18 Tiny Deaths by Bruce Goldfarb

Author:Bruce Goldfarb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2019-02-04T16:00:00+00:00

Moritz’s fellowship tour included visits to England, Denmark, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, and Egypt. He gained firsthand legal medicine experience in Edinburgh, Glasgow, London, Paris, Marseille, Berlin, Hamburg, Bonn, Munich, Vienna, and Graz. Moritz was pleasantly surprised by what he learned at the Federal Institute in Cairo, Egypt. He expected to find poorly trained staff working under primitive conditions. Instead, he found a well-equipped centralized facility that conducted all the postmortem examinations in the kingdom. The facility was kept busy; Cairo was experiencing up to twenty-five homicides a day at the time.

“Poisoning is very common in Egypt,” he wrote in a report of his fellowship for the Rockefeller Foundation. “It is doubtful that there is any place in the world where as much toxicology is done as in this Institute.”31

Moritz summarized his experience at Cairo’s Federal Institute in a letter to Sidney Burwell. “I had a very interesting time in Egypt, and saw more things of the ‘believe it-or-not’ variety than I thought possible,” he said. “Crime is a flourishing industry along the Nile, and they have many original ideas as to its performance. With the exception of Denmark I know of no place where all branches of medico-legal activity are so highly organized and centralized in a federal department. The medico-legal experts are well trained, and their work compares favourably with the best I have seen.”32

Overall, from his survey of systems across Europe and Africa, Moritz discovered a wide range in quality of medicolegal practice. Some cities were quite good. Most systems were not.

“My experience to date, particularly that part of it acquired on the continent, is of value, not because of the good things that I have learned, but rather because I have learned of so many practices to be avoided,” Moritz wrote to Wolbach. “I feel that I have made a long journey and spent an inordinate amount of time to study organizations and methods that are fundamentally bad.”33

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