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Julius Caesar is assassinated. Following this event, a physician performed an autopsy, and determined that of the 23 wounds found on the body, only one was fatal.
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Germanic and Slavic societies made law that medical experts must be the ones to determine cause of death in crimes.
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Fingerprints first used to determine identity. Arabic merchants would take a debtor's fingerprint and attach it to the bill.
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First forensic science manual published by the Chinese. This was the first known record of medical knowledge being used to solve criminal cases.
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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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Clothing and shoes of a farm laborer were examined and found to match evidence of a nearby murder scene, where a young woman was found drowned in a shallow pool.
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San Francisco uses photography for criminal identification, the first city in the US to do so.
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First school of forensic science founded by Rodolphe Archibald Reiss, in Switzerland.
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FBI established the National Crime Information Center, a computerized national filing system on wanted people, stolen vehicles, weapons, etc.
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FBI establishes the integrated automated fingerprint identification system, cutting down fingerprint inquiry response from two weeks to two hours.
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Britain's Forensic Science Service develops online footwear coding and detection system. This helps police to identify footwear marks quickly.
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Michigan state university develops software that automatically matches hand-drawn facial sketches to mug shots stored in databases.
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Japanese researchers develop a dental x-ray matching system. This system can automatically match dental x-rays in a database, and makes a positive match in less than 4 seconds.