On soul and conscience: the medical expert and crime. 150 years of forensic medicine in Glasgow

M. ANNE CROWTHER and BRENDA WHITE, On soul and conscience: the medical expert and crime. 150 years offorensic medicine in Glasgow, Aberdeen University Press, 1988, 8vo, pp. xviii, 169, illus., £14.50, £7.95, (paperback). Though Edinburgh was, albeit most reluctantly, the first Scottish (or, indeed, British) university to recognize medical jurisprudence as an academic subject, with the establishment of a Regius Professorship in 1806, the Department of Forensic Medicine in the University of Glasgow is effectively the oldest-and largest-such department still in existence in Britain today. Despite its inauspicious beginnings as a plaything of university and national politics, and despite the mediocrity of its first incumbents, under the two Professors John Glaister, father and son, who between them held the Glasgow Chair from 1898 to 1962, the Glasgow Department came not only to dominate criminal medico-legal practice in Scotland but also to serve as Scotland's principal national and international centre for post-graduate training and research in forensic medicine. The timely appearance of On soul and conscience on the 150th anniversary of the creation of the Glasgow Regius Professorship highlights the role of the Glaisters and their successors in building up the Glasgow Department into one of the leading centres of modern British forensic medicine, and thus helps to offset the marked London-Edinburgh bias apparent in most existing historical accounts of the development of English (and Scottish) forensic medicine. It was in Glasgow, rather than in Edinburgh or London, that forensic medicine first became institutionalized in Britain as a modern medical specialty, while many of the non-medical methods of scientific crime investigation and toxicological analysis which in England have long been the almost exclusive preserve of the Home Office Forensic Science Service were first developed and practised in Scotland by the Glasgow Department of Forensic Medicine. In accordance with its primarily departmental orientation and affiliation, the authors have chosen to cast their study in a largely chronological and prosopographical mould, tracing the origins and growth of the Department through the lives and work of successive Regius Professors, and general-historical readers may well feel that this has the effect of unduly narrowing the historical frame of reference in which the Department's work is situated. And whereas the earlier sections abound in fascinating insights into (for example) nineteenthcentury Scottish university medical politics, and the close connections between forensic medicine, public health administration, and hygiene in nineteenthand early twentieth-century Scotland, in the later chapters these more general contextual aspects tend increasingly to be crowded out by a mass of purely technical and institutional details of limited interest to non-specialist readers. Nevertheless, On soul and conscience provides an excellent introduction to the history of forensic medicine not only in Glasgow but in Scotland as a whole, while it also serves to highlight the possibility of using local or area studies of medico-legal practice to transcend some of the limitations of more purely institutional or disciplinary histories of forensic medicine.