Poisoning crimes and forensic toxicology since the eighteenth century

The easy availability of deadly poisons in nineteenth-century Britain, western Europe and the United States led to widespread public anxiety about the prevalence of murder by poison, resulting in what might be termed a ‘poison panic’. The fear was fed by well-publicised reports of trials and executions which, though not especially numerous, seemed indicative of the dangerous incidence of a unique type of homicide, one that was particularly difficult to prevent or detect. As a result, poisoning crimes stimulated the development of the earliest medico-legal specialism, forensic toxicology, and consequently the careers of some of the best-known expert witnesses of the Victorian era, including Mathieu Orfila, Alfred Swaine Taylor, Thomas Stevenson and Theodore Wormley. This article traces the history of poisoning crimes and the related medico-scientific discipline of forensic toxicology, using textbooks, key trials and crime statistics to examine and evaluate their contribution to the historical development of forensic expertise and practice

Medicine and justice: Medico-legal practice in England and Wales, 1700-1914. Introduction

This monograph makes a major new contribution to the historiography of criminal justice in England and Wales, by focusing on the intersection of the history of law and crime with medical history. It does this through the lens provided by one group of historical actors, medical professionals who gave evidence in criminal proceedings. They are the means of illuminating the developing methods and personnel associated with investigating and prosecuting crime in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when two linchpins of modern society, centralised policing and the adversarial criminal trial, emerged and matured. The book is devoted to two central questions: what did medical practitioners contribute to the investigation of serious violent crime in the period 1700 to 1914, and what impact did this have on the process of criminal justice? Drawing on the details of 2,600 cases of infanticide, murder and rape which occurred in central England, Wales and London, the book offers a comparative long-term perspective on medico-legal practice — that is, what doctors actually did when they were faced with a body that had become the object of a criminal investigation. It argues that medico-legal work developed in tandem with and was shaped by the needs of two evolving processes: pre-trial investigative procedures dominated successively by coroners, magistrates and the police; and criminal trials in which lawyers moved from the periphery to the centre of courtroom proceedings. In bringing together for the first time four groups of specialists — doctors, coroners, lawyers and police officers — this study offers a new interpretation of the processes that shaped the modern criminal justice system

The construction of forensic knowledge in Victorian Yorkshire: Dr Thomas Scattergood and his casebooks, 1856-1897

Forensic medicine became a recognised discipline in the nineteenth century, growing alongside the medical and legal professions. Very few medical men taught or studied forensic medicine at the start of the nineteenth century but by the end it was an integral part of medical education, and forensic science had begun to emerge as a separate discipline. This chapter focuses on the forensic expertise and practice of Leeds–based doctor, toxicologist, and lecturer Thomas Scattergood (1826–1900). Alongside his teaching career, he researched forensic techniques and acted as a consultant and medico-legal witness in criminal cases across the north of England. Scattergood’s personal casebooks will be used as the starting point to explore the kinds of forensic techniques available in the second half of the nineteenth century. These volumes contain Scattergood’s compiled notes on a wide range of potential forensic clues, including blood splatters, the effects of fire, water, lightning and earth on the body, knife or blade injuries, strangulation, chemical decomposition of bodies and a variety of poisonings. Case studies from his notebooks illustrate the scientific developments made in forensic medicine in this period. The casebooks also provide insights into the range of individuals involved in the business of medico-legal practice. Beyond his Yorkshire College–based laboratory Scattergood engaged with coroners, policemen, lawyers, judges, postmen, farmers and other doctors, among others, and he therefore lies at the heart of our work to unravel the networks involved in Northern forensic investigations

Deterministic Parallel Global Parameter Estimation for a Model of the Budding Yeast Cell Cycle

Two parallel deterministic direct search algorithms are used to find improved parameters for a system of differential equations designed to simulate the cell cycle of budding yeast. Comparing the model simulation results to experimental data is difficult because most of the experimental data is qualitative rather than quantitative. An algorithm to convert simulation results to mutant phenotypes is presented. Vectors of parameters defining the differential equation model are rated by a discontinuous objective function. Parallel results on a 2200 processor supercomputer are presented for a global optimization algorithm, DIRECT, a local optimization algorithm, MADS, and a hybrid of the two

Structural insights into the mechanism of negative regulation of single-box high mobility group proteins by the acidic tail domain.

The Drosophila and plant (maize) functional counterparts of the abundant vertebrate chromosomal protein HMGB1 (HMG-D and ZmHMGB1, respectively) differ from HMGB1 in having a single HMG box, as well as basic and acidic flanking regions that vary greatly in length and charge. We show that despite these variations, HMG-D and ZmHMGB1 exist in dynamic assemblies in which the basic HMG boxes and linkers associate with their intrinsically disordered, predominantly acidic, tails in a manner analogous to that observed previously for HMGB1. The DNA-binding surfaces of the boxes and linkers are occluded in "auto-inhibited" forms of the protein, which are in equilibrium with transient, more open structures that are "binding-competent." This strongly suggests that the mechanism of auto-inhibition may be a general one. HMG-D and ZmHMGB1 differ from HMGB1 in having phosphorylation sites in their tail and linker regions. In both cases, in vitro phosphorylation of serine residues within the acidic tail stabilizes the assembled form, suggesting another level of regulation for interaction with DNA, chromatin, and other proteins that is not possible for the uniformly acidic (hence unphosphorylatable) tail of HMGB1.This work was supported by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council through the award of Grant BB/D002257/1 (to J. O. T.) and a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) (to K. D. G.).This is the final published version. It first appeared at http://www.jbc.org/content/289/43/29817.long