The vicissitudes of the sea and the mulberry field of the world, gossip about the five thousand years of China. Hello everyone, I am Master Li.
As the saying goes, people die like lights go out. However, in China's vast history, there is such a divine detective, who relies on science to handle cases, and his life's effort is to let the "dead open their mouths" to wash away the injustice, he is the world's originator of forensic medicine Song Ci.
Song Ci's father was a former governor of Guangzhou, a governor of the Shogunate in Guangzhou, who was in charge of prisons in the shogunate. Under the influence of her father, Song Ci has a righteous personality since she was a child, but at this time he did not expect that he would embark on a forensic technical route.
The young Song Ci showed his intelligent, agile and talented side. As a teenager, he entered the door of his fellow confucian Wu Zhi, who was under the door of Zhu Xi, a famous philosopher, thinker, and theorist of the Southern Song Dynasty, so Song Ci became Zhu Xi's disciple. This status gave him the opportunity to associate with many of the scholars who were well-known at the time.
At the age of twenty, Song Ci stepped into the threshold of Taixue. At that time, Dr. Zhen Dexiu, a doctor of Taixue, was also a famous theorist, and he believed that Song Ci's article came from the heart, exuded a sense of truth, and praised him greatly. He was then accepted as a disciple. Under the dedicated cultivation of the division commanders, Song Ci entered the high school at the age of thirty-one. At that time, even if they passed the examination, they might not be able to get a vacant official position, but Song Ci had good luck, and he was soon awarded the post of a county lieutenant. But at this time, the change suddenly occurred, and the news came from the family that Song Ci's old father was seriously ill and needed someone to take care of him. Song Ci planned to push away this rare deficiency and go home to fulfill his filial piety. At this time, many people advised him to think carefully, and once this opportunity was missed, he did not know when it would be again, and even his mentor also spoke out to persuade him. But in the end, Song Ci replied that as a son of man, the official could not do it, and the kindness of his parents could not be repaid. Now that my father is seriously ill, if he ignores his father in order to become an official, it is contrary to human morality and intolerable. He resolutely returned to his hometown and took good care of his father. Later, when his father died, he studied at home.
When she returned home, Song Ci remained silent for nine years. It was not until he was forty years old that he was given the opportunity to become an official. In the following twenty years of eunuch career, Song Ci served as a senior criminal officer four times. But the knowledge he initially learned was nothing more than the Four Books and Five Classics and the governance of the country, but after taking up the position of prison proceedings, Song Ci realized that he had no small shortcomings in his professional skills. Therefore, song Ci, without any medical foundation, on the one hand, studied medical works assiduously and humbly sought advice from experienced medical officer Lang Zhong. On the other hand, he carefully summarized the experience of his predecessors, and constantly enriched his insights from the actual work cases, and worked hard to improve his professional level. As a result, Song Ci created a forensic legend of "letting the dead speak".
Once, when Song Ci was reviewing the case file, he found a murder case. The deceased in the case was an ordinary farmer, and the final verdict in the case file was suicide. Song Ci thought that now the season is just right, there is no famine and no harsh taxes, what can an ordinary farmer think of, as for seeking his own death? However, the detailed reason for the suicide was not recorded in the case file, and Song Ci felt that there must be something strange in it, and decided to retry the case while it was not long. He personally opened the coffin for autopsy and found that the deceased died of knife wounds, but the wound was light in the knife and heavier in the knife. He also inquired about the autopsy at that time, and learned that although the knife was in the hands of the deceased at the scene of the crime, it was not tightly held, and the knife could be taken out of his hand. Song Ci concluded that this must not be suicide, if committed suicide, the deceased will inevitably enter the knife in order to be less painful, and with this force, the strength of the hand will naturally increase, and the knife will definitely be tightly held in the hand. Coupled with the severe pain that can make the muscles tense, even if the person loses strength after death, the knife will be clenched in the hand.
After making this judgment, Song Ci sent people to extensively visit the deceased's neighbors, relatives and friends, and finally found out the grievances. It turned out that after there was an official eunuch in the peasant village, he would let loose the skeleton on weekdays, and the dogs and horses sounded. It just so happened that the local chief official was his father's protégé, and he turned a blind eye to his evil deeds, and the second generation of officials became even more arrogant. In the end, he coveted the beauty of the farmer's wife, and even sent the housekeeper to kill him directly, and then disguised himself as a suicide to let the government hastily close the case. However, Song Ci retried the case, arrested all the people, and convicted them. Song Ci was wronged by the peasant households, and won the praise of the local people, which caused a sensation.
During the Southern Song Dynasty, the feudal dynasty rarely had a period of prudent imprisonment. Zhao Xuan, the lord of the Southern Song Dynasty, personally issued an edict saying: "Prison, heavy matters." The examiner has the law, the dang has a comparison, and the doubter has a curse." Moreover, he also formulated a system of special evaluation of judicial officials, in which major and important cases may be reviewed by commissioners, and once unjust, false and wrongly decided cases are discovered and people's lives are taken, the judicial officials who sponsor the case will be punished with a cane at best, or exiled to prison.
In this context, a series of technical detection methods painstakingly studied and summarized by Song Ci came in handy. At that time, there was no concept of forensic medicine, and the servants who served as forensic doctors generally only gave a general cause of death because of their avoidance of corpses, and would not delve into clues that would help solve the case. But Song Ci's way of judging cases broke with that tradition. Out of the practical needs of autopsy, he boldly broke through the shackles of autopsy. Song Ci warned the inspectors of the corpse to be meticulous, and all the holes must be carefully examined once there was a possibility of a deadly foreign body. Moreover, Song Ci also demanded that the body should not be deliberately covered in any place, and once someone deliberately covered a certain place, it must be examined more, and specifically pointed out: "All women who examine women must not be ashamed."
Since Song Ci was Zhu Xi's disciple, he was naturally a famous scholar of science. However, his requirements for the examination of the corpse seriously violated the dogma of "seeing, hearing, speaking, and acting in a manner" and "there is no delusion inside and no arrogance outside". For a time, many theorists criticized him, and some of his former classmates did not support his approach. But Song Ci left behind the dogma of etiquette and only wanted to ensure that there was no injustice in the world. Unlike the idealism of the philosophers, Song Ci is more like a materialist who believes in science and has a lofty heart.
When Song Ci was more than sixty years old, he completed his life's work, "Collection of Washed Grievances", which included 53 contents, including general theory of examination, examination of wounds, autopsy, identification of injuries, and bone examination. Detailed discussions are also made on crimes, crime investigations, and procedures for the examination of legal officials. In this book, Song Ci not only introduced a lot of theoretical knowledge, but also compiled his actual work experience and real cases over the past twenty years, leaving a wealth of knowledge for future generations. Most of the forensic works of later generations have been based on this book, or have been annotated or supplemented. In addition, the "Collection of Washed Grievances" has also been disseminated overseas, and has made great contributions to the development of forensic science in the whole world, and has been translated into Dutch, English, French, German and other languages, and has been used as an official reference and teaching material. It was this first systematic ancient judicial examination book that laid the foundation for Song Ci's status as the originator of forensic medicine in the world.
The first sentence of the preface to the "Collection of Washed Grievances" reads: "Prison affairs are not more important than the great opening, the great opening is not more important than the initial love, and the initial love is more important than the test." "The work of performing autopsies is a very lowly profession in the eyes of ordinary people, but Song Ci is firmly involved in this industry. Because he knows that the determination of the facts of the case must be spoken of by evidence, and the examination is the top priority in obtaining evidence.
This work also further shows that Song Ci is a person who advocates science, and many of the knowledge he introduces in the book is still a compulsory course that forensic medicine needs to master to this day. Many of the tests he discovered were well aligned with modern science, and some of them are still active in the field of forensic testing to this day. For example, in the "Collection of Washed Grievances", a method of injury examination is recorded, this method of covering the bones with the help of red oil umbrellas is to rinse the bones with wine and vinegar, and observe them with a light source under the red oil-paper umbrella, and you can find the scars that are difficult to find. This method uses the principle of optics, the color displayed by opaque objects in the sun is selectively reflected, and the oil-paper umbrella can filter out some of the light that affects the observation, so that it is easier to find hidden scars. This principle of injury testing is still in use today, but the method has changed from the ancient red oil umbrella shading to the use of ultraviolet radiation.
In addition to recording autopsy and verification of death methods, the "Collection of Washed Grievances" also records many methods of saving people, and the book includes first aid methods for self-hanging, drowning, poisoning, heat stroke, frostbite and other situations, among which artificial respiration methods for self-hanging or drowning, gastric lavage and vomiting methods for poisoning are probably not unfamiliar to you today, and they are still methods still in use.
Perhaps this unparalleled work exhausted Song Ci's painstaking efforts, and two years after the completion of the "Collection of Washed Grievances", Song Ci, the ancestor of forensic medicine, bid farewell to the world. The Southern Song Dynasty poet Liu Kezhuang and Song Ci were friends with Mo Rebellion, and after his death, Liu Kezhuang wrote an epitaph of more than 2,000 words for him to commemorate his life of respecting life and safeguarding justice.
A little bit of mighty qi, a thousand miles fast wind. There is no injustice in the world, this is Song Ci's dream, and it is also the cause he strives for.
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