How To Perform An Autopsy in Medieval China
Or ‘How Bizarrely Violent Was 13th Century China?’
Yes! Finally a forensic book from roughly the time of my heroes’ life!
Not from their country, however. The first European forensic manuscripts wouldn’t show up until 1595 when Battista Codronchi wrote ‘De Morbis Veneficiis.’
If you want a Medieval forensic manual, you need to go to China.
That’s right: It’s time for a review of ‘Hsi y an chi lu’ or ‘The Washing Away of Wrongs.’
Background:
During the Sung Dynasty, government was divided into circuits, which were then divided into prefectures and subprefectures. Each prefecture had a Judicial head, but he assigned cases to people under him and there wasn’t a group whose job it was to investigate. The actual investigators were the minor functionaries of the subprefectures with titles such as Recorder.
Sung Tzu (whose name is often spelled as Song Ci) was one of these minor functionaries, first appointed sheriff of in the subprefecture of Yin in 1217 or thereabouts. He ultimately became Registrar of Hsin-feng subprefecture and participated in at least four cases.
To help the non-specialist, newbie political functionaries confronted with the job of deciding on a suspicious death, he wrote an excruciatingly detailed manual.
This manual was in use until the 1800’s. Later dynasties just added or erased entries as laws and science changed.
It came to the West as a French translation in the 1700’s, and it has been translated a bunch of times since. The latest translation, and the one I got my hands on from Books-a-Million, was done by Brian E. McKnight in 1981. This is the one you will probably find if you want to Google it yourself.
Contents:
Sung is deadly earnest about his job, which was probably helped by the threat of caning with a heavy rod if he came to a wrong conclusion. That is what he needs to remind his audience in his first chapter: There are certain procedures that must be followed for appointing the local who investigates the crime and when the second inquest needs to be held. Failure to do any of this could end with the official being beaten, or, if he was convicted of taking bribes, strangled.
(I feel like the American justice system would be very different if your local police chief was publicly whipped for not correctly identifying a cause of death.)
After spelling out proper procedure and putting the fear of the state into the newbie functionary, he moves on to how to perform the inquest.
In some ways the Sung Dynasty inquest was a bit like a trial, inquest, and autopsy combined. Family members were supposed to be present, as well as the accused. An assistant was supposed to prepare the body, and this assistant was most likely an undertaker, unless the deceased was a woman. In which case, a midwife would do the honors. Either way, the body was supposed to be covered in paper that was soaked in vinegar and wine for a period of time because Sung thought that would make latent injuries appear. The official then announces the injuries he sees, writes it on the special form, and then has everyone sign off on it. If foul play was suspected, then a second inquest was held. The trial followed, and if the suspect didn’t agree to the result of the trial, he was immediately re-tried.
There are a few moments where I had to wonder about the effect of translation. He specifies that you shouldn’t write on the form “The skin was broken. Then blood flowed out” because blood always comes out of broken skin. Rather, you should write, “The skin was slightly injured. There was a flow of blood.” Some people have interpreted this as him being snarky, but, you know, I think I’d write ‘Person bled from injury’ on the form. Also, Sung comes across as serious in the rest of the book, like when he tells his audience not to use the word ‘stab’ in reference to a blunt weapon. I had the same issue with ‘The Cow Shed,’ which was a memoir about the Cultural Revolution. The survivor declares that the Cultural Revolution had the excellent result of improving students’ calligraphy, and that is either the darkest of morbid humor, he’s trying to butter up the CCP, or…I’m missing something.
He continues to instruct officials on the correct way to hold an autopsy and to discover a murderer. If you have heard of the case of the murderer identified by a fly-attracting sickle, this comes from one of the four case studies that start the second chapter. Details that might not have been lost in the retelling:
- The murder victim was found on the side of the road with many stab wounds.
- The Recorder interviewed the victim’s wife to discover any enemies, and she told him that he had recently lent a neighbor money.
- The informers collected 70 or 80 sickles to lay out in the sun before flies started buzzing around the bloody sickle of the guy who owed the victim money.
The rest of the book is a list of different signs to look for on a corpse under different circumstances and at the crime scene. He’s actually really good about reminding officials to look at the weapon and disposition of the body.
There are also reminders of what to ask witnesses.
Special Notes:
There is a surprising amount of food in this forensic manual. His method for discovering latent injuries is to cover them in mashed white plums, and he recommends wine, vinegar, and pepper constantly. He also recommends burning soap bean pods before performing an autopsy.
I have in my notes ‘It’s Body Farm time!’ around the end of Chapter Two because he details the way that the weather effects how a body decays.
Also, the Medieval Chinese did not understand bones. Sung starts Chapter Three by declaring that people have 365 bones in their body to correlate with each day of the year and that women have darker bones then men, which suggests he had never seen a skeleton. Galen was a lot closer to reality there.
It isn’t all pepper and smashed plums though. Sung understood that blood circulates in the body while you are alive but coagulates once you are dead, and this can help determine if a wound came before or after death.
Another idea that a modern forensic pathologist would approve of is the diagrams of people’s bodies that the official was supposed to mark with locations of injuries. He includes the drawings in the book, and they do resemble something you would see today on ‘Forensic Files’ or ‘Cold Case Files.’
Which was important because some wounds were faked. Were there a lot of people trying to pass off natural deaths as murder? He spends a disturbing amount of time explaining how to tell the difference. And by ‘disturbing amount,’ I mean more than a couple sentences.
He includes a section of how to tell if someone died by acupuncture. Remember that the next time someone asks you what the harm is in acupuncture.
Conclusion:
You can get the translation for $35, and it can be enlightening at points. If you want to write a mystery set during the Sung Dynasty (or are just curious about the history of forensics), you could do worse than acquiring this book.
Sources:
The Washing Away of Wrongs | Mütter Museum (muttermuseum.org)
‘The Washing Away of Wrongs’ translated by Brian E. McKnight