Frances glessner lee dioramas

How did frances glessner lee discover her passion for forensics
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What did frances glessner lee do

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“Mother” Lee

Frances Glessner Lee was born in 1878 to John Jacob Glessner and Frances M. Glessner in Chicago, Illinois. John J. Glessner was vice president of International Harvester and as such, young “Fanny” was born into a life of Gilded Age luxury. She and her brother, George, grew up on fashionable Prairie Street in Chicago and were raised in a house that “epitomized the aesthetic and moral ideals of nineteenth-century domesticity.”¹

Little has been written about her early life; except that she was educated at home by private tutors and that she learned the domestic arts of interior design, metalwork, sewing, knitting, crocheting, embroidery, and painting from her female relatives.²

Courtesy of The Glessner House Museum

According to some, her father believed that ladies shouldn’t know anything about the human body.

She had aspired to study law or medicine, but her parents, who believed that “a lady didn’t go to school,” refused to allow her to attend a university. Instead, she married up-and-coming attorne

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Biographies

Mrs. Frances Glessner Lee at work on the Nutshell Collection, 1940s-1950s

Glessner House Museum, Chicago, Illinois

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Frances Glessner Lee (1878–1962)

Frances Glessner Lee (1878–1962), a New England socialite and heiress, dedicated her life to the advancement of forensic medicine and scientific crime detection. The seeds of her interest began when her brother's college classmate, George Burgess Magrath (1870–1938), vacationed with the Glessner family at their summer home in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Magrath, then a medical student, went on to teach legal medicine at Harvard and to become the chief medical examiner of Suffolk County (Boston). In 1931 Mrs. Lee helped to establish the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard, the only such program then in existence in North America. From that time on, she became a tireless advocate for forensic science. In 1934 she presented the department with a collection of books and manuscripts, which became the Magrath Library of Legal Medicine, and in 1936 endowed the department wit

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Murder Is Her Hobby: Frances Glessner Lee and The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death

Lee, the first female police captain in the U.S., is considered the “mother of forensic science” and helped to found the first-of-its kind Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard University when the field of forensics was in its infancy. At the time, there was very little training for investigators, meaning that they often overlooked or mishandled key evidence, or irrevocably tampered with crime scenes. Few had any medical training that would allow them to determine cause of death. As Lee and her colleagues at Harvard worked to change this, tools were needed to help trainees scientifically approach their search for truth. Lee was a talented artist as well as criminologist, and used the craft of miniature-making that she had learned as a young girl to solve this problem. She constructed the Nutshells beginning in the 1940s to teach investigators to properly canvass a crime scene to effectively uncover and understand evidence. The equivalent to “virtual reality” in their time, her masterfully