Reading the Corpse in Forensic Casebooks of Nineteenth Century China

Abstract

This article examines two forensic casebooks from nineteenth century China. Forensic cases are among the favored sources for progressive narratives sketching out the development of forensic knowledge as a process through which anomalies are detected and explained, and new facts are ultimately incorporated into the existing corpus of knowledge. This article is aimed at providing an alternative view. It first argues that cases revealing a serious discrepancy vis-à-vis the official manual for autopsies are extremely few. It later demonstrates that, instead of accumulating facts challenging the authoritative manual, forensic case compilers primarily addressed the question of weighing evidence. They singled out cases which shed light on how to make a decision in the face of several competing, but already-known symptoms. Each case displays how the weighing process worked out depending on its particular and unrepeatable circumstantial configuration, with no intent to convey generalizable information. Collecting precedents is thus not intended to form new claims as opposed to the canonical manual, but to make it more applicable to a complex reality. Forensic case compilers, therefore, did not evaluate the official manual in terms of correctness or inaccuracy, exhaustiveness or deficiency. What really mattered was flexibility in using the book depending on the actual circumstances.