In the nineteenth century, medico-legal evidence enjoyed enormous epistemological authority in criminal trials. Specifically, the trust that judges placed in the scientific evidence presented by medical professionals inspired stood in sharp contrast to the weary suspicion with which they regarded police investigations. The talk puts pressure on this neat distinction that was bolstered by colonial statutes. Instead, it shows how the distinction between the evidence of police inquiries and medical examinations, which colonial judges and magistrates took for granted and upheld in courtrooms, obscured a hidden history of material work in which medical evidence from bodies of victims were extracted through a sustained, if fraught, collaboration between doctors, surgeons and police inspectors. As scholars of modern India have shown, the role of policemen as mediators in criminal forensic practice continues to be a matter of heated controversy in the operations of criminal justice in India down to this day. This event underscores the importance of examining this relationship in historical perspective to understand why a presumed contrast between police investigations and forensic practice continues to carry such moral weight in modern institutions of criminal justice.

Event Speaker

Uponita Mukherjee, Assistant Professor of History at Fordham University

Event Information

Free and open to the public; registration required. Please email centerhistoryethics@cumc.columbia.edu and scienceandsociety@columbia.edu with any questions.

Hosted by the Center for Science and Society and Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health& at Columbia University.