REVIEW: 18 Tiny Deaths: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Invented Modern Forensics (nonfiction book) by Bruce Goldfarb

18 Tiny Deaths is both a biography of Frances Glessner Lee and a look at the early history of forensic science in the United States. I bought my copy new.

Review:

I first learned about Frances Glessner Lee and her Nutshell Studies through a miniatures group I was following. Unfortunately, the post didn't include a lot of information, but it did leave me fascinated with the idea of the Nutshell Studies, tiny meticulously constructed crime scenes. When I stumbled across this book, I knew I wanted to read it.

Less of this was focused directly on Lee and her Nutshell Studies than I expected, although it was mostly still an interesting read. 

The slowest part, for me, was the portion focused on Lee's parents and childhood - there were really only a handful of details here and there that were important for understanding later moments. I became much more interested when Goldfarb shifted to the state of death investigation in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century. A large chunk of the book was necessarily devoted to the career of George Burgess Magrath, Suffolk County Medical Examiner and a deeply influential person in Lee's life. It was Magrath who impressed upon Lee the value of the medical examiner system over the coroner system, leading her to spend years and a great deal of money trying to establish a strong forensic science department at Harvard. 

If all that was needed was money, effort, and sheer force of will, Lee probably could have accomplished anything. As it was, even she struggled to get buy-in for a lot of her plans (Harvard pretty much only humored her for her money and the possibility of getting more of it after she died), although she ended up doing a lot for homicide training for United States police officers. 

It took about half the book before the Nutshell Studies were finally mentioned in any real detail. Although I was a bit disappointed that there were no pictures (I need to see about getting a copy of Corinne May Botz's The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death), I enjoyed learning more about the work and planning that went into the miniature scenes. I hadn't realized quite how much detail they included.