Song Ci (1186-1249), courtesy name Huifu, was a native of Jianyang (present-day Nanping, Fujian), and a famous forensic scientist of the Southern Song Dynasty.
He practiced Confucianism in his early years, and after entering the army, he served as a magistrate in more than ten places, and was responsible for many prisons, and during his tenure as a pacifying envoy in Guangdong, he could not afford to be entrusted, at the age of 64, he handled countless cases in his lifetime, and most of them were personally experienced, and before his death, he wrote a five-volume "Collection of Washed Grievances", which is the crystallization of his life's experience and ideas in handling cases, and can also be described as the world's first systematic forensic science monograph.
The "Collection of Washed Grievances" is Song Ci's physical and mental blood, he applied the advanced Chinese medicine at that time to the examination of prisons, and analyzed the cases of successive official governments since the pre-Qin Dynasty, drew on the actual experience in them, and summarized them to make it organized, systematic and theoretical, so that once this book came out, it immediately became an indispensable book for prison officials at that time and in later generations, the significance is not trivial, and its authority is almost unquestionable.
In the past eight hundred years, the "Collection of Washed Grievances" has been translated into a variety of languages and circulated overseas, and many countries are still studying this book, and the pragmatic professionalism in its books has written a brilliant page in the history of world medicine, forensic science, and science and technology, and is still praised by the world.
At that time, the state and county governments often did not handle the matter of prisons rigorously enough, and the Standing Committee appointed some officials with no practical experience to handle them; these people misheard and mistrusted, were afraid of suffering and tiredness, and perfunctorily conducted on-the-spot investigation of the case, so it was inevitable that judgment would be wronged, so that black and white were reversed, right and wrong were reversed, and unjust prisons were abounded.
As a prison official, Song Ci deeply resented this phenomenon, and he attached great importance to the actual examination of the facts of the case, and did not easily make any decision, believing that the punishment was determined by the facts of the crime, and the facts of the crime must be seriously examined before they could be determined, so the test results often determined the severity of the punishment, and even the stakes were with life, so we must be cautious and never paralyzed.
In dealing with many human life cases, another outstanding manifestation of Song Ci's attitude toward corpses is that he abandons all the dogmas of the past, such as "do not treat incivility" and "incivility and do not act", out of the actual needs of the examination, contrary to the ethical concepts and specific practices of the time, and warns all the procuratorial officials not to let people cover their privacy, so that they must be carefully inspected where the holes, tricks, and hairs of the corpse are hidden, so as to prevent needles, cones and other deadly foreign bodies, and completely break the forbidden area of autopsy examination.
His pragmatic and truth-seeking is embodied in the examination of dead and injured, which not only requires a profound medical foundation, but also must master many scientific knowledge and methods, and fully apply various knowledge and diagnostic methods related to physiology, pathology, pharmacology, toxicology, etc. to the actual examination of dead and injury.
Only from the book "Collection of Washed Grievances", the test methods contained in it are diverse, comprehensive, and the accuracy is amazing, and some methods, although they belong to the category of experience, are almost the same as modern science, such as the method of saving the hanging discussed in the book, which is almost no different from the contemporary artificial respiration method, and there is the use of various drugs to treat scars to prevent external infection, eliminate inflammation, fix wounds, etc. Although the drugs used are different, they are basically consistent with modern scientific principles, and so on. Abound.
Song Ci handled all kinds of prison affairs, did not abide by the rules, did not stick to the form, did not fall into ethical concepts, did not misjudge in vain, paid attention to the results of the examination, and thoroughly used and recorded the methods and means of these inquests, all of which embodied his scientific spirit of being realistic and realistic, and also left a forensic science monograph "Collection of Washed Grievances" for posterity, which created forensic identification, so it was respected by the world as the originator of world forensic science.