- Who
- Sung Tz'u
- Where
- China ()
- When
- 1300
According to internationally renowned forensic biologist, Mark Benecke (Germany), the study of insects recovered from crime scenes and corpses can be traced back to a 13th-century medico-legal text book entitled Hsi Yuan Lu (The Washing Away of Wrongs) by Sung Tz'u (China), a lawyer and death investigator. When called upon to investigate a fatal stabbing in a rice field, Sung Tz'u asked workers to lay down their sickles; soon afterwards, blow flies were attracted to one particular sickle covered in invisible traces of blood, compelling its owner to confess to the crime. It is now known that certain blow flies such as Calliphora vomitoria have a preference for laying their eggs in fresh blood.
