Forensic Quotes

“The discovery that detonated Cleveland is one of Britain’s great contributions to awareness of child abuse. In 1986 and 1987 the Leeds paediatricians Dr Jane Wynne and Dr Christopher Hobbs reported in the Lancet that they were seeing more children who were being buggered than battered. About 300 cases were corroborated. The children were young – two-thirds were pre-school children – and anal abuse was more common than vaginal penetration. They also noted that ‘boys and girls seem to be at similar risk’. Almost half of the children who suffered anal abuse also showed a sign written up in the forensic textbooks as ‘anal dilation’, an anus opening when it was supposed to stay shut; opening and expecting entry. What the paediatricians were observing was not an acute sign, the effect of a single intrusion – a spasm or seizure – but a sign that was telling a story about everyday life; the anatomy of adaption. Anal dilation seemed to describe the architecture of abuse: it allowed the body to receive an incoming object, regularly.”
― Beatrix Campbell, Stolen Voices: The People and Politics Behind the Campaign to Discredit Childhood Testimony

“I’ve been twenty one years as a nurse, five years as a forensic nurse.” Bunmi was seducing Asa into accepting a fact that her interrogations were professional and infallible “I’ve come across countless MOs of various rapists. Many a rapist seems to be cautious of AIDS so they coerce their victims into stripping and only for them to penetrate in between the thighs.”
― S. A. David, Breasts of Evidence

“The stimulus to thought lies in the detail provided.”
― Dennis Howitt, Introduction to Forensic & Criminal Psychology

“I became delusional at the largest solar farm in the USA. I could smell smoke that no one else could and I thought the high voltage 24,000V equipment was on fire. Afterwards, I had an insatiable thirst all evening. It cleared up with sleep. My forensic examination of the incident indicated it was either a biologically toxic electromagnetic field exposure, or someone had spiked my food and/or drink with a drug. There was illegal activity occurring at the solar farm that I was investigating and reporting to the company management team.”
― Steven Magee

“His son, Joseph, an organic chemist, had once announced that he'd decided early on against forensic toxicology: he could never have so many lives and deaths on his conscience. His father understood him. Because sometimes the dead did walk in Alexander Gettler's sleep, sometimes they rattled in the black chair of Sing Sing, and always, as he admitted in that last vulnerable interview, 'I keep asking myself, have I done everything right?”
― Deborah Blum, The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York

“Bone is a miniature universe in which birth and death occur constantly. The basic unit is the osteon, composed of concentric loops of bone, a canal, osteocytes, vessels, and nerves. In living tissue osteons are born, nourished, and eventually replaced by newer units.

When magnified and viewed under polarized light, osteons resemble tiny volcanoes, ovoid cones with central craters and flanks that spread out to flatlands of primary bone. The number of volcanoes increases with age, as does the count of abandoned calderas. By determining the density of these features one arrives at an age estimate.”
― Kathy Reichs, Fatal Voyage