uterine life, in puberty, and in old age, is accompanied by characteristic modifications of development and regression, which are of interest on the question of medico-forensic diagnosis of identity, as shown by Dr. Pellacani.[586]
Congenital deformity of the genital parts, as epispadias or hypospadias; marks of circumcision, useful in India to identify Mussulmans above eleven years; traces of disease that may have left extensive cicatrices, as phagadenic chancre, suppurating buboes, etc., may also furnish characteristics of evidential value.