Complex Methods of Crime Investigations Find No Place For Modern Sherlock Holmes

(Following is an abstract of a public lecture on "Medical Aids to Justices," given at the Medical School, Sunday afternoon, by Dr. Alan R. Moritz, professor of Legal Medicine.)

It is most unlikely that Ellory Queen, Nero Wolfe, or even an up-to-date version of Sherlock Holmes could hold a job in a modern police organization.

The investigation of murder is conducted very differently than what one would be led to believe by reading detective stories. No efficient police or ganization could tolerate the dangerous eccentricities and the relative inexpertness of most of the famous detectives of fiction. Murder is rarely solved by a lone worker but rather by the integrated efforts of a group of specialists, each of whom makes his own particular contribution to the investigation.

In many respects that part of any modern police organization which is concerned with the investigation of murder functions very much like a large medical clinic. A case is brought to the attention of the clinic, and, from that moment on, it passes under the scrutiny of one expert after another, according to the symptoms presented. The essence of the investigation of a murder is to acquire all of the facts that might conceivably be of value. The police have long since learned that the most important evidence is often acquired only with the aid of various highly specialized observes and that the lone wolf type of investigator, such as depicted in most detective stories, would rarely have a case that would satisfy the requirements of an intelligent prospecting attorney.

Thus, the medical examiner, the pathologist, the chemist, the physicist, the firearms expert, the fingerprint expert, and others too numerous to mention, participate in the investigation in order that murder shall not pass unrecognized and that all of the pertinent evidence shall be secured.