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fact to become known as the “father of forensic science.” As a young man he had served as an army physician in North Africa, which gave him a chance to study bullet wounds. He also noted the importance of tattoos in identifying bodies.
    Lacassagne combined the scientific skills of a physician with the curiosity of a policeman. He was to use both throughout his career. In 1880 he founded the Department of Forensic Science at Lyons University, where he liked to remind his students, “One must know how to doubt.” 36
    Doubt was distinct from ignorance. Lacassagne had started his career when morgues and sometimes even cemeteries had bell-pulls for supposedly dead people to yank in case they were still alive and had only been in a coma when death was pronounced. The normal test for life was to place a mirror or feather in front of the mouth of the body, to see if the mirror would steam or the feather move, but these methods were by no means infallible.
    Lacassagne studied the significance of blotches on the body that appeared after death, deducing that blood collects at the lowest points of the body after circulation stops. If the body was moved within a certain time after death, the blood was still motile and the blotches could move, but after about twenty hours, the discoloration was permanent. He also noted that the body did not always cool at a given rate; earlier observers had generalized that the body temperature dropped one degree centigrade per hour during the first hours after death, but Lacassagne found that there were variations depending on the temperature of the environment. He also studied the onset and duration of rigor mortis, the stiffening and then relaxation of the body after life ceased. Such information was helpful in ascertaining the time of death.
    Lacassagne was also the first forensic scientist to show that a bullet could be matched to a particular gun. A few months before being called in on the Gouffé case, he had studied under a microscope a bullet that had been removed from the body of a murder victim named Echallier. Lacassagne noticed that the bullet had seven longitudinal lines, or striae, and theorized that they were the result of rifling — the grooves that were made inside gun barrels to cause the bullet to spin and thus move in a more accurate path. In the Echallier case, when the suspect’s gun was fired, it produced the same seven lines as were found on the test bullet. On that basis the suspect was convicted of murder. The science of ballistics was born.
    Nevertheless, when the exhumed body found at Millery was delivered to Lacassagne’s laboratory at Lyons University, he could not have been optimistic. Not only was it in a state of advanced decay, but as he told his students, “A bungled autopsy cannot be revised.” 37 Though Dr. Bernard had been a student of Lacassagne’s, he certainly had botched his attempt. Lacassagne decided to concentrate his examination on the bones and the hair. The work was gruesome, for the pathologist did not have the advantages of refrigeration or latex gloves. He plunged his hands into the putrid, maggoty flesh, cutting and scraping it away until the bones were exposed. The skeleton told him a lot. He found a deformation on the right knee that would have caused the man to walk with a limp. He discovered that the victim’s right ankle had been injured as well. Family members confirmed that Gouffé had walked with a limp owing to a childhood accident.
    Lacassagne agreed with the earlier pathologist’s conclusion that the cause of death had been strangulation, because there was clear damage to the thyroid cartilage. He thought, however, that it might have been manual strangulation, rather than strangulation by ligature or rope. He also disagreed with Dr. Bernard’s estimate of the victim’s age. Bernard had believed that the man was no older than forty, but Lacassagne put his age closer to fifty, which matched the forty-nine-year-old Gouffé.