Pioneer in a peculiar science

The first distinguished person I ever met told me that he preferred funerals to weddings. ‘Weddings,’ he said, ‘are so final.’

It is true that many changes take place to the human body after death, practically all of them of surpassing unpleasantness. Perhaps that is why no one before Professor Bass had the idea of observing the decomposition of human corpses under various conditions (or at least the determination to carry it out). He created an academic institution devoted exclusively to this purpose, the only one of its type in the world. Until then, knowledge of human decomposition was purely adventitious, the product of accumulated chance observations.

The aim of the systematic observation of the post-mortem dissolution of the human form is to help the police to find the guilty (and exculpate the innocent) whenever a victim of suspected foul play has been found. If Dr Bass, perhaps impelled by his ghost writer, somewhat overstates the scale of his accomplishments — after all, forensic science did not begin with him and had many startling deductions to its credit before the Body Farm was even thought of — who can blame him? For which of us is not inclined to inflate his own importance?

Professor Bass trained first as a physical anthropologist, and spent the first decade of his career excavating Indian graves in the Mid-West. The data from his researches refute once and for all the notion of the noble savage and the simple peaceful life. According to the human remains he discovered, life among the Indians was nasty, brutish and short. If they survived childhood at all (and on the balance of probability, they were more likely not to do so), it was largely to scalp or be scalped.