Alfred Swaine Taylor was an English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 toxicologist and medical writer, who has been called the "father of British forensic medicine"

Taylor studied medicine at Guy's Hospital

Guy's Hospital

Guy's Hospital is a large NHS hospital in the borough of Southwark in south east London, England. It is administratively a part of Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust. It is a large teaching hospital and is home to the King's College London School of Medicine...

 and St Thomas's Hospital and was appointed Lecturer in Medical Jurisprudence at Guy's Hospital in 1831. In 1832 he succeeded Alexander Barry as joint Lecturer on Chemistry with Arthur Aitken

Arthur Aitken

Major General Arthur Edward Aitken was a British military commander.Born in Rochford in Essex, by the time of the 1871 Census he was a 9-year old pupil at a school in Brighton, Sussex.He began his military career in 1882 as a cavalryman...

. He published textbooks on medical jurisprudence

Medical jurisprudence

Medical jurisprudence, or forensic medicine in the broad sense , now embraces all matters which may bring the physician into contact with the law...

 and toxicology

Toxicology

Toxicology is a branch of biology, chemistry, and medicine concerned with the study of the adverse effects of chemicals on living organisms...

, contributed to the Dublin Quarterly Journal and medical periodicals, and edited the Medical Gazette. He appeared as expert witness in several widely-reported murder cases. He also developed the use of hyposulphate of lime as a fixing agent for photography.

Works

• On the Art of Photogenic Drawing, 1840
• Manual of Medical Jurisprudence, 1844
• Medical jurisprudence, 1845
• A thermometric table on the scales of fahrenheit, centigrade and Reaumur, compressing the most remarkable phenomena connected with temperature, 1845
• On the Temperature of the Earth and Sea in Reference to the Theory of Central Heat, 1846
• On poisons in relation to medical jurisprudence and medicine, 1848
• On poisoning by strychnia, with comments on the medical evidence at the trial of William Palmer for the murder of John Parsons Cook, 1856
• The principles and practice of medical jurisprudence, 1865

External links

• Picture at Science and Society website
• Coley, Noel G., 'Alfred Swaine Taylor, MD, FRS (1806-1880): forensic toxicologist', Medical History, 1991, 35:409-427
• Earles, M. P., ‘Taylor, Alfred Swaine (1806–1880)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, accessed 20 Dec 2007
• Flanagan, Robert James and Katherine Watson, 'Alfred Swaine Taylor MD FRS (1806-1880)'