Song Ci Makes Death Investigation a Written Discipline

In 1247, during the Southern Song dynasty, the judicial official Song Ci produced a systematic guide titled Collected Cases of Injustice Rectified, which is also known in translation as The Washing Away of Wrongs. Designed as a practical handbook for judges and coroners, the work merged Song Ci's own administrative and investigative background with historical precedents in death investigation. His stated objective was to eliminate judicial errors that resulted from sloppy inquiries, false confessions, and misunderstood physical evidence.

Although composed in the thirteenth century, the earliest extant print edition survives from the succeeding Yuan dynasty, organized across five volumes containing fifty-three chapters. The opening volume outlines the statutory framework of the Song dynasty, documenting official imperial decrees that mandated physical inspections of casualties and wounds. Subsequent volumes outline the direct methodologies of postmortem examinations, providing systematic instruction on cleaning corpses to uncover obscure markings, analyzing tissue alterations, and offering medical therapies for surviving victims of violent assaults.