Forensics

Forensics, which is a branch of science, is the scientific way of collecting and testing information, regarding the past that is then exploited in a court of law. The term forensic originates from forensis, the Latin word, which means "of or prior to the forum." In the Roman era, an accused criminal is meant for submitting the case before a collection of the general public in the forum. Both the individual who is accused of the offense and the accuser would deliver speeches, supporting their sides of the anecdote. The case would be determined, supporting the person with the best argument and delivery. This basis is the resource of the two current usages of the term forensic as a form of authorized evidence and as a sort of public presentation. In recent use, the word forensics in the position of forensic science can be measured correct, as the word forensic is successfully a meaning for legal or associated with the courts. However, the forensic science is currently so closely connected with the scientific field that several dictionaries comprise the sense that equates the term forensics with forensic science.

Sources of forensic science

European medical practitioners in university and army settings started collecting information on the reason and the way of death during the 16th century. Ambroise Paré, an army surgeon from France, thoroughly studied the consequences of brutal death on internal organs. Paolo Zacchia and Fortunato Fidelis, the two surgeons from Italy, laid the base of the current pathology by learning changes that emerged in the structure of the human body due to sickness. During the last part of the 18th century, scripts, such as “The Complete System of Police Medicine”, written by Johann Peter Frank, the German medical expert and “A Treatise on Forensic Medicine and Public Health”, written by Francois Immanuele Fodéré, the French physician on these topics started to emerge.

During the 18th century, as the balanced values of the Enlightenment period increasingly infused the society, criminal examination turned out to be a more proof-based, rational method, the exploit of torture to compel confessions was condensed, and faith in witchcraft and other influences of the occult mostly came to an end to influence the decisions of the court.

Antique methods

The antique world lacked consistent forensic practices, which assisted criminals in evading sentence. Criminal inquiries and trials greatly depended on compulsory affirmations and eyewitness testimony. However, antique resources include several accounts of methods that foreshadow ideas in forensic science that were urbanized centuries later.

The credit of the initial written account of using entomology and medicine to resolve illicit cases goes to the Chinese book, Xi Yuan Lu, written during the Song Dynasty in 1248 by Song Ci, a Chinese forensic medical specialist. In one among the accounts, the case of an individual, killed with a sickle was resolved by an examiner who instructed everybody to carry his sickle to one site.

Flies, which are attracted by the odor of blood, finally collected on a solitary sickle and consequently, the murderer was confessed. The book as well, offered suggestions on the way to differentiate between strangulation and a drowning, together with other proof from investigating the corpses on making a decision, whether a death was caused through suicide, murder, or through an accident.

Later, during the 20th century a number of British pathologists, such as Mikey Rochman, Sydney Smith, Francis Camps, and Keith Simpson pioneered innovative forensic science techniques.