THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Friday, February 21, 2020 |A
Forensics
In a Nutshell
18 Tiny Deaths
By Bruce Goldfarb
(Sourcebooks, 351 pages, $25.99)BOOKSHELF| By Tom Nolan
T
he daughter of one of the wealthiest men in Chicago,
Frances Glessner Lee (1878-1962) grew up in a sheltered
world of privilege. Her father, John Jacob Glessner, was
a vice president of the agricultural-machinery company
International Harvester and helped establish the Chicago
Symphony, whose members were often guests and performers
at the Glessner mansion. Frances received private tutoring at
the family home, though she abstained from college rather
than attend any institution that wasn’t Harvard Medical
School (which did not then admit women). Instead she chose
early marriage and motherhood, wedding Blewett Lee, a
lawyer of conservative background and habits.
Today, Frances Glessner Lee is remembered, by those with
a knowledge of such things, for her contributions to forensic
education—and for her eye-catching “Nutshell Studies of
Unexplained Death,” miniature crime-scene re-creations used
to train investigators in the art of close observation. How did
this shy and insulated woman become, in the words of Bruce
Goldfarb, her capable
biographer, “nearly single-
handedly responsible for the
establishment of legal medicine
in the United States”? The clues,
at least in retrospect, were there
from the start, as Mr. Goldfarb
demonstrates in “18 Tiny Deaths,”
an engrossing and accessible
chronicle of Frances’s life and the
early years of scientific detection.
At 9, Frances endured a tonsil-
lectomy and two months of recu-
peration, which encouraged in her a
precocious interest in medicine. She
accompanied local doctors on visits to patients
and even assisted with minor procedures. She also took an
interest in her brother’s studies at Harvard Medical School.
When her marriage ended in divorce, Frances craved an
outlet for her intellectual and creative energies. “She felt a
drive to do something with her life,” Mr. Goldfarb writes,
“that was more meaningful and permanent, something in the
service of others, something that might change lives for the
better.” At the end of World War I, she moved to Boston to
become the resident manager of a home for returning
servicemen.
In 1929, at the age of 51, during a lengthy convalescence
following another surgical procedure, Frances became
acquainted with another convalescent-home patient: an old
medical-school classmate of her brother’s named George
Burgess Magrath, a Boston medical examiner who was called
on for advice and testimony throughout New England.
Here was someone with a cause worthy of Frances’s
enthusiastic support: the advancement of the study of legal
medicine and the reform of forensic procedure. Mr. Goldfarb
tells a great deal about Magrath’s career and, along the way,
conveys the primitive and unsatisfying state of forensics in
the early 20th century. Magrath came up in a time when
most states and cities didn’t have medical examiners but
labored under the coroner system, with deaths routinely
handled by elected or appointed officials who often had no
medical training. Suspicious deaths were investigated by the
police, but many crimes went unnoticed because they weren’t
obvious to an untrained eye. Autopsies were uncommon;
most coroners weren’t trained or required to perform them,
and many police officials thought them unnecessary and
distasteful. Despite the urging of Magrath and other experts,
the coroner system remained entrenched, a bulwark of
political patronage.Frances was struck by Magrath’s principled attitudes:
His aim was to expose the guilty, defend the innocent and
serve the victim. After observing him perform an autopsy,
Frances began her own informal study of anatomy and
medicine, acquiring an extensive library of rare and essential
texts. And she devised an ambitious plan to serve Magrath’s
professional mission and satisfy her own urge to make a
difference in the world. In 1931, she went to the president of
Harvard with a proposal that she fund a professorship of
legal medicine there, to be filled by Magrath, with herself as
his teaching assistant. She also proposed a much grander
gift to Harvard: a quarter-million-dollar endowment for the
establishment of a Department of Legal Medicine, to train
forensic pathologists. “What [Frances] was suggesting,”
writes Mr. Goldfarb, “was nothing less than creating an
entirely new field of medical practice from the ground up.”
Harvard agreed.
In the 1940s, Frances planned and hosted (at her own
expense) annual seminars at Harvard for police officials to
study the latest forensic techniques. And she devised and
built, as a teaching tool (again at her own expense), her
“Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death,” an extraordinary
series of scale-model dioramas of crime scenes. The idea
was not to present a puzzle, with a solution to be found,
but to display a setting as it would appear to witnesses, in
all its ambiguous complexity. Precisely detailed and
beautifully executed, the dioramas transcended the realm of
visual aid to become art.
Life magazine ran a photo essay on the “Nutshell Studies”
in 1946. MGM made a movie (“Mystery Street,” 1950) featuring
Harvard’s legal-medicine department. Until her death in 1962,
at age 83, Frances preferred to remain in the background. She
wrote in a “top secret” message to her advisory board: “For
me, it has been a long, discouraging struggle against petty
jealousies, crass stupidities, and an obstinate unwillingness to
learn that has required all the enthusiasm, patience, courage,
and tact that I could muster....Thishasbeen a lonely and
rather terrifying life....Iwasplaced in the category of ‘rich
woman who didn’t have enough to do.’ ”
Having shunned the limelight, Frances Glessner Lee, along
with her contributions to her chosen field, has been largely
forgotten. “I hope that I have done her justice,” Mr. Goldfarb
concludes. That he has.Mr. Nolan reviews crime fiction for the Journal.Frances Glessner Lee, little remembered today,
used her wealth and know-how to create the
Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard.Bloomberg Can Teach You to Make Music
M
ike Bloomberg’s is the
rarefied hauteur of the
technocrat. Anyone
who’s worked in an office since
the 1990s has dealt with the IT
overlord who tells you with a
paternalistic smile that “It can’t
be done that way” because of
this or that technical mumbo-
jumbo. The former mayor is
that guy on steroids.
With his self-satisfied regard
for technology, Mr. Bloomberg
carries a palpable disdain for
human craft. “I could teach
anybody, even people in this
room, no offense intended, to
be a farmer,” he said during a
2016 talk (recently gone viral)
at the University of Oxford’s
Saïd Business School. “You dig
a hole, you put a seed in, you
put dirt on top, add water, up
comes the corn.” Mr.
Bloomberg dug himself deeper,
turning to machine laborers
with the same condescension:
“You put the piece of metal on
the lathe, you turn the crank in
the direction of the arrow, and
you can have a job.” On the
other hand, in the information
age, “you have to have a lot
moregraymatter.”
There is nothing refined
about Mr. Bloomberg’s dismis-
siveness. The Roman poet Vir-
gil devoted his second major
work, “The Georgics” (Greek
for agriculture), entirely to the
subject of farming. It runs
more than 2,000 lines of dac-
tylic hexameter, the heroic
meter of Homer’s “Iliad” and
“Odyssey.”What Mr. Bloomberg fails to
understand is that technology
is the handmaiden to, not the
replacement for, human inge-
nuity in any endeavor—be it
farming, metallurgy or even
writing music.
Roughly 70 years before Mr.
Bloomberg began leasing his
eponymous terminals to finan-
cial workers world-wide, menmade fortunes in the stock
market using the nascent art of
technical analysis—the study of
stock-price movements—as
their sole guide. One of the
greatest of these early 20th-
century pioneers was Richard
Wyckoff, who, like everyone
else at that time, drew his
charts by hand on graph paper.
Today Wyckoff is considered
one of the fathers of technical
analysis. He was also among
the first to run a stock-market
subscription service, The Trend
Letter, published weekly start-
ing in 1911. Its subscribers
eventually numbered more
than 200,000.
Undeniably, it is much easier
today to assess stocks and com-
modities using a Bloomberg
Terminal. Its convenient aggre-
gation of a vast amount of fi-
nancial and market-moving in-
formation ultimately made its
creator a powerful plutocrat.
But the user still needs to know
how to interpret that informa-
tion. Modern investing relies on
the work of Wyckoff, while you
can be certain he and his con-
temporaries—Jesse Livermore,
William Gann, Humphrey Neilland others—didn’t rely on that
of Mr. Bloomberg. They used
only the primitive tools of pen,
paper and ticker tape yet
amassed great fortunes.
In my own profession, com-
posers have written music by
hand for centuries. I still write
my song drafts in manuscript
despite the advent of music-
notation software. When the
first of such programs began
to appear in the mid-1990s, I
resisted the trend. Still in its
infancy, the software was lim-
ited in function; it was faster
to write by hand. Eventually,
the programs became sophisti-
cated to the point that even
holdouts made the switch.
Yet no one would be fool
enough to say that the soft-
ware eliminates the need for
human creativity. Well, per-
haps one person would. I can
hear him now: “There are only
12 tones in a scale, right? You
just pick a meter and a key, add
a few instruments, up comes
the symphony.” Just don’t in-
vite me to the premiere.Mr. Opelka is a musical the-
ater composer-lyricist.By Gregg Opelka
With his regard
for technology, he
palpably disdains
human craft.OPINION
Coming in BOOKS this weekend
1774: The long year of American revolution • ‘Chinatown’
and the Los Angeles of old • The brief life of a ‘lost’
Mormon city • Librarians on the front lines • A history of
American exceptionalism • Sam Sacks on fiction • & moreAs thousands
of churches
close across
the U.S.,
many fret
about the in-
evitable decline of faith in
American life. Congregational
demise is troubling, but under-
reported data suggest that
fear of a secularizing America
may be overwrought. A reli-
gious renewal could be on the
horizon.
It’s true that denomina-
tion-based churches—Method-
ist, Baptist, Episcopal, Catho-
lic—have been on a downward
slope for years. But nonde-
nominational evangelical
churches are growing in num-
ber, from 54,000 in 1998 to
84,000 in 2012, according to
the Journal for the Scientific
Study of Religion. Pew Re-
search data show a similar
trend continuing to the pres-
ent, with steep declines
among mainline churches as
evangelical ones keep popping
up. And 42% of these new
congregations report growing
attendance, data from Lifeway
Research shows.
One reason for the success
of the new evangelical congre-
gations is their aggressive
pursuit of growth, which they
call “church multiplication”: A
new church will commit to
start several smaller churches
in a short time. Dave Fergu-
son, president of the church
leadership organization Expo-
nential, tells me that church
multiplication numbers are on
the rise. In 2015 only 4% of
Thank God, American Churches Are Dying
churches were multiplying,
according to research con-
ducted for Exponential by
Lifeway. Last year 7% were
doing so. Each percentage
point upward represents some
3,000 churches. Mr. Ferguson
says that if this growth is
maintained, “it will change
the spiritual landscape.”
Those multiplication ef-
forts aren’t only about in-
creasing the number of
churches. Fresh churches re-
placing and created from old
ones, armed with modern
ideas to attract and tend to a
new generation of believers,
can be exactly what a commu-
nity needs.
“Sometimes churches die,
and sometimes they should,”
wrote Ed Stetzer of Wheaton
College in 2018. “A new
church, not a reboot of the
old, should be started in its
place.” The leaders taking Mr.
Stetzer’s advice generally fo-
cus on creating churches that
cater to specific needs. There
is a church exclusively for em-
ployees of Disney World.
Spanish-language services are
more popular than ever.
“House churches,” composed
of neighbors meeting for in-
formal services—usually in
living rooms—are on the rise
as well. Popular Christian
leaders like Francis Chan, a
former megachurch pastor
who now advocates house
churches, offer free training
for this model.
Those with denominational
affinity will be sad to see a
certain kind of church fallaway. But the success of new
models shows significant
groups of people looking for
ways to live faithfully, albeit
in a less structured way.
Could this really signify a reli-
gious awakening?
Naysayers point to data
showing millennials are sig-
nificantly less religious than
previous generations. Yet half
of them are still in their 20s,
and much of the reporting
about their secular outlook
ignores how age affects beliefand practice. Every recent
generation has experienced
significant post-high-school
drops in church attendance,
but most wayward youths re-
turn after marrying and hav-
ing children. Given that the
average age for marriage has
increased seven years since
the 1940s, it’s too soon to dis-
miss millennials as godless.
And despite the rise of the
“nones”—those who don’t
identify with any religion—
evangelical Protestants and
Muslims are increasing in
number. Christian and Mus-
lim birthrates also outpace
those of the nones, not that
they should be written off
anyway. The Billy Graham
Center Institute found thatthis group is surprisingly
open to attending church at a
friend’s invitation, and most
view faith as good for society.
The largest population of
nones are millennials, so
these numbers offer a strong
indication that many will re-
turn to faith and church in
the future.
Much of the religious
growth in America also stems
from immigrant populations.
Nestor Gudino, an immigrant
from Argentina who opened a
church in North Carolina,
points to the power of the
Hispanic church. “Everybody
is putting their focus on the
Hispanic community, even in
the smallest towns, where
sometimes there is more His-
panic population than you can
even imagine,” he tells me
over the phone. As the His-
panic share of the U.S. popula-
tion grows, the percentage of
practicing Christians should
rise as well.
Complacency is dangerous,
but it’s important to realize
that religion in the U.S. is far
from dead. With a vibrant,
new church landscape on the
scene, there will be no short-
age of options to choose from
as millions of Americans
again find their footing in
faith. A selection of churches
may be dying, but their re-
placements are alive, well and
regenerating in ways the
American church has never
seen before.Ms. Andersen is a writer in
Indianapolis.As thousands close
across the U.S., lively
new congregations are
taking their place.HOUSES OF
WORSHIP
By Ericka
Andersen
What’s the
difference
between
Mike
Bloomberg,
Joe Biden,
Pete Butt-
igieg and
Amy Klobu-
char? That’s
the question.
On it rests all
the prospects for the former
New York mayor’s bid for
the presidency.
This week marked Mr.
Bloomberg’s debut on the na-
tional stage. Up to now, the
Bloomberg campaign has
been entirely prepackaged—
more than $400 million
worth of ads, canned state-
ments and stump speeches in
which Mr. Bloomberg refuses
to answer questions.
That ended with a Las Ve-
gas beatdown in Wednesday’s
debate. As expected, Mr.
Bloomberg’s opponents laced
into him for his wealth, his
stop-and-frisk policies as
mayor, his attitude toward
women, and lawsuits filed
against his company alleging
sexual harassment. Less ex-
pected was that Mr.
Bloomberg was utterly—pain-
fully—unprepared for the on-
slaught. He stuttered, barely
defended himself, sat meekly
as his rivals excoriated him.
The mayor several times
boasted that he’s the best
guy to take on Donald Trump,
even as everything he did
suggested the opposite.
Bad as the night was for
Mayor Mike, it’s unlikely to
prove fatal. His billions will
Bloomberg Says Me Too to Leftism
allow him to continue pro-
jecting a better image to vot-
ers, and there’s another de-
bate next week. It’s not even
clear if the predictable at-
tacks against him will reso-
nate. For every primary voter
turned off by claims that Mr.
Bloomberg is “buying” an
election, another might grav-
itate to a candidate who
promises to spend whatever
it takes to beat Mr. Trump.
For every Democrat offended
by Mr. Bloomberg’s past
comments, another may sim-
ply like that hehasare-
cord—of running a major
corporation and a city—in
contrast to a gaggle of pro-
fessional politicians.
Mr. Bloomberg’s bigger
problem was the rest of the
debate: the times he wasn’t
under attack. When he was
allowed to speak, he sounded
like every other Democrat on
the stage.
The Bloomberg team ear-
lier this week put out a
memo warning that Bernie
Sanders was running away
with the race and urging Mr.
Biden, Mr. Buttigieg and Ms.
Klobuchar to drop out and al-
low voters to consolidate
around Mr. Bloomberg. The
memo irked his rivals,
though it contained a basic
truth: Mr. Sanders is rolling
up the progressive vote,
while the “centrist” lane of
the party remains hopelessly
divided.
Voters remain undecided
in part because all those cen-
trist candidates sound alike.
Things got heated Wednesday
between Mr. Buttigieg andMs. Klobuchar, but can you
name a major policy differ-
ence between them? They’d
hike taxes, they’d create a
public medical-insurance op-
tion, they oppose school
choice, they’d rejoin the Paris
Climate Accord, they’d blan-
ket the economy in Obama-
like regulation.This is Mr. Bloomberg’s
opening—to offer a true al-
ternative to Mr. Sanders’s so-
cialism and pull the party
back from its lurch left. Last
year, when Mr. Bloomberg
was first toying with a run,
he looked ready to present
such a choice. He came out
swinging on banking regula-
tion, stop-and-frisk policy,
the #MeToo movement. He
slapped Democrats for want-
ing to abolish entire indus-
tries and derided the Green
New Deal as ridiculously ex-
pensive “pie in the sky.” He
has a history of supporting
pragmatic solutions, such as
charter schools.
Yet since he formally
joined the race, he’s rushed
to join the pack. He apolo-
gized for his city’s successful
stop-and-frisk policy, and
says he wishes he’d ordered
his police to end it sooner.
Earlier this month he un-
veiled an eye-popping plan toraise taxes by $5 trillion,
socking it to corporations
and rich people. (Hillary Clin-
ton promised only a $1.4 tril-
lion tax hike in 2016.) The
man who complained Demo-
crats offer things they can’t
afford now says he doesn’t
see the current $1 trillion an-
nual deficit as a problem.
This week Mr. Bloomberg
reversed himself on financial
regulation, promising to im-
pose a 0.1% financial-transac-
tion tax of the same type
proposed by Rep. Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez and to crack
down on Wall Street.
Mr. Bloomberg seems to
think all this is the price of
admission to the uberliberal
primary stakes. But the ex-
mayor already has plenty to
prove his progressive bona
fides: See his gun-control
proposals and climate and
abortion fervency.
Mr. Bloomberg’s best lines
of the night were those in
which he poked holes in pro-
gressive shibboleths. Asked
about the Sanders proposal
to require companies to put
employees on their boards,
Mr. Bloomberg said: “I can’t
think of a way that would
make it easier for Donald
Trump to get re-elected than
listening to this conversation.
It’s ridiculous. We’re not go-
ing to throw out capitalism.”
He got applause.
This field isn’t lacking in
progressives; it’s lacking
courage. If Mr. Bloomberg
wants voters to rally around
him, he needs to give them a
reason, not an echo.
Write to [email protected].On policy, there’s not
much to differentiate
him from Klobuchar,
Buttigieg or Biden.POTOMAC
WATCH
By Kimberley
A. Strassel