The Social History of Disaster Victim Identification in the United States, 1865 to 1950

Abstract

This paper will trace the history of DVI from nineteenth-century practices of sight recognition to contemporary DVI, detailing when and how different technologies used in DVI entered the disaster morgue. Much of this history is defined by improvisation, as local communities affected by sudden, mass death often relied on known technologies, medical or otherwise, applied under extremely difficult circumstances. Initially, these technologies were not always strictly forensic, but ones that supplemented sight recognition. As more forensic technologies became available in others fields, such as criminology, dentistry, and forensic pathology, disaster responders had greater tools at their disposal. The gradual introduction of these tools allowed DVI to become a more systematic and scientific process.

Introduction

The history of American disaster victim identification (DVI) and its transition from sight recognition to our current forensic paradigm can be difficult to trace. Disasters are often sudden events shaped by the particularities of place, politics, and community. In the past, when the normal structures for managing human remains were undermined by mass fatality events, responders had to perform identifications as best they could, but the challenges they faced were affected by the nature of the disaster (e.g., fire vs flood), the extent of the destruction to local resources, and the condition of the remains left behind. Before the rise of state and federal disaster response plans, the process of body recovery and identification was significantly defined by local context, as well as the knowledge and skills of those available to respond to the scene. As such, the history of DVI before the mid-20th century was uneven, occurring more through improvisational, even experimental, responses to mass fatality events rather than through concerted and collective effort at designing best practices. One consistent thread, however, has been the imperative to identify, regardless of the challenges inherent in that task.

Many contemporary practitioners situate the origins of DVI in the mid-20th century, when formal DVI standards emerged in both the scientific literature and the disaster morgue. However, the emergence of these formal practices was dependent on a series of smaller, less formal developments in DVI that actually began in the late 19th century. The primary method used in this period was sight recognition performed by the family and friends of the dead. However, between the Civil War and World War II, sight recognition in the United States evolved, becoming both more formal and more technical. While never a purely scientific practice, sight recognition was shaped by the emergence of technologies in other arenas. As such, this essay will demonstrate that the origins of DVI predate World War II.

In order to understand how DVI developed, it is necessary to go beyond the boundaries of the disaster morgue. DVI practices were, for many years, shaped by existing technologies, developed for purposes other than disaster identification. The post-World War II era would witness a quick consolidation of once-disparate techniques, principles, and values in the disaster morgue. As such, this essay will discuss the practices involved in sight recognition, as well as those in the associated fields of criminology and military identification, which devised methods according to their own internal logics and needs but which also contributed to the formalization and standardization of DVI in the 1940s and beyond.

Discussion

Imperatives to Identify Disaster Victims

Why do we go to such great lengths to identify those killed in disasters? We might hypothesize that the desire to identify is universal, rooted in a human instinct to ritualistically honor our dead. In DVI, the primary justification in the 19th century was social and religious. Nineteenth-century American death practices were significantly framed by Christian values, specifically the long tradition of the ars moriendi (1). Originating in medieval Europe, the ars moriendi was both a genre of Christian literature and a set of social-theological practices that guided worshippers toward a “good” death (2). Such a death would occur at home, where the dying individual could be tended by family and spiritually prepare to die by making amends. After death, families would care for the body at home before burial and then perform a series of social rituals that demonstrated their grief to the wider community, such as wearing black, covering mirrors in the home, and refraining from joyful social events (3). Conversely, a sudden, violent, or painful death, such as those caused by war, epidemic disease, or disaster, complicated the dying process and created uncertainty as to whether the victim’s soul was sufficiently prepared for death. While identifying disaster victims in this period could not resolve all uncertainty, it nonetheless offered an opportunity for the community to reclaim the individual and enact those funeral rites that symbolically mitigated the tragedy, bringing them into what historian Thomas Laqueur has called the “community of the normative dead” (4).

Over time, identification also became a significant bureaucratic and legal issue, which only increased the imperative to identify each individual victim of a disaster. At the middle of the 19th century, tracking death became part of a larger national project of recording vital statistics, and death registration became a tool for tracking illness. Although it would take several decades for the United States to develop a centralized death registration system, the death certificate became a necessary means to document the fact of death (5). This, in turn, allowed families to collect insurance, transfer property, distribute inheritance, and so on. As the official confirmation of death became a bureaucratic, legal, and social issue, DVI became both a state and community imperative, which would eventually lead to cooperation and frustration between the 2 groups.

The Civil War

The Civil War (1861-1865) was a transformational moment in American history that laid a critical foundation for modern DVI. Historian Drew Faust has argued that the death of an estimated 620 000 people over the course of the war radically reconfigured America’s relationship with death (1). The scale and violence of these deaths challenged traditional notions of what constituted a proper death; death touched nearly every American’s life in some way, altered beliefs about the afterlife, and remade cultural understandings about the relationship between the body and the self (1). Fighting men feared burial in an unmarked grave and their families feared the absence of a body in their funerary rituals. As Faust notes,

The body was the repository of human identity in two senses: it represented the intrinsic selfhood and individuality of a particular human, and at the same time it incarnated the very humanness of that identity—the promise of eternal life that differentiates human remains from the carcasses of animals, who possessed neither consciousness nor promise of either physical or spiritual immortality.

The threat to the body represented by warfare was also a threat to identity and to the rituals that 19th-century Americans believed necessary to confirming a “good” death (6).

This may be why the Civil War was also the first major military engagement in the United States in which both the US Army and civilians focused significant energy on locating, exhuming, and identifying the bodies of fallen soldiers. At the beginning of the war, the Union Army did not have a formal identification process for those killed in combat, leaving soldiers to fend for themselves. In preparation for battle, soldiers often made agreements with one another to record the burial locations of their brothers-in-arms and to write letters to their families to inform them of the death. Soldiers also took individual precautions by placing slips of paper or letters on their person before battle; others carried purchased identification discs (precursors to the 20th-century “dog tag”), which could be made from gold, silver, brass, or lead and stamped with the soldier’s name, hometown, rank, and/or regimental unit (7,8). Such precautions were futile, however, as burial of the dead often fell to whichever side won the battle. At best, the winning side would bury enemy combatants in large trenches, with little attention to individual identity; at worst, enemy combatants might not be buried, but stripped of valuables and left exposed to scavengers (9).

These twin fears of anonymous, unmarked burial and corpse desecration motivated some families to track down the remains of lost fathers, sons, and brothers. Nongovernmental agencies, such as the Christian Commission and the Sanitary Commission, fielded letters from desperate families and helped secure information about soldiers’ burial locations in response. At the war’s end, the national government also enacted a remarkable program to record the burial of every lost soldier and, when possible, to exhume the dead for reburial in either family plots or national cemeteries dedicated to their memory (1).

These efforts served as both a direct and indirect precedent for DVI; death DVI. Death and the American response to it during and after the war created a new cultural paradigm of obligation to the dead and a fixation on the corpse as the center of funeral rituals at the end of the 19th century (10). After mass fatality events in this period, affected communities would go to great lengths to ensure that the families of victims had at least some opportunity to see and, ideally, identify the remains, regardless of the condition of the remains. Similarly, the formal processes enacted by the military offered a model for the systematic accounting of the dead. While the identification methods used during the Civil War would not immediately transfer into DVI, the foundations of both obligation and system would inform the larger ethos of the late 19th-century disaster morgue.

Sight Recognition

By the end of the 19th century, Americans increasingly became victims of violent disasters caused by industrial development. Alongside hurricanes, urban conflagrations, or epidemic diseases was the threat of railroad accidents, factory fires, mine collapses, and other such calamities. In the wake of these events, the most common and accessible method of identification was sight recognition (also called visual recognition). Akin to visual identification in today’s morgues, sight recognition in the 19th century was relatively simple: the body was laid out so that victims’ families, friends, neighbors, or acquaintances could look for familiar features of the face or body; they might also recognize personal effects located with the remains. Yet, this method was often a highly variable and informal process dependent upon the nature of the disaster, its location, and the availability and skill of local responders. Identifications were made based on the identifier’s subjective knowledge about the victim’s body, which could lead to mistaken identities. For example, 2 different families claimed the body of a young woman killed in the capsizing of the S. S. Eastland in Chicago (1915), and only a unique dental filling resolved the issue (11).

Such misidentifications occurred after most major disasters in this period, in part because the manner of death often altered the appearance of victims’ remains. While some recovered remains may have only exhibited the usual signs of death, such as bloat, rigor mortis, or discoloration, many bodies displayed signs of trauma, such as gashes, bruising, and disfigurement. Severe fires and explosions caused the most extreme damage, including burns and fragmentation. Because sight recognition was dependent on the condition of the body, such physical damage created 2 problems. The first was the inability for those familiar with the victim to locate an identifiable feature. The second was the potential to traumatize the victim’s family by displaying a severely disfigured body to them. However, as the sole means of identifying the dead, sight recognition was often performed in even extreme cases. For example, following the 1867 Angola Train Wreck, passenger remains were displayed in Buffalo, New York, despite the fact that most of the approximately 49 victims were burned beyond recognition (12) (Figure 1). By the end of the century, however, nascent systems emerged to organize and facilitate sight recognition, even if such systems could not overcome the problem of disfigured remains and mistaken identities.

Figure 1:

The “Angola Horror,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 1867.

The core of these early systems was the temporary morgue. In the same era in which most major American cities were opening morgues for the common investigation of suspicious deaths, the temporary morgue became an important institution for centralizing the recovery, identification, and counting of disaster victims. As temporary versions of standard morgues, however, these facilities emerged in the immediate aftermath of a disaster in whatever structures were available for the task of storing and displaying large numbers of bodies. For example, locals opened several morgues after the 1889 Johnstown Flood in Pennsylvania, including one in a schoolhouse and another in a mill. Similarly, after the 1903 Iroquois Theater fire in Chicago, which killed over 600 people, bodies were laid out in a restaurant, a salon, and a private undertaking establishment (13). The ad hoc nature of these sites also led to a chaotic, sometimes improvisational identification process, overseen at various times by local volunteers, undertakers, police officers, or coroners.

By the early 20th century, however, these temporary morgues often followed a general procedure. Following the 1907 Monongah Mine Disaster in West Virginia, the local coroner put this procedure into practice, despite the fragmentary condition of the remains:

A record of each body was kept both by the coroner and by the company. As the bodies were undressed, care was taken to find and preserve every article found in the clothes or on the body; these articles were turned over to the coroner and the names and descriptions entered on the records.

Related to this procedure were important bureaucratic technologies that allowed for the documentation and circulation of information produced in the morgue. At Monongah and many other disasters, bodies were numbered upon arrival at the morgue, with some form of card or tag placed with the body (14). The numbering of remains was especially crucial when death tolls soared, in order to create a link between bodies, envelopes of personal effects, and coroner files. These bureaucratic practices culminated in the death certificate, the formal declaration of death. While such paperwork is now a mainstay of the morgue, its incorporation in the early disaster morgues marks a desire for organizational structure that would ideally bring order to the otherwise informal subjectivity of sight recognition.

Over the course of late 19th and early 20th centuries, those called upon to run these temporary morgues began to incorporate existing technologies that could enhance or supplement sight recognition. The most widely adopted of these supplemental practices was embalming. A product of the Civil War, when entrepreneurial undertakers set up tents alongside battlefields to preserve recent casualties, embalming became an increasingly popular option for American funerals in the latter decades of the 19th century (15). This popularity allowed embalming to become a viable option after disaster as well. This had a significant effect on identifications because the preservative radically extended the temporal window for identification. One of the first major disasters that incorporated embalming on a large scale was the 1889 Johnstown Flood. With nearly 2200 victims to recover and identify, a team of undertakers from Pittsburgh traveled to the affected area to offer their professional services as embalmers. Although documents don’t record the total number of bodies embalmed in Johnstown, the state’s public health organization later reported that undertakers used at least 100 kegs of Utopia brand embalming plus 10 carboys of generic embalming fluid (16). Embalming became a frequently used tool after Johnstown, especially in cases with high fatality rates and long recovery periods.

Another supplemental technology used in DVI was photography, but this did not prove as immediately useful as embalming until the 20th century. In 1904, officials in New York City undertook a remarkable effort to photograph many of the victims of a fire on the passenger ship General Slocum. The decision was apparently an improvised one, and only a fraction of the approximately 1100 victims were photographed. The pictures were taken on North Brother Island, where volunteers arranged bodies in groups according to sex and age (17). While it is unclear whether identifications were made through these photographs, they nonetheless represent an intriguing early attempt to use a familiar technology to push identification beyond the chronological limits presented by the dead body. Much like embalming, however, photography in disaster identification required an existing infrastructure to be valuable; New York’s municipal departments, and its numerous commercial photography establishments, provided the necessary components for the city’s experimental efforts.

Even with new technologies to help, sight recognition continued to be a highly variable method throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Not all supplemental tools were used in every mass fatality event, nor were there clear lines of development between one disaster and the next, even in the same city. For example, the famous Triangle Shirtwaist Factor Fire of 1911 occurred only 7 years after the General Slocum disaster; while the city displayed victims from both fires at the same pier in Manhattan, the Triangle victims were not embalmed. This may have been due to the lower body count of that fire—136 killed instead of 1100 (18).

Likewise, decisions about identification often reflected the particularities of the disaster’s location; while a coroner in one location might decide to photograph the victims in his charge, another coroner might simply opt to embalm his. This inconsistency was due to a lack of formal standardization in this period. Not yet a system, sight recognition was more a set of sanctioned practices always shaped by the political, social, and logistical realities of any given disaster event. Instead of focusing on developing identification techniques, most state investigations into mass fatality events instead looked for the cause of disaster in order to prevent future occurrences. For example, a series of mining disasters in 1907 prompted workers’ demands for better regulation of the nation’s coal mines (19).

Finally, even as sight recognition and its supplemental technologies became more common in the United States, the method still faced limitations due to the scope and nature of disaster. For example, the 1900 Galveston Hurricane and Flood caused such widespread destruction that survivors were forced to dispose of human remains en masse, without formal attempts at identification (20). Following the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, city officials established temporary morgues but bodies held there were quickly buried as fire approached the neighborhood; other bodies not recovered in time were also burned beyond recognition (21). The solution to the limitations of sight recognition lay in the development of identification science in the arena of criminology.

Criminological Developments Before World War II

The rise of identification science in the United States in the early 20th century laid the foundation for DVI in both scientific and cultural ways. The advocacy for, and investment in, forensic science in this period not only developed identification techniques that would transfer into the disaster morgue but also built cultural trust in the science. Furthermore, the movement toward forensics altered what it means to identify, locating identity in minute, even abstract fragments of the body. That shift would also make identification the purview of scientists and technicians who were trained in reading the body in these new ways.

Beginning in the late 19th century, American law enforcement championed the role of science—particularly anthropometry—in identifying the criminal body. Early criminologists believed that the shapes, proportions, and measurements of the body constituted a unique physical profile, which would help police identify repeat offenders who might otherwise evade capture by changing their appearance or traveling to new jurisdictions. The form of anthropometry that became popular in the United States was developed by French police scientist Alphonse Bertillon. His system was comprised of measurements of the body, from overall height to such minutiae as the length of the ear; qualitative descriptions of the body’s surface marks as well as the shape of the features, including ears, chin, nose; and photographs of the face from the front and the side view (i.e., the “mug shot”) (22). Such detailed recording of the criminal body reveals a great optimism about the value of objective data about the body as a tool to combat the disorder of crime. This conceptual link between system and order would eventually become a key component in disaster identification as well. The transfer of criminological science into the temporary morgue would take decades, however, because most Americans were not subject to the same rigorous data collection processes as criminals were in the early 20th century.

The enthusiasm for anthropometry in this period encouraged practitioners with an interest in legal medicine to propose other methods for reading identification in the body. Proposals were made to identify bodies by the eyes, the bones of the hand, the veins, or even the shape of the navel. Many of these proposals, however, focused on the living body rather than the dead. In the 1920s, physicians William Ledlie Culbert and Frederick M. Law published on their successful postmortem identification of a body through radiographs; Culbert had previously treated the deceased man and made X-ray films of his nasal accessory sinuses, which he then compared to postmortem images (23). Such case studies, however, did not offer clear pathways to “scale up” these identification methods to mass fatality events.

The difficulty in scaling up identification methods was evident in the work of the US Army in the early 20th century. In theory, enlistment provided the perfect opportunity for the collection of physical data about each soldier, which the army did using a modified version of Bertillon’s system (24). But deploying that information under the chaos of war proved difficult, especially when most identification work was initially performed by men with little anatomical training. During the Spanish-American War (1898), the Quartermaster General tasked a chaplain, Charles C. Pierce, to institute new procedures for handling soldier remains at the Office of Identification in Manila. Graves registration personnel successfully made identifications based on a combination of physical and contextual information, but Pierce’s frustrations with the work also led him to recommend identification discs for all soldiers, which took the form of the “dog tag” in 1913 (25). Although the information imprinted on the tag has changed over time, early examples contained social information, such as the soldier’s name, next-of-kin, or religious affiliation, rather than measurements or medical history (26). The movement to identification tags suggests that identification on a large scale was still difficult to implement, even with standardized antemortem records.

The technology that seemed to hold the greatest promise for disaster identification was fingerprinting, which originated in India under British colonial rule in the 19th century. This identification method grew popular in the United States shortly after 1900 because it was an easier and cheaper alternative to the Bertillon system (27). The simplicity of the method made it easy for advocates to envision broader applications for fingerprinting beyond the criminal profile. Some began calling for the “universal fingerprinting” of all American citizens as a means of ensuring personal and national security. To combat the negative stigma attached to fingerprinting, groups such as the International Society for Personal Identification (founded 1919) sought to educate the public on the social benefits of the practice to the “noncriminal class.” These benefits consisted primarily in protecting oneself from fraud, accident, or mistake, especially in terms of insurance claims and bank records. Personal identification also offered an additional layer of certainty to passports, medical files, and school records (28).

Advocates also used disasters to persuade the public to support universal fingerprinting. New York law enforcement agent Frederick Kuhne saw fingerprints as a means of circumventing the “disagreeable and heartrending task of visiting the morgue” (29). In the years leading up to World War II, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover authored several books and articles in favor of what he called “civil identification.” In a 1939 publication, Hoover briefly reflected on the use of fingerprints to identify victims of the Labor Day Hurricane in Florida 4 years prior, while also lamenting that these identifications were made “only because [the victims] had criminal records” (30). These references to disaster suggest that officials were aware of the significant social and bureaucratic limitations of sight recognition. Such limitations also served as a convenient rhetorical device for fingerprint advocates. In their 1918 book Personal Identification, authors Harris Hawthorne Wilder and Bert Wentworth dedicated a chapter to the “uncertainties” of sight recognition before devoting several other chapters to fingerprinting, which they deemed “absolute identification” (29).

Dental Identification

As fingerprinting was making its ascendancy, so too was forensic dentistry emerging as a valuable disaster identification tool. Although there exist documented cases of dental identifications throughout history, the formalization of this method within legal medicine began in 1897. That year, several wealthy victims of the Bazaar de la Charité fire in Paris were identified by their teeth. The event prompted dentist Oscar Amöedo to promote the forensic dentistry, which culminated in the first textbook on the subject, L’art dentaire en médecine légale (1898). In addition to describing the anatomy and pathology of the teeth, Amöedo’s text also asserted that the variability and durability of teeth made them invaluable for identification cases in which sight recognition was not possible, as proven by the Charité fire (31).

Amöedo was not the first dentist to make this claim, nor to propose standardized metrics that would facilitate the adoption of dental identifications. E. K. Wedelstaedt suggested a simple system of tooth measurement based on the millimeter; Alton Thompson, however, developed a complete classificatory system that included a glossary of standard terms for describing the shape and color of teeth (32,33) Such efforts reflect a recognition that the profession of dentistry needed a shared language to solidify the medicolegal position of dental identifications.

Despite this advocacy, dental identification did not immediately become a common tool in the disaster morgue. Sporadic cases continued to appear, such as the father who identified his daughter’s “peculiar” teeth after the 1904 General Slocum fire (34). But, like other medical or criminological methods, dental identifications were only useful if antemortem records existed for the victims. The dental profession had grown in the United States since the late 19th century but struggled to convince Americans that dental health was important. One dentist in 1909 lamented that only an estimated 5% to 8% of Americans received any regular dental care (35). Furthermore, advocates of forensic dentistry also noted the variation in charting practices, which was not an insurmountable challenge to identification but which prompted some to advocate for standardization. For example, in 1937, dentist Edward J. Ryan called for a “complete system,” which would include “plaster casts of the teeth and jaw, full-mouth X-rays, intraoral photographs, and a complete record chart showing existing fillings, crowns, and bridges” (36). Ryan’s proposed chart included 2 views of the teeth, from the front and from below (Figure 2).

Figure 2:

A chart for standardized dental examinations, in Ryan, identification through dental records, 1937, 259.

In the rare instance in which local disaster responders did try to incorporate dental identifications more formally, their attempts were often ad hoc and only partially successful. For example, in the 1928 St. Francis dam collapse coroner Oliver Reardon mailed dental cards to the families and dentists of the victims. He only received a few responses, which included both general narratives of the victims’ teeth and technical information about fillings and other treatments. There was no apparent relation between the information sent to Reardon and the more formal systems proposed by men like Thompson or Ryan. Furthermore, there were only a few victims identified by these efforts. And yet, even such efforts reveal a strong impulse toward greater proceduralism in DVI, as well as a desire to look toward medical experts to bring greater standards to the disaster morgue.

Post-World War II Consolidation

The 1940s witnessed the consolidation of earlier trends in DVI toward the formalization and standardization of identification practices and procedures. During World War II, the nation not only mobilized for war in Europe and Asia but also developed strong civil defense programs that had several advantages for DVI. One benefit was the massive expansion of the country’s fingerprint files. The dream of universal fingerprinting championed by Hoover and others came closer to being a reality as national security concerns led the government to collect prints from a range of individuals: all enlisted men, civilians employed in wartime industries, interred Japanese citizens, draft dodgers, migrants, and suspected spies. The federal government also sponsored a campaign to collect civilian fingerprints at “neighborhood fingerprint stations.” By 1943, when the US population stood at approximately 136 million people, the FBI held a reported 70 million fingerprint cards in its new 8000 sq ft facility in the National Armory in Washington DC (37). For this reason, fingerprint technicians were often deployed to assist after disasters. For example, when a ship full of ammonium nitrate exploded at the docks in Texas City, Texas, in 1947, the identification team included fingerprint technicians from the Texas Bureau of Identification, the Houston police department, and the FBI. They fingerprinted as many of the 581 victims as they could, comparing postmortem prints to those found in the victims’ enlistment papers and employee files (38).

The Texas City disaster was also one of several mass fatality incidents at the time that contributed to a growing body of knowledge about disaster response and identification in the postwar period. In the months following the explosion, the Texas Bureau of Identification produced a film called Survival! Texas City, which documented their identification work. The film contains graphic scenes of severely burned and dismembered remains and shows the various techniques used by both bureau agents and other technicians, including dental exams, X-rays, autopsies, and anthropometry. The film appears to have been shown to other law enforcement agents to provide an in-depth demonstration of forensic technique on bodies that were difficult to identify (39). Likewise, the Texas Bureau of Identification also published a short book titled Identification in Disasters (1948), which focused less on the specific details of the Texas City disaster and instead offered prescriptive advice on organizing identification work after catastrophe. The book emphasized the need for cooperation between a variety of teams involved in the recovery and identification of the dead, such as volunteer litter bearers, embalmers, and coroners. It also provided an organizational chart to assist future responders in structuring the management of their operations (40) (Figure 3).

Figure 3:

Disaster identification organization chart, in Texas State Bureau of Identification and Records, identification in disaster, 1949, 8-9.

The identification work at Texas City also benefitted from previous disasters. At least one of the agents working for the Texas Bureau of Identification had recently attended a seminar on disaster response at the Harvard University Department of Legal Medicine (39) founded in 1931; the department regularly held seminars on forensic science for law enforcement agents, who attended from all over the country to learn new techniques and procedures (41). The seminar attended by the agent included information from at least 2 disasters in the greater New England area: the 1942 Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire in Boston and the 1944 Hartford Circus Fire. In the Cocoanut Grove fire, sight recognition had been a useful method of identification, but the Hartford fire had depended on sight recognition and dental identifications (42,43). Such seminars, targeted as they were at law enforcement, provided a direct connection between criminological techniques and disaster in this period.

Law enforcement agents were not the only professionals interested in circulating new knowledge about DVI. One of the earliest medical professionals to contribute to this burgeoning field was Cuyahoga County coroner Samuel Gerber, who gained firsthand experience in disaster identification after the 1944 East Ohio Gas Explosion. Stymied by the poor condition of the bodies, Gerber spent the next several years advocating for better disaster response preparation among his colleagues. Although rooted in his personal experiences in Cleveland, the larger expansion of Cold War Civil Defense planning in the United States also inspired his call to action. In a talk at the 1952 meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, which was also published in the institution’s annual proceedings, Gerber explicitly argued for “preparedness” within the field of forensic pathology, noting that “planned preparedness which anticipates as nearly as possible all problems is the optimal aggressive defense against turbulent chaos into which the community is thrown immediately following a disaster” (44). Although Gerber briefly cited his experiences with victims of the 1944 explosion, his lecture focused on articulating the problems with sight recognition and recommending coroners develop their technical skills and expand their professional networks. He suggested using cases in the morgue to practice observation and investigation of the anatomy, organizing a local disaster preparedness team, and studying the experiences of other professionals who had experienced mass fatality disasters (44).

Learning from fellow professionals was possible due to an increase in medical publications on identification work in this period, as demonstrated by the case of the 1949 Noronic ship fire in Toronto. The identifications were overseen by a group called the Medical Identification Committee (MIC), which was comprised of physicians, dentists, and pathologists, who oversaw a larger team of technicians. The very existence of such a committee reflects both the formalization of identification work in this period and the shift away from purely criminological expertise in the morgue. Several members of the MIC would publish on their experiences. Pathologist T. C. Brown spoke about the committee’s work to the International Association of Identification and published his speech in Finger Print and Identification Magazine in 1950; other publications by Brown and his associates also appeared in JAMA and The American Journal of Roentgenology and Radium Therapy, among other publications (45 -48). Not only did the Noronic fire provide valuable information about the particular process undertaken after the fire, it also provided models for how to organize identification work. For example, the team used a “crossword puzzle” chart that allowed the team to correspond victim names with unidentified bodies; in his article, Brown included the chart and explained its use, thereby describing not only the forensic techniques undertaken in Toronto but also the means of assessing the data produced through those techniques. These publications helped to translate the specific details of a unique mass fatality event into more generalizable procedural information that would help future identification teams.

Conclusion

Although long established in the United States, sight recognition has never offered a perfect solution to the destructive power of disaster upon the human body. Even under the best circumstances, sight recognition could not guarantee that every victim of disaster would be identified or that every identification would be accurate. Yet, despite these limits, it would be shortsighted to dismiss the method as primitive. Between the Civil War and World War II, Americans pursued a procedural form of sight recognition, performed within the designated space of the temporary morgue, that incorporated as many new technologies as was feasible to make the method a success. As such, sight recognition was already in a period of expansion and formalization before the introduction of forensic techniques.

The movement toward forensic practices in the disaster morgues of the 1940s, however, did mark a significant turning point in the history of DVI. The powerful social, bureaucratic, and legal imperatives to identify the dead that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries made it valuable to have even a fraction of the body identified. Forensic identification promised to meet that need by using cutting-edge techniques to move past the limitations of sight recognition and its dependence on the body’s surface appearance. The ability of forensic experts to transform fragments back into people make it an extremely powerful tool that radically redefined the temporary morgue and the meaning of identification. Identification became a scientific practice, no longer swayed by the subjective recognition of family or friends but grounded in data culled from the body. With that shift came a greater attention to the role of data management within the morgue. Simultaneously, the temporary morgue became a less public space, which created new political and social complexities that DVI experts are still wrestling with today. Families of the deceased were once very central to the identification process but now must place their trust in the experts tasked with identifying the remains. As such, contemporary DVI practices continue to evolve, not only technologically but socially as well.

Biography

Vicki Daniel, Department of History, Case Western Reserve University

Project conception and/or design, data acquisition, analysis and/or interpretation, manuscript creation and/or revision, approved final version for publication, accountable for all aspects of the work.