Death in a nutshell

I was never particularly interested in dolls or dollhouses as a child, but if I'd had something like this, you couldn't have dragged me away:

Frances Glessner Lee, a Chicago heiress, provided for just about every creature comfort when she fashioned 19 dollhouse rooms during the 1940s. She stocked the larders with canned goods and placed half-peeled potatoes by the kitchen sink. Over a crib, she pasted pink striped wallpaper.

But you might not want your dolls to live there.

Miniature corpses  --  bitten, hanged, shot, stabbed and poisoned  --  are slumped everywhere. The furnishings show signs of struggles and dissolute lives; liquor bottles and chairs have been overturned; ashtrays overflow.

Lee, a volunteer police officer with an honorary captain's rank whose father was a founder of the International Harvester Co., used her ghoulish scenes to teach police recruits the art of observation.

She called her miniatures the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, after a saying she had heard from detectives: "Convict the guilty, clear the innocent and find the truth in a nutshell." At her thousand-acre estate in Bethlehem, N.H., she set up a workshop called the Nutshell Laboratories. The first woman to become a member of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, she noticed how often officers mishandled evidence and mistook accidents for murders and vice versa. After endowing a new department in legal medicine at Harvard, she created the Nutshells as classroom tools, packing them with tiny but detectable clues: lipstick smears on a pillowcase, a bullet embedded in a wall.

"The inspector may best examine them by imagining himself a trifle less than six inches tall," she suggested in her curriculum notes.

NYT  review by Eve Kahn (at SFGate) of  The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death by Corinne May Botz,  via Bioephemera. The photo is from an exhibit called Visible Proofs at the National Library of Medicine.

By the way, do you notice anything odd about the placement of the corpse in the photo?

Comments

[prairie biker]

not really. she's at least in the kitchen where she belongs.

[Ana]

After his mead-induced killing spree, he went into the icebox to get himself a venison tenderloin to put on the grill.

[Ana]

Those are some pretty neat little scenes she has set up. I wish there were more explanations about the scenes. I guess you have to read the book.

[prairie biker]

she's face up, arms at her side, the oven and the larder are both open and the larder door is open above her. unless the door is not properly balanced, it should have closed as she fell past it. or perhaps she rolled under it, but then why are her arms at her sides?

[Ana]

PB's invited to all of our crime scenes.

[joanna]

I'm with PB on this one--she looks arranged in the kitchen, with the door being a huge clue.

[Ana]

Yeah. And she appears to be ironing, making pie, and cleaning the fridge all at the same time. Which, frankly, could have killed her.

[Melissa]

T'was the leftovers in the icebox what done her in.

[nursemyra]

fantastic!