Sir Bernard Henry Spilsbury was a British pathologist.
19 Facts About Bernard Spilsbury
2.
Bernard Spilsbury's cases include Hawley Crippen, the Seddon case, the Major Armstrong poisoning, the "Brides in the Bath" murders by George Joseph Smith, the Crumbles murders, the Podmore case, the Sidney Harry Fox matricide, the Vera Page case, and the murder trials of Louis Voisin, Jean-Pierre Vaquier, Norman Thorne, Donald Merrett, Alfred Rouse, Elvira Barney, Toni Mancini, and Gordon Cummins.
3.
Bernard Spilsbury played a crucial role in the development of Operation Mincemeat, a deception operation during the Second World War which saved thousands of lives of Allied service personnel.
4.
Bernard Spilsbury was born on 16 May 1877 at 35 Bath Street, Leamington Spa, Warwickshire.
5.
Bernard Spilsbury was the eldest of the four children of James Spilsbury, a manufacturing chemist, and his wife, Marion Elizabeth Joy.
6.
Bernard Spilsbury studied at St Mary's Hospital in Paddington, London, from 1899.
7.
Bernard Spilsbury specialised in the then-new science of forensic pathology.
8.
Bernard Spilsbury concluded that a scar on a small piece of skin from the remains pointed to Mrs Crippen as the victim.
9.
Bernard Spilsbury later gave evidence at the trial of Herbert Rowse Armstrong, the solicitor convicted of poisoning his wife with arsenic.
10.
Bernard Spilsbury was able to work with minimal remains, such as those involved in the Alfred Rouse case.
11.
Bernard Spilsbury was able to appear for the defence in Scotland, where his status as a Home Office pathologist in England and Wales was irrelevant: he testified for the defence in the case of Donald Merrett, tried in February 1927 for the murder of his mother and acquitted as not proven.
12.
Bernard Spilsbury was a Home Office-approved pathologist and lecturer in forensic medicine at the University College Hospital, the London School of Medicine for Women and at St Thomas's Hospital.
13.
Bernard Spilsbury was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine.
14.
On 17 July 2008, files containing notes on deaths investigated by Bernard Spilsbury were auctioned at Sotheby's and were acquired by the Wellcome Library in London.
15.
The hand-written cards, discovered in a lost cabinet, were the notes that Bernard Spilsbury apparently accumulated for a textbook on forensic medicine which he was planning, but there is no evidence that he ever started the book.
16.
Bernard Spilsbury is commemorated by an English Heritage blue plaque attached to his former home at Marlborough Hill in north London, and another at his birthplace, 35 Bath Street, Leamington Spa, which was his father's chemist shop and is still a chemist shop today.
17.
Bernard Spilsbury is mentioned in the Severed Heads song 'Dead Eyes Opened' by the narrator, Edgar Lustgarten as 'a great pathologist with unique experience'.
18.
The influential Law Journal expressed 'profound disquiet' at the verdict, noting 'the more than Papal infallibility with which Sir Bernard Spilsbury is rapidly being invested by juries.
19.
Bernard Spilsbury has in particular been criticised for his insistence on working alone, his refusal to train students, and an unwillingness to engage in academic research or peer review.