From a friend over at Ladies United for the Preservation of Endangered Cocktails (LUPEC) - PGH (link to video in comments) Oh, how we love heiresses! Especially the ones who go right off the society rails. What could be better than a 52 year old divorcee with millions of her daddy’s dollars at her disposal reconstructing intricate crime scenes in dollhouse form? Francis Lee Glessner was born into wealth in 1878. While her brother was sent to Harvard, she was educated at home and married a lawyer, a marriage that ended in divorce. It was one of her brother’s Harvard classmates, a medical student named George Burgess Magrath, who introduced Glessner to the newly emergent field of forensic pathology. She was immediately smitten by the brainpower and skill forensics required, much to the apparent consternation of her family. She dutifully waited until her disapproving brother died to venture forward into her own career at the age of 52. Like any heiress worth the name she founded schools and funded chairs in the field but her real claim to fame is known as the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Deaths. Glessner created, by hand and to scale, 18 actual crime scenes. Complete with tiny locks, working lights, and red paint blood spatters, these morbid little dollhouses were designed to train detectives in reading crime scenes. During the 1940s and 1950s, Glessner would host weeklong seminars where leading crime scene investigators would study the dioramas and attempt to solve the cases depicted—and these merry times would finish with a lovely dinner at the Ritz Carlton. In 1945, Glessner helped to found the Harvard Department of Legal Medicine and donated her dioramas for use by students of crime scene investigation. When the department was dissolved in 1965, the dioramas ended up in the Maryland Medical Examiner’s Office in Baltimore where they are still used for teaching and lectures.
Posted on: Fri, 07 Mar 2014 12:36:10 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015