Nutshell Dioramas Of Death

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Frances Glessner Lee(1878 - 1962) was a New England socialite and heiress who grew board with the confines of womanhood in her era and became interested in forensic medicine and went on to dedicate her life to its advancement. It all began when a classmate of Frances' brother came to vacation with the Gressner family in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. George Burgess Magrath went on to teach legal medicine at Harvard and became chief medical examiner of Suffolk county. In 1934 Frances endowed the Department of Legal Medicine with $250.000 which would be the equivalent of several million dollars today. The department was the first such program in North America. She went on to be appointed captain of the New Hampshire State Police in 1943, the first woman to hold such a position. It was in the mid 40's that she began to create the Nurshell Studies of Unexplained Death which was a series of 18 miniature crime scene dioramas. She ws able to combine her passion for forensic science and her love of dolls. She presented them to the Harvard Department of Legal Medicine and they went on to be housed at the Maryland Chief Medical Examiner's Office. Up to that time many murders went unsolved because detectives either tampered with or misinterpreted evidence and coroners made mistakes in autopsies. Seemingly trivial details can mean the difference between a solved case and a case going cold for years. Studying the miniatures a student could learn more in an hour than they could learn in months of more general study. More info here: