Details of the dioramas may be found here as well as a detailed biography.
MURDER IS HER HOBBY
A gentle 77-year-old. dowager is New England’s top criminologist and the creator of Harvard’s famous “nutshell studies” of unexplained death.
By John N. Makris
MRS. FRANCES LEE, who is a captain in the New Hampshire State Police and the only woman in the United States to hold such an active rank, has become, as a result of an unusual and non-paying hobby, a pioneer in the application of medical science to crime detection.
Her amazing series of model crime settings, which Mrs. Lee builds with the aid of a carpenter at her Littleton, N. H., estate, are housed in a special room at Harvard University’s Department of Legal Medicine, which she founded and endowed and which is the first and only one of its kind in North America.
Resembling shadow boxes, the models are built into the walls and are illuminated under glass in the darkened room. Above each model is furnished such general information as the “investiga- tor” would probably obtain before determining the nature of death. Read the rest of this entry »
And improved 12 gauge tear gas rounds are still in use today while the rotary launchers are still sold now in 37mm.
Rapid-Fire Gun Spreads Gas over Riot Area
Machine guns that can flood a wide area with tear gas or nauseating gas in a few seconds are the latest recruits to law-enforcement staffs. Forty or fifty feet from the muzzle, the stream of powder has become a cloud of blinding or sickening gas, and the rapid-fire gun can distribute this along a broad front, effectively putting down a riot. The powder shell follows a formula developed by a former army officer. Read the rest of this entry »
“You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.”
Reading Modern Mechanix, you’d either think that the word “impossible” meant “unlikely” or that people were way better at designing things than they really were.
French Prison Makes Riots Impossible
A MODEL prison has been built at Fresnes, near Paris, France, where it would be virtually impossible for convicts to plot and execute a riot such as the recent one in the Colorado state penitentiary at Canon City which was the most terrible of several recent uprisings in American prisons.
Read the rest of this entry »
This is pretty terrifying, though I suppose it is just a much cruder form of how we use psychiatric drugs today.
A few things I noticed:
1. obviously being gay is a disorder.
2. they didn’t say if the prisoners were actually given any choice about their operations.
3. what did they do to the kids?
4. This quote
“It points also to the more illuminating truth that if the grandparents, or even the parents, of these men had been given proper medical and surgical treatment for their own glandular abnormalities, their children and their grandchildren would not have offended society…”
sounds like Lamarckism. Though according to Wikipedia that theory seems to be making a comeback.
5. Apparently you can tell a criminal by their face. From the pictures in the article that seems to mean “Foreign Looking”.
Crooks Cured by Surgeons Knife
Here for the first time is the amazing story of how criminals in San Quentin prison, California, are made honest by giving them healthy glands.
By H. H. DUNN
THE surgeon’s knife and the laboratory test tube have entered the campaign against crime. Experimental researches, carried on over a number of years and beginning to show results in control and reform institutions this summer, indicate that criminal tendencies may be eradicated, development of the criminal averted, and the established criminal restored to normal by medical and surgical treatment. Read the rest of this entry »
