The personal view in this week's BMJ (p 349) describes one doctor's experience with a John Doe, an unidentified, presumed missing, person. The internet could play a greater part in helping to identify such people, the author suggests, perhaps with an online international registry made up of hospital records and maybe including photographs of the deceased.
Currently no single internet site provides a list of all missing people. If you are looking for a missing person or if you have seen someone you recognise as missing—or even if you yourself are missing—it is best to consult the site based in your own country, if one exists. In the United Kingdom, the website of the National Missing Persons Helpline (www.missingpersons.org/) is a good example of such a service.
The Doe Network (www.doenetwork.org) is an international non-profit organisation devoted to solving cases concerning unexplained disappearances and unidentified victims of crime from north America, Australia, and Europe. Its volunteers come from diverse fields: forensic artists, medical examiners, journalists, missing persons case workers, law enforcement officers, detectives, and “everyday people.”
The UK National Missing Persons Helpline Identification and Reconstruction Department (www.missingpersons.org/identification.html) provides a brief description of the technologies at our disposal nowadays in the search for missing persons, from image enhancement and facial reconstruction to age progression. Although not visually exciting, www.sciencevictoria.org.au/ord798.htm is an Australian site with an interesting essay on facial reconstruction, stretching from Egyptian Pharaohs and death masks to FACE—the Facial Automatic Composition and Editing system devised by Victoria police and now successfully in operation worldwide.
For information about missing persons of a different kind, have you ever wondered who the FBI's top 10 most wanted are? See www.fbi.gov/mostwant/topten/fugitives/fugitives.htm for a line up of mugshots.
Finally, if you want to know why unidentified people are called John or Jane Doe, it's all to do with a legal debate during the reign of King Edward III (1312-77) about a hypothetical landowner who is kicked out by his leaseholder. See http://ask.yahoo.com/ask/20020923.html for a fuller explanation.