Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Tiny clues




Frances Glessner Lee




Frances Glessner Lee was born in 1878, the youngest child of a prominent Chicago family.  Like other wealthy girls of that time, she had a formal debut, toured Europe and married a proper husband. Her close friendship with her brother's Harvard classmate, Dr. George Burgess McGrath, changed the trajectory of her domestic, society life. He became a professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School, and chief medical examiner of Suffolk County, and piqued her interest in forensic science.

In the 1930's Frances Glessner Lee constructed a series of dioramas that illustrated her belief that crimes could be solved by scientific analysis of visual and material evidence. Her eighteen miniature scenes, The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, were used in lectures on crime scene investigation and as training material for police officers.



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