Suspicious deaths have been with us since the first hominids, or before. Better scientific explanations have often come at the cost of full social understanding.
References
1.
Maxwell AtkinsonJ.. Discovering Suicide: Studies in the Social Organization of Sudden Death (Macmillan, 1978). Classic sociological study of how coroners in Britain classify deaths as suicides.
2.
SimonCole.Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification (Harvard University Press, 2001). Documents the historical rise of fingerprinting and also questions scientific claims about the identification technique's infallibility in court.
3.
EricKlinenberg.Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2002). Influential and controversial study of the 1995 lethal heat wave in Chicago; medical examiners first documented the excess mortality for which Klinenberg offers a broader social explanation.
4.
StefanTimmermans.Postmortem: How Medical Examiners Explain Suspicious Deaths (University of Chicago Press, 2006). Ethnographic look behind the scenes in a medical examiner's office that explains how medical examiners classify deaths as they do and the social consequences of their work, including advice on how to get away with murder.
