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Arabic merchants would take a debtor's fingerprint and attach it to the bill.
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First pathology reports published.
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First recorded instance of physical matching of evidence leading to a murder conviction (John Toms, England). Evidence was a torn edge of newspaper in a pistol that matched newspaper in his pocket.
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German chemist Valentin Ross developed a method of detecting arsenic in a victim's stomach, thus advancing the investigation of poison deaths.
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James Marsh, an English chemist, uses chemical processes to determine arsenic as the cause of death in a murder trial.
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Henry Faulds and William James Herschel publish a paper describing the uniqueness of fingerprints. Francis Galton, a scientist, adapted their findings for the court. Galton's system identified the following patterns: plain arch, tented arch, simple loop, central pocket loop, double loop, lateral pocket loop, plain whorl, and accidental
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23 wound marks, only one mark was fatal
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Juan Vucetich, an Argentinean police officer, is the first to use fingerprints as evidence in a murder investigation. He created a system of fingerprint identification, which he termed dactyloscopy.
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Anthropometry, a system using various measurements of physical features and bones, used throughout the US and Europe. Using the system, a criminal's information could be reduced to a set of numbers.
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Victor Balthazard and Marcelle Lambert publish first study on hair, including microscopic studies from most animals. First legal case ever involving hair also took place following this study.