Forensics and a Civil War skull collection

How do bones heal -- and how fast?

Prior to this study, forensic anthropologists could only say that cranial injuries happened either around the time of death or sometime before it. Now they can trace a particular injury to one week, six weeks, or immediately prior to death. . .

The skeletal remains that Barbian and Sledzik studied are part of a collection of about 2,000 such specimens stored at NMHM. William Hammond, the Surgeon General of the US Army from 1862-1864, had Union doctors collect and carefully catalog skeletal remains from soldiers felled at battlefields from Antietam to Bull Run. Veterans' families sent bones to the museum for decades.

Posted by David on May 27, 2008 9:33 PM