Search results for "Judicial Identification"

El esqueleto de la viuda Houet: Frenología y medicina legal en Francia durante la década de 1830

2015

This paper deals with the judicial identification of corpses in nineteenth-century France. The case of the widow Houet (1833) is particularly interesting for this purpose because two contrasting techniques of identification were employed: forensic medicine and phrenology. Mateu Orfila, dean of the Paris Faculty of Medicine, had recently developed a quantitative method for the identification of corpses, which was later regarded as a landmark in nineteenth-century forensic medicine. Pierre-Marie Dumoutier, an outstanding member of the Society of Phrenology, analysed the skull and offered surprising data about the personality of the widow. The episode stirred up controversies on the evidentiar…