Johann Ludwig Casper

Johann Ludwig Casper was a German physician and forensic scientist, born in Berlin on 11 March 1796 and died there on 24 February 1864. He studied pharmacology and medicine in Berlin, Göttingen and Halle, took his doctorate in 1819 and travelled to France and England before returning to Berlin in 1822. His early interests were pathology and paediatrics, but from 1839 he was professor of forensic and public medicine and from 1841 director of an institute for teaching forensic medicine. In 1852 he published a work on rape and pederasty and how a court physician establishes them. In 1858 he proposed that a body putrefies in air, water and earth at a ratio of 1 to 2 to 8, later called Casper's Dictum. His Atlas zum Handbuch der gerichtlichen Medicin, published just before his sudden death, carried colored lithographs of gunshot wounds and may be the earliest book on forensic pathology to include them.