Industrial Revolution (1800’s-1940’s)

49 Frances Glessner Lee

Early Life

Frances Glessner Lee was born in 1878 to a wealthy family in Chicago. Her father pushed her and her brother to learn as much as possible. He hired private tutors to teach them. Frances Glessner found she had a passion for medicine. When her brother came of age to go to college, her father let him study at Harvard. However, Frances Glessner was not allowed to attend college because she was a lady, and he believed that women should not get a higher education. Instead, Frances Glessner married a lawyer, Blewett Harrison Lee, at the age of 19, and they had three children. However, they got a divorce in the 1930s (“Glessner House”, n.d.).

The Start of Her Career

Frances Glessner Lee could not go to college but did not let this stop her from learning. Frances

Library of Legal Medicine will be Opened Tomorrow. (1934, May 23). The Harvard Crimson. Retrieved December 6, 2022, from https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1934/5/23/library-of-legal-medicine-will-be/.

met one of her brother’s friends from college, Dr. George Burgess Magrath, and they soon developed a lifelong friendship. Dr.Magrath was considered the leading figure of his age in legal medicine. His work inspired Frances Lee to pursue her education in legal medicine (“Glessner House”, n.d.).

In 1936, Frances Glessner Lee donated $250,000 to the Harvard School of legal medicine to develop “The George Burgess Magrath Endowment for legal medicine” (“Ms.Frances G. Lee Gives”, 1936) This was a collection of rare books and sources accessible to Harvard students to encourage their pu

rsuit of knowledge in legal medicine. Some rare pieces included a 15th-century manuscript of Petrus de Abano’s De Venenis and a collection of pieces on  Charles J. Guiteau, President Garfield’s assassin (“The George Burgess”, n.d.).

 

The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death

In the 1940s, Frances Glessner Lee started her work on the nutshell dioramas, a collection of murder scenes created to help train police. Each diorama was a doll house room, and each was created with extreme attention to detail. Each murder scene contained intricate details that give clues to what happened, from the color of the doll corpses to the positioning of the window latches(“Murder is Her”, 2017). This mixture of craft and forensics was used to train police and to look at murder scene from a different angle. She was made the first female police captain in the USA and continued to work very closely with the police (“Mrs. Frances Lee, rich” 1962).

 

Impact Today

Even though the college of legal medicine at Harvard was dissolved, Frances Glessner Lee has had a substantial impact on the society we live in today. The Nutshells are still used today in training seminars today at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore(“Murder is Her”, 2017). The library that Frances Glessner Lee created and spent many years collecting for was donated to Countway library and is there to this day(“The George Burgess”, n.d.). Frances Glessner Lee had a very important role in being one of the first females in a male dominated field. She provided a new perspective to the field and her work became widely respected.

 

Work Cited

  1. Biber, K. (2013). IN CRIME’S ARCHIVE: The Cultural Afterlife of Criminal Evidence. The British Journal of Criminology, 53(6), 1033–1049. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23639952

  2. Boston Medical Library. (n.d.). The George Burgess Magrath Library of Legal Medicine. Center for the History of Medicine at Countway Library. Retrieved December 6, 2022, from https://collections.countway.harvard.edu/onview/exhibits/show/corpus-delicti/endowment-for-legal-medicine/magrath-library

  3. Endow Chair at Harvard: Mrs.Frances G. Lee gives $250,000 for teaching Legal Medicine. (1936, Sep 21). New York Times (1923-) Retrieved from http://libproxy.clemson.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/endows-chair-at-harvard/docview/101737034/se-2

  4. Glessner House. (n.d.). Retrieved December 1, 2022, from https://www.glessnerhouse.org/

  5. Kmietowicz, Z. (2015). The mother of CSI in a nutshell. BMJ: British Medical Journal, 350. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26518330

  6. Lee, F. G. (1952). Legal Medicine at Harvard University. The Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science, 42(5), 674–678. https://doi.org/10.2307/1139962

  7. Mrs. Frances Lee, rich widow who became criminologist, dies: New Hampshire police captain financed Harvard’s legal medicine department. (1962, Jan 28). New York Times (1923-) Retrieved from http://libproxy.clemson.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/mrs-frances-lee-rich-widow-who-became/docview/115931217/se-2

  8. Murder is her hobby: Frances Glessner Lee and the nutshell studies of unexplained death. Smithsonian American Art Museum. (2017, October 17). Retrieved December 6, 2022, from https://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/nutshells

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