100 Years of toxicology in the German society of legal medicine

Abstract

On the occasion of the constitutive meeting in September 1905, the chairman explained why the name of the Society was not chosen as being ‘‘The Society of Legal Physicians’’, but instead ‘‘The Society for Legal Medicine’’. The underlying reason was that the Society also wanted to extend a warm invitation to psychiatrists as representatives of legal psychiatry, and also to the legal chemists, should they wish to become members. The chairman explained that there was no doubt at all that legal chemistry – which cannot be clearly separated from legal medicine in the field of toxicology – cannot be disregarded, even not any of our members are able to do justice to the tasks of a chemical analyst like our honourable colleague Mr Katter [34]. The then holder of the chair of the institute in Graz and member of the founding committee, Julius Kratter, can well be regarded as the first representative of the forensic toxicologists in the scientific society due to the fact that he was competently familiarised in this field by his teacher and predecessor Adolf Schauenstein, who himself was promoted to university lecture in forensic toxicology at the university of Vienna. During the construction of the institute in Graz, he had, for example, regarded the creation of a modern laboratory consisting of two rooms as being highly important, where he personally carried out investigations for identifying poisons in the human body for forensic purposes [26,41]. An accurate date of the first membership of a legal chemist in the Society cannot be established from the Society’s bulletins, regardless of whether it was published in the ‘‘Vierteljahresschrift’’ or subsequently in the ‘‘Deutsche Zeitschrift fur Gerichtliche Medizin’’ (German Journal for Legal Medicine). In the scientific lectures, analytical-toxicological problems played only a minor role. For the main part, analyses were performed by legal chemists outside the institutes of legal medicine, these never appearing to present their findings at the meetings. In Vienna, this was never disadvantageous for legal medicine, as good co-operation obviously existed between the legal chemist Hermann Jansch and the corresponding management of the institute of legal medicine. Numerous important pieces of work originate from Jansch, concerning, e.g. the distribution of veronal [15] or morphine [16] in the body. The determination of thallium in the very first case of murder by poisoning with this heavy metal (see the following) was also performed in his institute using a validated method [10,28]. In 1945, the ‘‘father’’ of legal chemists moved to the Institute of Legal Medicine in Vienna and focused primarily on problems concerning clinical toxicology, whilst F.X. Mayer – whose successor was G. Machata [24] – dealt with forensic cases from 1937 onwards [4]. Both have made a remarkable contribution to legal chemical investigations; one of the subjects is hair analysis and the danger of false positive findings through, for example, environmental contamination thereof [17]. Also in the period during which A. Bruning was director of the Berlin Institute of Legal Chemistry, there was fruitful collaboration between the legal medicine and legal chemistry [27]. Besides others, this collaboration was also expressed by the fact that Bruning and Muller-Hess, the then director of the Berlin Institute of Legal medicine, jointly published the first issue of a compilation of cases of poisoning in 1930 (‘‘Sammlung von Vergiftungsfallen’’ later Archives of Toxicology). Until the mid-1970s, this unique international series was the most important instrument for the publications concerning forensic toxicology (at least within the Germanspeaking community). From 1954 onwards, the Archives of Toxicology was not only the publication medium of the German Pharmacological Society, but also for the German Society for Legal and Social Medicine. The way they were published in great number in this medium, the detailed descriptions of the cases of poisoning including methods for the determination of the single poisons must, from today’s standpoint, be considered as a complete set of works. It represents an outstanding and internationally significant achievement of the European forensic toxicology. Besides Forensic Science International 144 (2004) 215–220