‘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.
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