Word: thorwald
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...CENTURY OF THE DETECTIVE by Jurgen Thorwald. 500 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World...
...solved by the comparison of fingerprints, and that solution constituted a major breakthrough for the infant science of criminology. In less than a century, that science has developed from rule of thumb into an enormously intricate medico-legal discipline, and the story of its development, as described by Jurgen Thorwald (The Century of the Surgeon) with impressive literary and scientific competence, is a tale of blood and bloodhounds, wills and pills, pathologists and psychopaths. For sheer suspense and wallowing aceldama, it is worth a hundred whodunits...
...Author Thorwald considers his sub ject in four tidy divisions. ∙ CRIMINAL IDENTIFICATION, the funda mental problem of detection, began to be a science in 1879, when Alphonse Bertillon introduced a system of anthropometry involving some eleven bodily measurements of each criminal. Fingerprinting, long a form of signature in the Orient, was introduced to Europe by Britain's William Herschel, and it had to compete with anthropometry until 1904, when two prisoners at Fort Leavenworth were found to have identi cal features, practically identical anthropometric measurements and identical names: Will West. Only their fingerprints were different, and within seven...