Henry Faulds

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Henry Faulds (born June 1, 1843 in Beith , Scotland , † March 19, 1930 in Wolstanton ) was a Scottish doctor and missionary who made an important contribution to the development of the fingerprint process ( dactyloscopy ).

Education

Henry Faulds was in Beith ( Ayrshire born). His family initially had an adequate income, but the father ran into financial difficulties and Henry had to leave school at the age of 13 to take a job in Glasgow . At the age of 21 he decided to study at the University of Glasgow . First he studied mathematics, logic and classical literature. He later devoted himself to medicine at Anderson's College and obtained a medical license in 1868.

India

After graduating he became a missionary for the Scottish Church ( Church of Scotland ), which initially sent him to British India , where he worked for two years in a hospital for the poor in Darjeeling .

On July 23, 1873 he was instructed by a letter from the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland to establish a mission in Japan . After more than two centuries, the country had given up its self-imposed isolation and intensified its exchange with the world under the new Meiji government. Faulds married Isabella Wilson in September of that year and broke up in December.

Japan

After arriving in Tokyo, Faulds began building a hospital (Tsukiji Hospital, Tsukijibyōin , 築 地 病院 ) and a training center for medical students in the Tsukiji district, which had been assigned to foreigners. Japanese surgery owes him the introduction of Joseph Lister's aseptic measures . In 1875 he was involved in founding the first Japanese society for the blind ( Rakuzenkai , 楽 善 会 ) and in 1880 in setting up the first school for the blind ( Rakuzenkai kunmō-in , 楽 善 会 訓 盲 院 ). In 1882, 15,000 patients were treated annually in his hospital.

In addition to these activities, he wrote academic articles and wrote two travel books. When he accompanied his friend, the American archaeologist Edward S. Morse , during his excavation at the famous mollusc pile of Ōmori, he became aware of the fingerprints in the pottery shards found there. When comparing several thousand fingerprints, he realized that these showed specific shapes for each individual, remained the same from childhood and could not be changed. When there was a break-in at his hospital shortly afterwards and a member of his staff was suspected, he compared his fingerprints with those at the location of the break-in. The arrested person was then released again. Among the foreign medical professionals in Japan was the German pathologist Friedrich Karl Wilhelm Dönitz , who recognized the importance of the discovery of von Faulds and introduced the procedure into Japanese forensics .

After detailed investigations of the human skin ridges, Faulds sent a letter to the journal Nature in 1880 , in which he suggested using fingerprints at the crime scene to identify the perpetrators and dactyloscoping all ten fingers. The following month, Sir William James Herschel , a colonial official in Bengal , wrote to the magazine saying that he had been using fingerprints since 1860 to distinguish recipients of pension payments and thus avoid fraud. Decades of bitter feud for the honor of the first discovery followed.

Return to England

Because of various disputes over the management of the Tokyo hospital, Faulds returned to Great Britain in 1886. Scotland Yard rejected his concept. One of the main problems was the lack of a classification system, which made it impractical to compare prints at the crime scene with those already registered.

Faulds practiced as a surgeon, first in London, later in Fenton (Stoke-on-Trent). In 1922 he sold his practice and moved to Wolstanton, where he died at the age of 86 - deeply bitter because of the lack of recognition.

Historical appreciation

The process of identifying people using fingerprints was introduced during the 1860s. first used by William James Herschel in India. The suggestion to use this in forensics came from Henry Faulds in 1880. The Englishman Francis Galton (1822–1911), who took over Fauld's idea without referring to it, provided a classification system for practical police use.

Works

  • Henry Faulds: Nine years in Nipon: Sketches of Japanese life and manners. Boston: Cupples & Hurd, 1888. * Henry Faulds: East Asia. Longton, Staffs. 1897
  • Henry Faulds: Guide to finger-print identification. Hanley: Wood, Mitchell, 1905.
  • Henry Faulds: The hidden hand: a contribution to the history of finger prints. [s. l., 1917]
  • Henry Faulds: A manual of practical dactylography. : a work for the uswe of students of the finger-paint method of identification. London: The "Police review" publishing Co., Ltd., [1923].

literature

  • Simon A. Cole: Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification. Cambridge, MA [u. a.]: Harvard Univ. Press, 2002.

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ The area, as the name shows (Tsukiji, lit. about 'built-up earth') was new territory that had been won in the marshland at the western mouth of the Sumidagawa river through the backfilling of earth in the 17th century.
  2. ↑ The "Special Needs Education School for the Deaf, University of Tsukuba" has its historical roots in this school.
  3. ↑ The excavation site is considered the birthplace of Japanese archeology. The German Heinrich von Siebold also worked here.
  4. ↑ grandson of the astronomer William Herschel
  5. ↑ http://galton.org/fingerprints/books/index.htm
personal data
SURNAME Faulds, Henry
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Scottish doctor, missionary to Japan, pioneer of dactyloscopy
DATE OF BIRTH June 1, 1843
PLACE OF BIRTH Beith
DATE OF DEATH March 19, 1930
Place of death Wolstanton