The art of tracing footprints

A brief history of one of the earliest forensic techniques

‘There is no branch of detective science which is so important and so much neglected as the art of tracing footsteps. Happily, I have always laid great stress upon it.’

Sherlock Holmes extolls the virtues of footprinting in his first ever case, A Study in Scarlet but, by the time Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective story was published in 1887, real-life detectives were regularly using footprint analysis in the investigation of crime. This form of early forensic science has a long and fascinating history, sometimes with drastic consequences.