Murder and the Making of English CSI, by Ian Burney and Neil Pemberton

This book by Ian Burney and Neil Pemberton identifies and explains the origins of modern crime scene investigation (CSI) as a medico-scientific system with networks of institutions, concepts and practices focused on the crime scene as a distinct space ‘bounded conceptually and operationally by explicit rules of practice’ (p. 3). Using homicide as a lens through which to examine this process, the book sets up an important distinction between two paradigms of crime investigation and the sites in which they are performed. Forensic pathology, common since the nineteenth century, studies bodies in a mortuary. But forensic science has a more recent pedigree and a wider sphere of operation: it is concerned with the things found on or around a body (known as trace evidence) and practised at two locations, the crime scene and the laboratory, usually by teams rather than individuals. But forensic pathology and science interact at these three sites and in a fourth, the courtroom; there is thus no simple story of substitution of one for the other. Instead, by the 1950s, conceptual, technical and institutional changes had resulted in the integration of the lone inter-war pathologist into the emergent procedures of CSI.

Archaeology · Crime scene · Criminology · Epistemology · Forensic science · Genealogy · Homicide · Linguistics · Poison control · Political science · Simple (philosophy) · Sociology · Space (punctuation) · Suicide prevention · TRACE (psycholinguistics) · Computer Science · Historical and Scientific Studies · History · History of Science and Medicine · Law · Medicine · Philosophy