Dan Snow's History Hit - FORENSICS: The Beginning

Episode Date: October 19, 2022

Death by tiger bites. Death by prodding. Death from sexual excess. Deaths from over-eating and over-drinking. The opening of graves.These are a few of the chapter headings in a 13th-century Chinese book called ‘The Washing Away of Wrongs’. It is a compendium of grizzly, gory, bizarre murders and deaths.Its author was Song Ci, a Confucian trained bureaucrat who, like his fellow officials all over China, was responsible for investigating murders in his jurisdiction. According to the Wikipedia page for ‘forensic science’ this book is the earliest written evidence of forensic thinking. Is that correct?Our guest today is Daniel Asen, a historian of China at Rutgers University.This is the first episode in a mini-series from Patented: History of Inventions we’re bringing you all about the invention of Forensics.Produced by Freddy ChickEdited by Pete Dennis and Anisha DevaThe actors were Lucy Davidson and Tristan HughesThe Executive Producer is Charlotte LongIf you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hey everyone, exciting new mini-series just landed. You've got to check it out. It's from our sister podcast, Patented, hosted by Dallas Campbell, the one and only. It gets under the skin of forensics. How it started, how it works. And we're featuring one episode of it on Dan Snow's History Hit today. The episodes are fascinating, you're going to love it.

You've got the one on fingerprints, how they fight crime with fingerprints. It all starts in colonial India. The first murder case ever to hinge on fingerprint evidence was in India. Check them out. Lie detectors. The invention of the lie detector is a strange story and it's full of eccentrics, let me tell you. Fascinating true crime and incomplete science at its heart. These days, I didn't know this, but these days, lie detectors are based on AI and MRI scans. They're used in policing all over the world. But the fundamental problems at the heart of lie detectors have not changed since they were invented 100 years ago. History matters, even with exciting tech stories like AI. Don't neglect the history. This series

is cool because they get exclusive access to London's most inaccessible museum, the Met Police's Crime Museum. I've been running in there for ages. I'm jealous about that. This episode, though, looks at the birth of forensics. Where did it all start? According to Wikipedia, which I might have happened to quickly glance at, the page for forensic science says there was a book written by Song Qi, a Confucian-trained bureaucrat responsible for investigating murders. That's the earliest evidence of forensic thinking, but is that true? I don't know. It's Wikipedia lying. Who knows? You'll have to listen to this episode to find out. For the rest of the series, search patented history of forensics wherever you get your podcasts.

Enjoy. Somewhere in ancient China, an inquest official and a murdered man's wife are alone together. In the past, what man was your husband's worst enemy? My husband had no enemies, but only recently there was a certain man who came to borrow money. He did not get it. Her husband's body had been at the side of a road with 10 deep wounds across it. Wounds that looked like they'd been made by a farmer's sickle. No valuables or clothes were taken. The inquest official said robbers merely want men to die so they can take their valuables. Now the personal effects are here while the body bears many wounds. If this is not a case of being killed by a hateful enemy then what is? The official sends word that all the dead men's neighbours are to come to him,

bringing all the sickles they own with them. Soon 60 or 70 sickles are laid out on the ground. The neighbours and the official stand around the sickles, looking at them. The weather is hot and full of flies. And the flies begin to do something strange. They gather on one particular sickle. Whose is this? A man speaks up. The same man who had come to borrow money from the murdered man. The sickles of the others in the crowd had no flies. Now you have killed a man.

There are traces of blood on the blade, so the flies gather. How can this be concealed? The neighbours are speechless. The murderer knocks his head on the ground, confessing all. Hello, I'm Dallas Campbell. Welcome once again to patented my podcast all about the history of invention and innovation and other such things today's episode is the first of a mini series hurrah on the history of forensics the application of science to solving crime. We're going to go from flies on a sickle to bloody fingerprints on a tea garden almanac, from the wavering lines of a polygraph to DNA.

And like any deeply researched podcast, the first thing we did, of course, was go to the Wikipedia page for Forensic Science and read the history section. And it begins by talking about a book. And I love the title of this book. I've actually got it in my hand now. It's beautiful. It's called The Washing Away of Wrongs. The Washing Away of Wrongs. Written in China in 1248 by an official called Song Se during the Song Dynasty. When we try to find out a bit more about Song Se, there's very little out there. So that got us curious. Who was Song Se? What was this book, The Washing Away of Wrongs? And is this really the beginning of forensic sciences as

we know it? My guest today is one of the few people in the West, at least, who can help us answer these questions. Daniel Assen is a historian of China lots of strange books in my life. And this one has just landed on my desk. And it's awesome. I mean, actually, just the title is amazing. The title is The Washing Away of Wrongs. It'd be a good movie title. And just going through the contents. Crikey. Murderous injuries.

Chapter 24. Chapter 23. Suicides by edged weapons. Chapter 45. Deaths from sexual excess. Deaths from overeating or overdrinking. Tiger bites. Yeah. Tiger bites. Yeah, tiger bites, the opening of graves.

Honestly, it's the best contents list of any book I now own. So, okay, tell us about the washing away of wrongs. What do I have in my hand? Well, what you have in your hand is recognized to be the world's first systematic treatise on forensic medicine. And it was written in the 13th century by a Chinese official named Song Ce. scientist or forensic expert in the way that we would think of that. He was a Confucian-trained bureaucrat. And one of the various responsibilities that local officials had in China at the time was to investigate and solve crimes. And they did this in addition to collecting taxes, to famine relief, basically everything else. And so Song Tzu wrote this book for officials who maybe did not have experience in forensics

and sort of in murder cases and in the other cases that they would have to solve. Okay, so just paint a picture for us. So before Song Tzu, what did forensic medicine look like? Or did it not exist? Or was it just completely haphazard? By the time that Song Tzu came around, there was actually an even longer tradition of Chinese interest in forensics. And in some ways, he might better be considered almost a synthesizer, in a sense, of that older tradition. So, for example, in 1975, a grave was discovered in Hubei province in China. And this grave was from an official who lived during the Qin Dynasty, which was in the third century BCE. And one of the things that was found in this grave was a large number of bamboo slips,

which is what people wrote on at the time. And these slips contain a number of models for how to record and handle criminal cases. And something that they include is extremely careful and detailed attention to forensics, things like examining crime scenes, the fact that when trying to determine whether someone was strangled or whether they hanged themselves, an important piece of evidence is whether the rope mark crosses at the back of the person's neck, things like that. In fact, the officials who wrote these slips actually even talked about looking for things like footprints at a crime scene. And so by the time that you get to Songzi, not only has the Chinese legal system sort of established forensics as a pretty important part of legal procedure, but you also have other forensic, primarily case collections. And so, Sonza kind of wrote this work, The Washing Away of Wrongs, by bringing

together the works that existed at this point in time and also combining it with his own considerable experience. Okay, so it's a bit of both. You say that word synthesizer. So he's an organiser, I suppose, of sort of disparate history of forensics that had gone before that was perhaps a little bit sporadic in terms of, you know, somebody might have studied rope marks during a suicide. He collects it all into this volume and creates a kind of more of a methodology. Because when you read it, it is almost like a dictionary. There's lots of interesting cases, but it is a kind of dictionary of terrible things. I have to say, I've got really slightly obsessed by this book. You know, I started off reading The Sickle Story, which I mentioned in the introduction,

which is a kind of, you know, sort of some sort, and then it gets darker and weirder and more and more gruesome and more and more detailed. Like, you know, the descriptions of suicide and just all kinds of things are just like, crikey. Well, I think that one way to understand the book is to put yourself in the shoes of an official like Song Tzu. So, you're in charge of administering a county someplace in China, someplace that you're not originally from. China was still a gigantic place back then, so you might not fully understand the local dialect. You were completely dependent on the staff of your local government office. And for officials like Tsong Tse, the people who

staffed the office were not sort of seen as particularly trustworthy. So you receive a report that a dead body is found someplace in your jurisdiction. You understand that because it's such a serious crime, the higher levels of the bureaucracy are going to be placing a tremendous amount of scrutiny on you. You go to the body, the person who actually handles the body is a local staff member called a wu zuo, someone who might be like a local undertaker or something like that. But because of who you are, a member of the kind of Confucian-trained elite, you might not really trust this person. And so, the way that Song Tzu's Washing Away of Wrongs fit into this,

and I think this does get to its almost encyclopedic nature, is that this book helps you to understand what you're looking at, you be able to distinguish, was this person murdered? Did they die from natural causes? Did they commit suicide? And also to critically evaluate what the wu zuo is reporting. And to be able to say, yes, that's true or no, maybe he's trying to cover up something because he was bribed or something like that. So it's like a kind of much more objective look at things. It's a sort of scientific method of 13th century China, I suppose. Everything is very sort of objective rather than just here's what we think. Yeah. Part of why I think that forensics as a field of pre-modern Chinese science is so fascinating is that there is something really empirical about it.

Yes, exactly. But at the same time, the year. It also contains a lot of other stuff that might be considered quite fantastical from a modern viewpoint. Yeah, I've just opened it at random. Here we go. This is quite good. A section on decapitation. When the trunk and the head are in different places. That's excellent. When holding inquests on corpses, where the severed head is in a different place from the body, first compel the relatives to identify the corpse. Carefully measure the placement of the head and body, and then the distance separating them, indicating whether the head is to the right or

the left of the body, and how far it is from the shoulders or the legs. When the body has been dismembered, measure the location of the parts and, in addition, note down their relationship to one another. There's a thoroughness to it, which is, I think, the thing that surprised me. So that's the kind of flavour of the book, and we understand what it's about. Just tell us a little bit about Song Seo, who he was, how he came to write this book. What was his background? Where was he from? So Song Tzu was born in 1186 in Zhenyang, which is located in southern China. His father was kind of a middle-ranking bureaucrat. Early on in Song Tzu's life, he studied with a disciple of Zhu Xi, who was a very, very important Neo-Confucian philosopher in China.

quite impressed with his learning and with his scholarly sort of attainment, right? And at the time, these were extremely important things if one wanted to become an official. Song Tzu ended up getting the highest degree. This put him on a path to having a very successful official career. But just at the point when he was about to take his first official position, his father died, and he wasn't able to take this position. And it was really only about 10 years or so later that he was able to become a low-level official. Over the next couple of decades, he rose through the ranks of the Chinese local administration to the point that he was administering not only counties, but even higher levels. For example, he became the judicial commissioner of Hunan, so an extremely important position that really sort of put him in a place where he could understand what local judicial practices looked like. And so throughout this whole process, he really does gain a tremendous amount of practical experience in solving crimes. You know, I think that one also gets the sense from just kind of reading the book

that he just had just a very curious and searching intellect, which also really, really drove him to write this book as well. Yeah, that's what I picked up as well. You can really sense that. It's funny when I was reading it and getting more and more absorbed into all these stories, I kind of thought, oh my God, this would be the best TV series ever. And then I realised the Chinese have made it into a really long-running TV series. And I was like, multiple TV series. Okay, multiple TV series. But here's the thing, I'd never heard of Song Se, and I bet most of the listeners of this haven't heard of Song Sese. So first of all, is he kind of remembered as a great intellectual, scientific

figure in China? Because he's certainly, I think it's fair to say, certainly not kind of thought of particularly in the West. So where does he stand in Chinese culture? Yeah. So Song Tse is a very famous historical figure in China today. Right. a very famous historical figure in China today. He was the subject of at least two television series. He's been the focus of various historical novels. Song Tse is an extremely well-known figure. And it's hard to find an account of the history of forensic medicine in China that does not mention him and sort of afford him an extremely important status. But one really interesting thing about Song Tzu is that prior to the 20th century, and specifically the second half of the 20th century, Song Tzu was not a very well-known figure. And he wrote this book, The Washington

Way of Wrongs. Either the work that Song Tzu wrote or later versions of it continued to be used in Chinese forensic practice for many, many centuries after his death, really right up until the middle of the 20th century. But despite the fact that officials relied on it, there really was not a great sense of who Song Tzu himself actually was. And part of it is that there really were not many historical records of him. And in fact, present day understandings of Song T that there really were not many historical records of him. And in fact, present-day understandings of Song Tzu, really without exception, rely on a relatively short text, which was in Epitaph, which was written by one of his contemporaries. contemporaries. And this text is really the main source about Song Tzu's biography and sort of who his father was and sort of what his upbringing was. And so he's a very, very fascinating figure, but his fame is really a pretty recent phenomenon.

We'll be back after this short break. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes,

who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. it's interesting i wonder outside of china i mean i'm just trying to think if we can sort of say this is the kind of birth of forensics or a sort of systematic synthesis of all the sort of forensic that have gone on to china up to now what was going on outside china i mean were, were there people like Song Tse outside China doing similar things? I mean, what was going on in Europe? What was going on in the Middle East? Where was forensics elsewhere? What was the sort of state of play?

Yeah, so it really is not until a couple of centuries later that one finds similar kinds of that one finds similar kinds of broad overviews, let's say, of the state of forensic medical knowledge. And the first places that these are written is they're written in continental Europe. And this happens in the last couple of years of the 1500s with the work of an Italian physician, Fortunato Fidele. The next major sort of Western treatise on forensic medicine is written a couple of decades after it by another Italian physician named Paolo Zacchia. And these works are somewhat similar to The Washing Way of Wrongs in that they kind of contain a broad overview of all of the different kinds of forensic problems that one might encounter. had a pretty important difference with Song Tzu's text. And it's actually an extremely important difference for understanding sort of how forensics developed in China versus in the West. And that is that both of these authors were physicians, and Song Tzu was not, right? He was an official, right, a government official. And so what this reflects is that really, by this point, especially in continental Europe, you have this basic expectation that physicians should be the experts, should be the ones who are providing the forensic evidence in these kinds of cases. And you simply did not have that same assumption

in China. Well, it's interesting because you can understand in the writing of this book, The Washing Away of Wrongs, the real sort of genius of it is in a way it's less the kind of the medical expertise and more just the systematic collection of stories and the putting together of all these different things, which is kind of what makes it, I suppose, you know, we could say it's the birth of forensic because it's the system that's been created rather than just, you know, being an expert on a particular bit of the physical human anatomy. Yeah, it's really about so much more than what I think we might sort of think of as forensic medical knowledge. It's about sort of how do you carry out an investigation? You know, how do you make sure that a criminal investigation

is isolated from people in a local village who might try to influence it, right? It's sort of how do you sort of establish at least the appearance of propriety and objectivity? One other thing that I think is really important to keep in mind is that, you know, the kinds of forensic examinations that Song Ce and his colleagues carried out did not happen in a morgue or in a sort of forensic laboratory. These examinations were supposed to be carried out in public, in a place where people from the local village could come and see it. And so another important part of what Song Tzu was trying to do, and this does really come through in the book, is do these examinations in a way that would convince people, that would

sort of create a sense of legitimacy for the outcome. It's interesting. My entire knowledge of forensics stems from watching CSI Miami in the early noughties. The other interesting thing about this, as opposed to, I guess, forensic science in Europe, there's no tiger bites in Europe or anything like that. This is one of my favourites, chapter 37, being prodded to death. It's great. Whenever someone has been prodded with a hard object until he dies in the back of the ribs, there will be purplish red swollen marks as if from the rash of a disease. These will be three or four inches in size. The skin will not be broken. By hand, feel whether injuries have been done to the muscle or bone. I tell you,

when I do my Netflix series called The Washing Away of Wrongs, I'm totally doing an episode of being prodded to death, just because it's really good. And tigers, obviously. So the chapter on Death by Tiger Bites is actually one of my favorite chapters. I guess you could say, even though it's just like the rest of the book, it is such a morbid subject. But one interesting thing, and I think that this chapter kind of shows how Song Tzu put this book together, is he says in that chapter, these are the different forensic signs to look for in such cases. But some people say that at the start of the month, tigers will attack a person by biting their head. In the middle of the month, tigers attack a person by biting their stomach. At the end of the month, tigers attack a person by biting their legs. And this is exactly how cats will bite rats. And this is exactly how cats will bite rats. And so you can kind of almost imagine Song Tzu sort of taking this just huge world of anecdotes and sort of experience and cases and synthesizing it, sort of putting it all together in a way that would be most helpful for an official who might actually have to determine if someone in their area had been killed by a tiger. Or been prodded to death.

It's a tiger or prodding. Could be either. Actually, just looking at the Wikipedia article on my screen, do you think, is Wikipedia right that the book is the starting point or at least the earliest real example of forensic science? Obviously, as you said, there was sporadic bamboo chits found in third century China in the Qin dynasty. Is this the Bible, if you like, the kind of ground zero of forensics? I hope so. I'm hoping you're going to say yes, because it's such a marvelous text. It's going in my favorite book section, of which I've got some really weird books, but this is certainly it up there.

It is. It's a great text. You know, it contains a lot of things that are recognizable today. recognizable today. And I think that if someone was so inclined to find the birth of modern forensic medicine in this text, they probably could. So, you know, for example, this text includes mention of using insects as a way of sort of understanding time of death. Yes. And flies on sickles. As a way of sort of understanding time of death. Yes. Right? And flies on sickles.

Or flies on sickles. Or, you know, it contains passages which kind of look like modern understandings of lividity. So the sickle case, which has become famous as described with the flies landing on the sickle, therefore pointing out the murderer, making the murderer confess. Just tell us the significance of that story. So in a sense, we can sort of see this as an early example of forensic entomology. I mean, I guess, right, using knowledge of insects as a way of sort of solving a crime. But it's actually about more than that. You know, it's sort of about how the official combines the, you know, forensic aspects of the investigation with sort of a basic understanding of psychology, almost, of sort, which is that once everybody saw that the flies were attracted to this one sickle in particular, the official then turned around and used that fact

to convince that one person to confess. And again, this speaks to the importance of confession in the Chinese legal system. That was another very important piece of evidence in these cases. But it also gets to the public nature of these forensic examinations. The official understood that given this sort of, you know, seemingly authoritative evidence of the flies collecting on this one sickle in particular, evidence of the flies collecting on this one sickle in particular, he could pressure the killer to confess, standing in front of all the other people in the village. And the killer ultimately did confess, and the case was closed. It's a great parable. It's a great morality tale. That kind of story has everything in it, exactly as you say. It's science, it's morality, it's psychology, it's law, it's all the things.

so utterly fascinated by it, sort of by the strangeness of it, by the sort of pseudo-scientific kind of nature of it. And so, if one is looking for the historical origins of forensic medicine, one can find things in the text. And I think that part of why Song Tzu himself has become such an important figure in China is that he has really been taken as the basis for a very kind of nationalistic, almost narrative, right, of being able to say, well, China invented forensic medicine first. At the same time, I think it's also important to recognize that for every technique that you can find in the text that resembles a modern forensic technique or forensic practice, there's also things that are really very questionable. For example, an important technique in the text is that if officials were confronted with a case of suspected poisoning, fatal poisoning,

they were instructed to take a silver needle or a silver hairpin, insert it into the dead body. silver hairpin, insert it into the dead body. If when they took it out, it had a discoloration that could not be scrubbed away, it could be taken as evidence that the person had been poisoned. And when the first Western-trained modern forensic scientists in China in the 1920s and 30s were trying to extend their own authority in China over forensic cases, one thing that they did was they subjected these kinds of older forensic practices to laboratory tests. And one of the things that they found is, for example, in this silver needle test, is that the needles were actually tarnishing, right? In other words, it didn't really matter if the person had been poisoned or not. If the needle comes into contact with the sulfur byproducts of sort of human decomposition, then again, regardless of whether poison had been used the needle will change color and so from the perspective of modern forensic science the book really does contain things that are quite questionable yeah so we could maybe say perhaps it's the first word on forensic science but it's certainly not the last can't say it better than that. I think that's it. You know what I love about doing this podcast is that the sheer variety of subjects I cover,

and some subjects you might know a little bit about, or you might have heard a name, but I knew nothing of Song Sir, and I knew nothing of this book. And I've been absolutely gripped by it. I mean, there is something, which is why I guess programs like CSI are so popular. We love programs about forensics because we love to know who done it and why done it and all those sorts of things. But this has just given it a whole new context that I was completely unaware of. And it's brought me much joy, especially the bit about death due to sexual excess. Yes, that's the way that officials are supposed to tell is if the erection has subsided, then it's probably something else.

If it has not subsided, then that's evidence of death by sexual excess. So again, it's just extremely practical instructions. Yeah. Yeah. It's made me happy because I'm puerile. Dan, listen, thank you very much for coming on to the show. It's been such a pleasure and it's been great to sort of give our listeners an introduction to Song Sir. And hey, go get yourself a coffee of The Washing Away of Wrongs. It's available on Amazon and other booksellers, I think. Dan, thank you very much. Thank you. Okay, that's it. Thank you very much for for listening i hope you enjoyed episode one of our triptych

on forensics we're going to be continuing this mini-series with an episode on the birth of fingerprinting but before that we've got an episode on perfume specifically the birth, the invention of the world's most famous perfume, Chanel No. 5. As always, please leave a rating, leave a review, a nice review, and tell all your friends to listen too, and I'll see you next time. you