From Wounded Fairies to Sweet Fanny Adams: Helping Police with Their Enquiries Through the Centuries

The medical profession and criminal law have worked together over the millennia, from the Ancient Egyptians to the present day. Doctors have been asked to interpret wounds since antiquity. In From Wounded Fairies to Sweet Fanny Adams Dr. Peter Moore looks at how doctors got involved in crime, examining the accused or checking injuries, dating from the Edwin Smith papyrus, written in ancient Egypt in about 1600 BC which lists 48 cases involving wounds. He reveals how it was illegal to kill or maim a fairy in the time of Henry III, and how the Tudors and Stuarts didn’t bother with police and doctors, but just boiled criminals. Charting the development of forensic science over the centuries, Dr. Peter Moore explains how the Police medical service gradually became more structured by the mid Nineteenth century, with the introduction of a Chief Surgeon and several Divisional Surgeons, caring for officers and providing medical care to prisoners.

DR. PETER MOORE spent 30 years as a GP, complementing this work with what he calls a ’hobby’ - serving as a police surgeon, spending nights and weekends at the police station seeing burglars, examining victims of sexual assault or looking at dead bodies. He says it was better than stamp collecting or gardening, and helped pay the mortgage.