Science for the People

#564 Frances Glessner Lee and the Nutshell Studies

06.21.2020 - By Rachelle Saunders, Bethany Brookshire, and Carolyn WilkePlay

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Around the end of the second world war, a set of tiny miniature dioramas depicting a variety of deaths were created to help teach investigators how to approach a crime scene. You may have heard of the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death and their maker, Frances Glessner Lee... but you probably didn't know how Lee became interested in forensics, that she used her inheritance to establish a department of legal medicine at Harvard Medical School to accellerate the field, or that she used her political savvy to push the adoption of the medical examiner system in more jurisdictions. We talk...

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