Crime Doctor

In the little town of New London, Mo., 48 years ago, a man and his wife were injured in a buggy accident by the side of a stream. The man survived, but the woman was found dead, face down in the water. When a local doctor, after a cursory examination, suggested that the woman had been dosed with morphine, her husband was indicted for murder.

Then, as now, violent and mysterious deaths in most parts of the U.S. were the concern of an elected coroner who often had no knowledge of medicine. With no official machinery available to prove his client's innocence, the New London defense attorney went to the only man he knew who could help him: Dr. R. B.H. (for Rutherford Berchard Hayes) Gradwohl, a young St. Louis physician who picked up an occasional extra fee performing autopsies for the city coroner. Would Dr. Gradwohl, asked the lawyer, be interested in performing a private autopsy to save an innocent man's life? Dr. Gradwohl, who had spent five postgraduate years in Germany, Austria, England and France studying forensic (i.e., legal) medicine, said he would.

Is It Murder? One midnight soon afterward, the doctor, the lawyer and eight witnesses went into a snow-covered country cemetery to dig up the woman's body. The young doctor's autopsy, performed in a nearby shed, proved to the court that death had been caused by drowning and not by poison. The lawyer's client was acquitted. "All at once," says Dr. Gradwohl now, "it struck me with great force how much could depend on the proper scientific inquiry into the cause of sudden death." Last week, Dr. Gradwohl made the same point in Chicago in a speech marking the close of his first term as president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. The academy, like the St. Louis Police Laboratory, which he now heads, was founded as the result of Dr. Gradwohl's early determination to make responsible Americans conscious of the importance of forensic medicine. Few whodunit fans would tolerate a corpse unless the concentration of poison, time of death, incident angle of bullet, knife or blunt instrument and other relevant factors had been measured and determined by precise scientific methods. Yet in real life, there is seldom such thoroughness.

41 out of 48. The FBI and several large cities besides St. Louis now have crime laboratories which do the job. By & large, however, the U.S. is still well behind Europe in the scientific examination of sudden death. Some 300,000 Americans will die this year from clinically obscure causes, said Dr. Gradwohl last week. Yet in 41 of the 48 states where the deaths will occur, the responsible investigating officer is not required to be a physician.

Dr. Gradwohl left this week for New York to consult with the A.M.A. on the establishment of a forensic medicine board of its own to help formulate standards in the neglected science.

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