Items on display include:

• Surgical instruments used in the autopsy of Abraham Lincoln
• Some of the first medical treatises on forensics, dating back to the 1600s
• A human heart with a bullet hole in it, a stomach poisoned by arsenic, and a kidney punctured by a fatal knife wound
• The famous "Nutshell Studies" dollhouse crime scenes, based on true cases and created in the 1940s as a forensic teaching tool
• Fingerprints from the first investigation to use fingerprints to help secure a conviction for murder--the 1892 Francesca Rojas case
• Film clips of actual forensic autopsies

Among the stories told in the exhibition are:

• How, in 1998, DNA evidence identified the Vietnam War's "Unknown Soldier" as Lt. Michael Blassie of St. Louis, Missouri
• How American anthropologist Clyde Snow and a group of courageous Argentinean students invented the field of human rights forensics in the mid-1980s. Evidence uncovered in their excavations of mass graves led to the convictionof members of Argentina's murderous military junta, and the Argentinean effort became the model for investigations of political and ethnic murders and atrocities around the globe
• How Kirk Bloodsworth, a crab fisherman from Maryland's Eastern Shore, became the first person convicted of murder to be exonerated by DNA evidence

"Visible Proofs: Forensic Views of the Body," has an Experience Zone, where detectives of all ages can explore forensics firsthand. Participants can work with recreated miniature murder scenes, use black lights to test for evidence of ingerprints and bloodstains, examine human bones for tale-telling characteristics, and use software to create a composite face from hund
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Contact: Robert Mehnert
publicinfo@nlm.nih.gov
301-496-6308
NIH/National Library of Medicine
3-Feb-2006