The Sherlock effect : how forensic doctors and investigators disastrously reason like the great detective / by Thomas W. Young.

chapter 1 Reasoning Backwards / Thomas W -- Young -- chapter 2 Sherlock and His Successors / Thomas W -- Young -- chapter 3 Categorical Intuitive Deduction / Thomas W -- Young -- chapter 4 How Detective Fiction Turned into Medical Science / Thomas W -- Young -- chapter 5 Good Cop, Bad Cop / Thomas W -- Young -- chapter 6 You Don't Know What You Don't Know / Thomas W -- Young -- chapter 7 Can't Shake This Feeling / Thomas W -- Young -- chapter 8 The Emperor Wears No Clothes / Thomas W -- Young -- chapter 9 Broken Bones in Babies / Thomas W -- Young -- chapter 10 The Unified Hypothesis / Thomas W -- Young -- chapter 11 Failing the Infamous / Thomas W -- Young -- chapter 12 The Deadly Bed / Thomas W -- Young -- chapter 13 Failing the Numerous Not-So-Infamous / Thomas W -- Young -- chapter 14 The Double Dip / Thomas W -- Young -- chapter 15 Modern-Day Sherlocks / Thomas W -- Young -- chapter 16 The Battered Football Player Syndrome / Thomas W -- Young -- chapter 17 Tree People and Forest People / Thomas W -- Young -- chapter 18 The Perils of Pediatric Forensic Pathology / Thomas W -- Young -- chapter 19 Kayakers, Spider Bites, Jack the Ripper, and Speaking for the Dead / Thomas W -- Young -- chapter 20 CSI, Adam Ruins Forensic Science, Forensic Tree Teams, Divinity School, and a Bridge in Melbourne / Thomas W -- Young -- chapter 21 Confessions of a Former Chief Medical Examiner / Thomas W -- Young.

Forensic science is in crisis and at a cross-roads. Movies and television dramas depict forensic heroes with high-tech tools and dazzling intellects who—inside an hour, notwithstanding commercials—piece together past-event puzzles from crime scenes and autopsies.? Likewise, Sherlock Holmes—the iconic fictional detective, and the invention of forensic doctor Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—is held up as a paragon of forensic and scientific inspiration—does not "reason forward" as most people do, but "reasons backwards." Put more plainly, rather than learning the train of events and seeing whether the resultant clues match those events, Holmes determines what happened in the past by looking at the clues.? Impressive and infallible as this technique appears to be—it must be recognized that infallibility lies only in works of fiction. Reasoning backward does not work in real life: reality is far less tidy.?