Recent Book: Forensic Science: Methods of Forensic Science
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Abstract
The subject described as forensic science cannot be regarded as a homogeneous or individual discipline. It is factually a heterogeneous collection of disconnected fragments drawing on the resources of numerous and varied disciplines. These volumes, planned under the aegis of an international advisory board, are welcome inasmuch as each of the individual sections has been written or compiled by an author who can be regarded as an expert in the field about which he writes. Although differences in style and treatment may occur, the level of knowledge and expertise can be expected to be high in contrast with the patchiness of earlier books on forensic science in which a single writer attempts to cover many unrelated disciplines. Some unevenness is bound to ensue when writers from different countries, and with varying approaches to their subjects, confront an advisory board with the problem of producing a reasonably coherent volume whose content has to fit in with a legal framework that differs from one country to another. Moreover, the time taken for authors to produce their material, and for the editorial board to collate it, involves a time-lag before publication that means inevitably that a good deal of new material will meanwhile accrue in rapidly changing fields. In the introduction the promise is made that when a chapter is out-dated it is intended to include later chapters on the same subject. This may appear an expensive method of keeping a publication up to date: perhaps more so than if the production, from the beginning, had been issued in booklet form in binders from which out-dated sections could be easily discarded. In the chemical and toxicological field the first volume deals with the alkaloids, the barbiturate acid derivatives and carbon monoxide.