Medical Detective

Last week the National Association of Coroners met in Philadelphia. Officials suggested to their host, Coroner Charles H. Hersch, that a cocktail party be held in the city morgue. Snapped Mr. Hersch: "As long as I'm coroner there'll be reverence only for the deceased."

But on the morgue's second floor the coroners found a different kind of entertainment. There is the laboratory of one of the top-flight U. S. medical detectives: testy, sharp-eyed Dr. William Scott Wadsworth. During his 41 years as coroner's physician. Dr. Wadsworth, known to reporters as "Waddie," has examined 10,094 bodies. He has a tremendous assortment of cartridges (1,500 of 40 different makes), 360,000 filing cards on poison (largest collection in the world), razors and knives, plaster casts of teeth, hanks of hair, chunks of skull perforated with bullet holes. In his office are a homemade rifle range, charts spattered with red ink to mark the splash of blood, hundreds of machines to weigh, measure, test and sight, all made by Waddie out of odds & ends from the five-and-ten.

To out-of-town coroners last week, Dr. Wadsworth sounded off on "pseudo-experts, damned-old-fool judges, tissue-grabbing pathologists, psychopath lawyers." He gave a lecture on ballistics which mocked many a detective-story cliche. Salient points: >

> Most persons think of ballistics as a simple microscopic comparison of a few bullet irregularities with grooves in gun barrels. To Dr. Wadsworth this is "ridiculous." Any two scratches, he claims, can be "matched." He showed his colleagues a case full of slugs of a thousand different shapes, flattened, split, crumpled. Said he: "No two bullets fired from the same gun are ever exactly alike."

> Important medical detective work is the study of clothing and bits of matter that cling to hot bullets. A shot in the liver, for example, goes through coat, vest, trousers, shirt, underclothes and skin ("which is nothing but rawhide"), forming a cone of matter with the bullet at the apex. "The direction, penetration and size of the cone are important in determining the distance and direction of the shot."

> In one of Waddie's most famous puzzling cases a man had been killed during a shooting fray, but the nearest bullet was found on the floor four feet from the corpse. Some unknown missile had penetrated the breastbone and windpipe, grazed the esophagus, pierced the large artery (aorta) leading from the heart. Result: "massive, bursting hemorrhages of every blood vessel [in the chest], a great gush of blood from the mouth." Waddie was sure the bullet had done the damage, but attorneys for the suspect in the case insisted that the victim must have been stabbed with a dagger by someone else. Waddie studied the scene, then rigged up a chain of rubber tubes of graduated widths, to simulate blood vessels. He dropped a bullet in the largest tube, attached the mouth of the tube to a spigot, turned on the water. The bullet pushed along through the smaller tubes; when the water was turned on full force, the bullet spurted out across the room. A viscous substance like blood, said Waddie, can push a bullet out with greater force than water.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.