The politics of forensic medicine

On 25 March 1884, two representatives of the Siamese government paid a visit to Ernest Satow, the British consul to Siam. According to Satow's account of the meeting, the Siamese officials, including Phraya Thep Phlu of the Bangkok metropolitan police, came to inquire about legal proceedings against a British subject who was suspected of having caused physical harm to a Siamese subject, which resulted in death. One of the Siamese officials complained to Satow ‘that sufficient notice had not been given to him to send down an officer to the inquiry at the Agency [sic: Consul] this morning’.Footnote ⁷ Satow informed them that the legal proceedings that day were ‘merely a preliminary inquiry, & that if it appeared necessary to indite [sic: indict] the accused for manslaughter, a trial w[ou]ld take place with assessors [sic: a jury?], presided over by myself when due notice sh[ou]ld be given to’ the Siamese state. On the matter of procedure, Satow then

The Siamese officials, according to Satow's account, ‘agreed to get the doctors to hold a postmortem exam[inatio]n & then to decide whether he [they] w[ou]ld ask for a prosecution for manslaughter’ in the British Consular Court.

By invoking the standards of medico-legal evidence upheld by the British Consular Court in order to protect a British subject suspected of involvement in the death of a Siamese subject, Satow helped to politicize unnatural death in Bangkok. He signalled to Siamese officials that, in the absence of clear forensic evidence, British consular officials would not allow the Siamese state to pursue criminal charges against British subjects in the British Consular Court. The encounter therefore revealed medical jurisprudence as a new field of contestation in the ongoing negotiations over extraterritorial law and constrained Siamese sovereignty. Taking up such legal cases and the correspondence of Siamese government ministers, this article reveals how medico-legal scrutiny transformed dead Siamese bodies into politicized subjects of transnational concern.

The link between forensic medicine and politics is not as obscure as it might seem. The medico-legal investigation of cases of unnatural death, an institution known as the inquest, is deeply imbricated in the history of constitutional politics in British history. Although inquests initially began as a safeguard for the king's financial interests in cases of unnatural death, the institution eventually became a part of civic life and a guard against the excesses of autocratic rule.Footnote ⁸ Inquests were held in public spaces, usually a pub, and allowed for a sort of local sovereignty over the legal and economic repercussions of cases of unnatural death. By the early nineteenth century, the inquest had come to be viewed as a crucial facet of constitutional politics and a central feature in radical democratic political rhetoric, as candidates for the office of coroner like Thomas Wakley used it as a signpost for advancing the cause of popular liberties.Footnote ⁹ The relationship between forensic medicine and politics was perhaps even more salient in the colonial world, however, where arguments about European racial and moral superiority were substantiated through medical discourses about indigenous bodies.Footnote ¹⁰ Medicine was thus a seemingly objective means of giving voice to politicized and racialized ‘truths’ about native bodies.Footnote ¹¹ Racialized medical knowledge was not simply a matter of discourse, however: it came to life in colonial legal institutions, where the testimony of forensic experts could mitigate ‘European criminal culpability in murder trials’ by transforming a criminal act of homicidal violence into an ‘accidental’ death.Footnote ¹²

The early history of forensic medicine in late nineteenth-century Siam differs in crucial respects from that of both metropolitan and colonial British history. Officials in the Siamese state first confronted Western medical jurisprudence as one facet of its ongoing and asymmetrical engagement with foreign imperial powers. The Anglo-Siamese Bowring Treaty (1855) and other unequal trade treaties signed in its wake established extraterritorial legal exemption for foreign subjects residing in Siam.Footnote ¹³ In cases where foreign residents were accused of having caused physical harm to a Siamese subject, foreign consular officials could appeal to forensic evidence to protect their subjects, as evidenced by the incident in Satow's journal. In the final years of the nineteenth century, as the ranks of foreign residents grew and political status became malleable in a context of increasingly fraught imperial competition, the pursuit of justice in cases of unnatural death was effectively transformed into a matter of transnational political concern. In this distinctive social, legal, and political environment, the standards of evidence recognized by foreign consular courts became hegemonic, and officials in the Siamese Ministry of the Capital were ultimately forced to try and assimilate foreign (primarily British) standards and practices for the investigation of cases of unnatural death in the capital city. The early history of forensic medicine in Siam thus elucidates the practical ways in which law and medicine figured in contests over Siamese sovereignty.

Before delving into the efforts of the Siamese state to implement forensic medical investigations into cases of unnatural death, it is necessary to consider the broader conditions that helped to make unnatural death and forensic medicine a site of political contestation in Siam. The following discussion highlights two such factors: (a) extraterritorial legal rights and the associated problem of differential standards of medico-legal evidence in foreign consular courts and (b) the registration of Asian immigrants in Siam as the subjects of foreign powers. Both cases offer surprising insights into the ways in which political affiliation seem to have transcended racial difference in the colonial world.

Evidence on trail: extraterritoriality and consular courts

Extraterritoriality gave the European imperial powers ‘the right to protect their citizens according to their own forms and process of law and treat them as if they resided within territory actually subject to their jurisdiction’.Footnote ¹⁴ Extraterritorial legal privileges in Siam (as elsewhere in the colonial world) were conferred based on the political status of the individual. Foreign residents who registered as political subjects with the consulates of any of the imperial powers who had signed unequal trade treaties with Siam were eligible for extraterritorial legal status while residing in Siam. In practice, the extraterritorial rights of a foreign resident were protected by consular officials and legal institutions established by their home nation. In the event that the foreigner was named as a defendant in a criminal or civil action, any legal proceedings would have to take place in a foreign consular court. Foreign consular courts are therefore one important factor in explaining how forensic medicine rose to prominence as a matter of political concern in late nineteenth-century Siam. The trial of an ethnic Malay man named Salim, who was living in Siam under British legal protection, is a case in point.

In August 1892, Salim was brought before the British Consular Court in Bangkok on charges of having murdered a Siamese subject.Footnote ¹⁵ Salim's defence counsel, a British attorney named E. B. Michell, mounted a vigorous attack on the standards of medico-legal evidence and expertise recognized and employed by the Siamese state. Witnesses providing testimony on the nature of the injuries sustained by the deceased included the Siamese district official (nai amphoe), who admitted that he ‘made a post-mortem examination because he was told to do so by the authorities [his superiors]’, but he personally possessed ‘no medical knowledge’. An unidentified Siamese woman (likely a bystander or relative of the deceased) gave similarly non-expert evidence concerning the cause of death. Lastly, a Chinese man named Duan, who was employed by the Siamese state as the wound ‘dresser’ at Bangrak Hospital, noted a broken wrist, a cut to the head, and an injured bladder when describing the injuries sustained by the deceased. Duan also testified that the abdomen and side of the deceased's body were discoloured and, according to the account published in the Bangkok Times, he asserted that ‘These injuries were the cause of death’. Under cross-examination, Michell attacked Duan's credentials, revealing that, although he had been working as a wound dresser for seven years, he lacked any formal medical training or certification. By holding up Siamese forensic evidence against the standards for expert testimony demanded in the British Consular Court, Michell thus made quick work of the Siamese state's case against Salim.Footnote ¹⁶ But Michell was not finished yet.

The crux of Michell's defence came when he argued before the five British-born jurors selected to hear the case that, when deciding a case as serious as murder, definitive forensic evidence was required to determine the cause of death.Footnote ¹⁷ In his closing remarks, Michell

Michell's appeal to opium as a latent cause of death is just one way in which notions of race and morality were smuggled into the apparently objective science of forensic medicine; native bodies were assumed to be diseased bodies. There were, however, limits to such racialized disparities: the attorney Michell and likewise the panel of five British-born jurors evidently favoured Salim's political status as a compatriot over his racial status as a native-born Malay.

With Salim's fate in the balance, the jury found him not guilty of murder, and likewise of the lesser charges of manslaughter and aiding and abetting. In the end, the verdict rendered by the British jury in the case became a de facto referendum on the standards of medico-legal evidence in Siam. The jurors appended a brief statement to the verdict, noting ‘The jury wish to express their [sic] opinion that it would have been very much better if there had been some medical testimony as to the cause of death’ presented in the case. A postscript to the trial report in the Bangkok Times reads: ‘In consequence of the report on this verdict made by Chief [Police] Inspector Sheriff to the [Siamese] authorities, we understand, the police officials have been authorized to call in regular medical men in future, in cases where Siamese subjects have died from injuries supposed to be inflicted by foreigners.’

Transnational legal cases such as the trial of Salim were the backdrop for conversations among Siamese officials concerning the need for higher standards of medico-legal evidence in Siam. The early years of Siamese police inquests into cases of unnatural death were characterized by a high degree of executive authority over the meaning and outcome of cases of unnatural death.Footnote ¹⁹ By the last decade of the nineteenth century, however, extraterritorial law and foreign consular courts began to make an impression on the Siamese officials who governed the capital city. Cases such as the trial of Salim demonstrated the need for a new form of medico-legal expertise in the investigation of unnatural deaths above and beyond the executive authority of Siamese officials. The fact that Salim was Malay points to another important factor in the rise of forensic medicine as an authoritative form of knowledge: the enrolment of Asian subjects as foreign residents with extraterritorial legal privileges.

Western subjects, Asian bodies: the demographics of extraterritoriality

The unequal trade treaties that instituted extraterritorial legal privileges for foreign residents also increased commercial activity in Siam by granting residential rights to foreign merchants, and standardizing duties on goods for import and export.Footnote ²⁰ Siam thus became a desirable destination for a diverse group of immigrants from across South and East Asia. In the ensuing half-century after the first treaty was signed in 1855, a huge influx of labourers and merchants from British colonial territories in Asia and from coastal regions of southern China added to the cosmopolitan composition of Bangkok.Footnote ²¹ Moreover, the British annexation of Upper Burma in 1886, and the creation of French Indochina in 1887, brought a dramatic surge in the number of Asian immigrants—in addition to a large number of Asian residents of various ethnicities who were already living in Siamese territoryFootnote ²²—who could potentially claim extraterritorial legal status as the subjects of foreign powers. Between 1887 and 1895, British consular officials added 9,281 new British subjects to their rosters, in addition to untold numbers of subjects who had failed to register formally but who would nevertheless claim extraterritorial privileges if involved in legal proceedings.Footnote ²³ The English-language press kept tabs on the growing ranks of French legal subjects of Asian ethnicity; in August 1896, the Bangkok Times wryly noted that ‘The manufacturing of FRENCH SUBJECTS [sic] goes on at a merry rate. This morning the neighborhood of Custom House Lane [outside of the French consulate in the Bangrak area] was crowded with aspirants for that honour.’Footnote ²⁴ The dramatic increases in the number of registered foreign residents in Siam became a bone of contention between the British and French, who had opposing views on the question of extraterritoriality and how best to leverage it in their relations with Siam—and with each other.

The French maintained a legalistic and expansive interpretation of their rights under extraterritoriality, which they applied to the process of registering new legal subjects.Footnote ²⁵ This was especially true after the French took control of former Siamese territories on the west bank of the Mekong River in 1893. By 1895, they had established consular offices in the northern and eastern Siamese regions of Nan and Korat, which the British feared they would use as ‘centers from which large numbers of Siamese subjects of Cambodian or Annamite stock might be registered as French protégés to hinder Siamese authority’.Footnote ²⁶ From the British perspective, French registration had turned Siam into the stage for a kind of imperial battle by proxy waged through the logic of demographics, with the enrolment of legal subjects as armaments.Footnote ²⁷ Each new French Asiatic subject became a de facto outpost of French jurisdiction, and therefore an extension of its demographic—if not territorial—influence in Siam.Footnote ²⁸

The British, on the other hand, adopted a more conciliatory stance, hoping to ingratiate themselves to the Siamese.Footnote ²⁹ As early as 1884/85, Satow, who would soon be appointed the British Minister to Siam, expressed in a private memorandum his desire to effect ‘[t]he limitation of British protection to such persons as are actually entitled to it’.Footnote ³⁰ Satow's sense of entitlement was likely a matter of both racial belonging and cultural competency. In August 1895, Maurice de Bunsen, the ranking British official in Siam at the time, observed that ‘it cannot but be extremely galling to the self-respect of Siam to be deprived of jurisdiction over a large proportion of its entire population, made up by Asiatics, who, by birth, are as far removed as the Siamese themselves are from European ideals of justice’.Footnote ³¹ De Bunsen also questioned the logic of allowing Asian immigrants living under British protection in Siam to transfer extraterritorial privileges to their descendants indefinitely, given that they would presumably become assimilated in Siam over successive generations. Of course, the relatively conservative British position on the question of extraterritorial rights was also a matter of sheer economy, since asserting extraterritorial rights for the vast numbers of Shan, Burmese, and Indian labourers who had immigrated from Burma to Northern Siam to work in the teak logging industry would have overrun the limited resources of the British Consular Court in Bangkok.Footnote ³² The British therefore acquiesced to Siamese proposals to institute a ‘mixed court’ in the North, known as the International Court at Chiang Mai, with jurisdiction over civil cases involving Siamese and British subjects residing there.Footnote ³³ The French objected to the International Court—which they saw as a challenge to the institution of extraterritoriality—and lamented the fact that the British had given up their claims to extraterritoriality for so many of their subjects in Siam.

Extraterritoriality undoubtedly represented a ‘stigma of inferiority’ for Siam, and was ‘a major preoccupation’ for its leaders in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote ³⁴ Although it was not a part of the explicit discourse of state officials surrounding legal medicine and justice in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Siam, these shifting demographics of political belonging also help to explain how forensic medicine rose to prominence as a new form of authoritative knowledge. The registration of Asian residents in Siam as legal subjects of European imperial powers—so-called protégés—effectively blurred the racial and ethnic lines that had previously helped to define political belonging and its correlate, legal subjectivity.Footnote ³⁵ In a variation on the old adage, extraterritoriality, it seems, made strange political bedfellows, provoking sentiments of alliance and affiliation that transgressed apparent racial boundaries in favour of the assertion of imperial interests. In Siam at least, the enrolment of foreign protégés by the imperial powers elevated political subjectivity over racial or ethnic identity, confirming what Anne Stoler has long suggested—that ‘the quality and intensity of racism . . . varied enormously in different contexts and at different moments in any particular colonial encounter’.Footnote ³⁶ When foreign consular officials in Siam extended the extraterritorial legal privileges enjoyed by European- and American-born residents to Asian immigrants, it had the unintended effect of projecting the inequities of differential legal rights onto the dead: no longer could a dead Asian body be presumed to be a Siamese subject.Footnote ³⁷ This situation heightened the need for expertise in dealing with the dead; it called for the intervention of forensic medicine.Footnote ³⁸ Implementing the new standards of expertise fell to senior officials in the Siamese state, who had to come to terms with, and try to assimilate, the new standards of forensic evidence.

The politics of unnatural death in late nineteenth-century Siam

On 7 December 1892, Prince Naret (1855–1925), the Siamese Minister of the Capital, painted a vivid picture of the landscape of extraterritorial jurisdiction in Siam in a letter addressed to his counterpart in the Siamese Ministry of Religious Affairs. The letter begins by articulating the thorny issue of legal complaints filed by Siamese subjects against foreign residents enjoying the legal protections of extraterritoriality. Naret observes that ‘These days, legal cases often arise whereby people under foreign protection kill people under Siamese protection (Thai: khon fai sayam). In such cases, those under Siamese protection have to file a complaint [against the perpetrator] in consular court according to the dictates of the foreign treaties’.Footnote ³⁹ Thus far, the letter seems to introduce a general complaint against the system of extraterritorial law in Siam. In the final decade of the nineteenth century, however, Siamese government ministers were well accustomed to the system and they understood that a daunting series of comprehensive legal reforms would be needed before they might hope to challenge it.Footnote ⁴⁰ Naret's letter, however, goes beyond the general injustice of extraterritorial law to name a much more specific point of contention: the shortcomings of the Siamese state's manner of dealing with certain kinds of death.

The subject of Prince Naret's letter is in fact the emerging disparity between the standards of forensic evidence as implemented by the Siamese state versus those employed by foreign consular courts in Bangkok. ‘The foreign legations, which abide by the standards of international law’ in deliberating evidence and deciding whether or not to try a criminal case, ‘do not accept the testimony of [Siamese] district officials (phanak ngan amphoe) regarding postmortem examinations as evidence because those [Siamese] officials cannot clearly state the cause of death’.Footnote ⁴¹ In cases of unnatural death, Naret observed, foreign consular courts would only accept the forensic testimony of a medical doctor in the Western tradition (phaet) who had conducted an autopsy in order to determine the precise cause of death. The implication, Naret realized, was that ‘In cases where the Siamese side does not send a physician to inspect the corpse [and] conduct an autopsy revealing the cause of death, the [foreign] consular courts simply throw the matter out’.Footnote ⁴² Foreign legations in Bangkok were well within their rights to simply dismiss cases of suspected foul play against their subjects in the event that the Siamese state was unable to arrange for an autopsy performed by a medical doctor to determine the cause of death. In these instances, relatives of the deceased Siamese subject would have no further legal recourse. ‘This state of affairs,’ Prince Naret rightly observed, ‘has been to the detriment of the Siamese side.’Footnote ⁴³

In the coming months, as ministerial discussions over the standards of evidence employed by the Siamese versus the foreign consular courts would escalate, the notion of people on the ‘Siamese side’ ‘losing advantage’ to foreign residents in Siam would become a refrain, and at times a rallying cry, for efforts intended to overcome the inequities of the plural legal system created by extraterritorial law.Footnote ⁴⁴ This imbalance of justice between the vast majority of Bangkok's residents and the few who enjoyed privileged political and legal status as foreign residents helped consolidate a sense of Siamese subjectivity based on the recognition of collective disadvantage. Armed with this insight into the shifting effects of extraterritorial law on Siamese subjects, Prince Naret turned to forensic medicine as a means of addressing the injustice.

Bureaucratizing death investigations

The social and political realities of late nineteenth-century Siam—including extraterritoriality, foreign consular courts, and the growing ranks of Asiatic protégés—all conspired to make forensic medicine a significant form of authoritative knowledge. On the one hand, the standards of medico-legal evidence upheld by foreign consular courts became the last line of defence for foreign residents accused of harming Siamese subjects. On the other hand, officials in the Siamese state realized that forensic investigative procedures might be utilized in order to challenge and overcome the obstacles that prevented it from obtaining justice in foreign consular courts. But, while forensic medicine was touted as the answer to some of the inequities instituted by extraterritorial law, the question of how to actually implement this new form of expertise remained. In order to explain how forensic medicine was implemented in this period, we must look to Naret and his role within the rapidly changing state bureaucracy. These conditions helped to determine both the extent to which forensic medicine was implemented by the Siamese state and likewise the nature of elite interest in the dead and injured bodies of Siamese subjects.

Prince Naret's letter (dated 7 December 1892) to Jao Phraya Phasakorawong, which lays out the contentious matter of political subjectivity under extraterritorial law and provides evidence of a consolidation of notions of political belonging in Siam, also points to the potential solution to the problem. According to Naret, the solution lay in reforming the standards of forensic evidence in Siamese courts and introducing forensic medicine as part of the Siamese police inquest. He called for

Not wanting to burden the state with the added expense of dealing with the remains, Naret suggested that, once the autopsy was completed, the relatives of the deceased (literally, the ‘corpse's owners’, jao khong sop) could come and take the body away for burial or cremation; the evidence would be preserved by police in the event of a legal inquiry into the death (presumably requested by the Siamese state in a foreign consular court). The crux of Prince Naret's letter, however, is the question of who could be called upon to conduct autopsies for the Siamese police in cases of unnatural death that would meet the evidentiary standards of foreign consular courts.

The fact that Naret's letter was addressed to Phasakorawong, head of the Ministry of Religious Affairs (krasuang thammakan), suggests that he had already come up with a solution. In December 1892—in the wake of the recent reformation of the government ministries in April of the same year—the Hospital Department (krom phayaban), which was responsible for overseeing physicians who were hired by the Siamese state, was still an administrative division under the Ministry of Religious Affairs.Footnote ⁴⁶ Foreign physicians employed by the Hospital Department served as doctors and hospital inspectors, but they were also responsible for the education of medical students at the newly founded medical college. The doctors were educators, and the Hospital Department was therefore housed within the Ministry of Religious Affairs, which was responsible for education.Footnote ⁴⁷ If Naret wanted an economical solution to the challenge of meeting the standards of medico-legal evidence established in the foreign consular courts, he needed the help of Phasakorawong in reassigning a physician in the employ of the state to the task of conducting autopsies. Naret had one particular physician in mind: the American Dr T. Heyward Hays.

Dr Hays was the obvious candidate, for several reasons. First, and perhaps most importantly, he was already in Bangkok, working under contract on a fixed salary for the Hospital Department as Superintendent of Government Hospitals.Footnote ⁴⁸ Naret understood the terms of Hays's contract with the Hospital Department to be sufficiently vague as to allow them to add autopsies to his burden without incurring any additional expense. According to Naret, performing autopsies in cases of unnatural death was ‘the responsibility of Dr. Hays on account of his salaried appointment with the [Siamese] Hospital Department, which was charged with caring for the injuries and illnesses of the people’.Footnote ⁴⁹ In cases where a foreign subject was suspected of having killed a Siamese subject, Naret proposed that the police would summon Dr Hays, who would then go and inspect the corpse (at the scene) and later conduct a surgical autopsy (presumably at a government hospital) to determine the exact cause of death. Hays would then compile an inquest report and give a copy of the report to police officials, who would preserve it as evidence in the event of any legal case that might arise in the consular courts. The plan had the virtue of thrift. Unfortunately, the very thrift of the plan would be its downfall, hampering the progress of forensic science and medicine in Bangkok for several years, and leading to revealing conversations about who was qualified to present forensic testimony before the consular courts.

Days after Naret submitted his plan to Phasakorawong, it was clear that Dr Hays was unwilling to accept the new role as coroner to the Siamese state. When informed of the state's plans, Hays submitted a counter-proposal to the Hospital Department through an official named Khun Phisitsaphawijan.Footnote ⁵⁰ Hays reported that ‘there are many students at the [newly founded Siamese] medical college who have sufficient knowledge to be able to’ conduct post-mortem examinations and autopsies in cases of unnatural death, and that ‘the students should therefore be made to conduct autopsies as requested by the Ministry of Local Government’.Footnote ⁵¹ According to Hays, there were four students in particular who had been trained in surgery and were capable of performing the duties. Hays further proposed that the students might share the duties of inspecting corpses as needed by the Ministry of Local Government on a rotating basis. He, did, however, add one concession to Prince Naret's original plan: if a particular case should prove too difficult for the medical students, then Dr Hays would accompany them and supervise in the examination.

The original proposal that reached the ears of Dr Hays was geared towards addressing the specific problem of reforming Siamese inquest procedures in such a way that they would produce evidence that met the standards of foreign consular courts. The Siamese police needed to produce appropriate documentary evidence in cases of unnatural death so that foreign courts could no longer simply dismiss criminal complaints against foreign residents suspected of having harmed Siamese subjects. The proposal arrived in a period of significant changes in the Siamese government, however, and Dr Hays seems to have misunderstood the scope of the proposed changes, which were essentially an attempt to reform the standards of Siamese evidence law in practice without addressing the question in theory.Footnote ⁵² In his response to Prince Naret, Hays stated that he would not be able to perform both his current duties as inspector of government hospitals and the additional responsibilities of the newly proposed role, which he understood to be that of a ‘regular medical officer of the court’ (mo prajam samrap san). Hays reiterated his offer to recommend students from the medical college to fulfil the role of coroner and suggested that, ‘in important cases’, he ‘or another European physician could be assigned to assist in the investigation’.Footnote ⁵³ Yet Hays's recommendations went still further, overstepping the ambitions of Prince Naret and helping to demonstrate the precise nature of the Siamese state's interest in forensic medicine at the time.

Hays suggested that the Ministry of the Capital might institute inquest procedures for all cases of unnatural death—‘not just in cases where foreigners killed Thai people [sic: khon thai], but in all cases including even the lowliest serf’.Footnote ⁵⁴ If such a system were put in place, Hays thought that the graduates of the newly established Siamese Royal Medical College would be able to fill this new role, which required a person knowledgeable in (Western) medicine (phu ru wicha phaet). Medical students signed a contract as part of their enrolment in the college, which required them to work as civil servants for the government for a period of three years after their graduation.Footnote ⁵⁵ Since many of the students were unable to find appropriate medical work within the Siamese government upon graduation, he reasoned, they might each be given a district where they could support themselves through fees charged to the state for each autopsy (and presumably other medical services provided to the populace at large). In effect, Hays's proposal called for the application of forensic medicine at the level of population governance in a normative sense; he advocated extending forensic investigation to all cases of unnatural death in Siam. Discussions within the Siamese state over forensic medicine, however, trended in the opposite direction. Juxtaposing Hays's proposal with the ensuing plans made by Naret reveals a point of inflection in the relations between medical science and Siamese political life in the last decade of the nineteenth century.

For Naret and other Siamese officials, the emerging question of their political responsibility to a group of people who were, by default, Siamese legal subjects was still determined by the exigencies of imperial politics. Naret was interested in forensic medicine only in so far as it might be useful in addressing the conditions of the Siamese state's diminished sovereignty. For him, forensic medicine provided an important form of leverage in rare but consequential cases of unnatural death that had the potential for transnational legal repercussions. An autopsy allowed the Siamese state to present expert medico-legal evidence against foreign residents suspected of having injured or killed a Siamese subject. This pragmatic, transactional arrangement with a new form of expertise was not indicative of a shift towards a broader, more encompassing sense of political solidarity and responsibility to the Siamese body politic. In many ways, it corresponded to long-standing patterns of elite interest in new and foreign sources of knowledge.Footnote ⁵⁶ By calling attention to the (dead) bodies of Siamese subjects, forensic medicine did not level or undermine the hierarchical nature of social and political life in Siam; instead, it seems to have reinforced it by allowing Siamese elites to martial Siamese bodies more effectively in the course of political projects intended to bolster the state's claims to sovereignty.

The consolidated sense of Siamese subjectivity that emerged from the engagement with forensic medicine is emphatically not the sort associated with individual agency and the constitution of political life that normative understandings of civil society would have us expect.Footnote ⁵⁷ Forensic medicine did not become a vehicle for popular democratic challenges to autocratic power as it had in nineteenth-century Britain.Footnote ⁵⁸ Nor did it foster a sense of self-identification among subaltern Siamese subjects themselves. Rather, what we see in Naret's burgeoning interest in medical jurisprudence is an elite bureaucrat finding concrete terms for confronting an ongoing political challenge to the state. While Naret sought to implement forensic medical concern for the dead and injured bodies of Siamese subjects, he did so in order to invoke those bodies in the arena of imperial politics. The interests of the subaltern dead were passed over in favour of those of the state and its elite agents. This transaction created a new political constituency of morbid subjects—that is, mute bodies: objects that in spite of the intervention of medico-legal expertise were emphatically not able ‘to object’ to the claims made on their behalf.Footnote ⁵⁹ Even in light of the relatively constrained scope of Naret's initiative, however, conforming to the new standards of medico-legal expertise would nevertheless prove to be a much more vexing question than the Siamese government ministers realized.

A question of credentials? Race, objectivity, and expertise

Hays's subtle but steadfast refusal to accept new responsibilities as a coroner sparked a new conversation among Siamese officials about the nature of medico-legal expertise. Based on his letters, it seems clear that Prince Naret did not view the question of expertise and medico-legal evidence in foreign consular courts as a matter permitting racial bias or discrimination. When asked by Phasakorawong whether he thought that the Siamese state should employ a foreign or Siamese physician to conduct autopsies, Naret replied that he had ‘no preference in the matter whatsoever, so long as the doctor who performs the autopsies has sufficient knowledge to be able to speak to the symptomatic causes of death so that the foreign consular courts will believe him’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Initially, Naret's sole concern was that the person appointed be sufficiently credible ‘so that the consular courts will not overrule the cause of death and throw out the case as has happened before’.Footnote ⁶¹ His thoughts on the issue of medical credentials for graduates of the newly founded Siamese medical college clearly support this view of medical expertise.

It was paramount, Naret cautioned, that the Ministry of Religious Affairs, which was responsible for medical education, should administer the qualifying examinations at the medical college and the medical licensing process (ok nangsue samkhan jaeng khwam-ru phaet) in such a way that foreigners would trust in it. Until such standards were in place, however, Naret insisted that Dr Hays accept the added responsibilities of performing autopsies in cases of unnatural death involving foreign subjects, and of compiling reports of his findings to be submitted to the foreign consular courts.Footnote ⁶² Perhaps out of compromise in the face of Hays's repeated refusals, Naret suggested that Hays might bring medical students along with him when called to perform an autopsy, which would lighten his burden somewhat and provide an educational opportunity for advanced medical students. He stressed, however, that Dr Hays should himself perform all the documentation duties himself so that the consular courts would accept the evidence provided by the Siamese police and justice would be served for Siamese subjects murdered at the hands of foreigners.Footnote ⁶³ Naret's reservations about appointing Siamese medical students to conduct autopsies concerned the relatively manageable issues of credentials and experience, not the more indelible problem of racial prejudice. But, for the time being, the unresolved issue of finding a physician to conduct autopsies in cases of unnatural death would continue to fester.

Sometime in late May 1893, a fight broke out at a rice mill between two employees—a Siamese man named Nai Khram and a South Asian (khaek) named Ali, who was living in Siam under British legal protection.Footnote ⁶⁴ Three days later, Nai Khram died after a bout of uncontrollable vomiting. The Siamese doctors treating the man concluded that he had died as a result of some underlying illness, and not from injuries sustained in the fight.Footnote ⁶⁵ Lacking other options, the Siamese police summoned Dr Hays to perform an autopsy and determine the cause of death. Hays acquiesced, and he too attributed the death to an unspecified illness.Footnote ⁶⁶ Naret accepted the doctor's judgement that this particular case involved an underlying chronic illness and not a fatal injury inflicted by a foreign subject, but the case nevertheless prompted a renewed discussion of Naret's earlier proposals regarding the appointment of a physician to conduct autopsies.Footnote ⁶⁷ In cases of death that involve bodily injury, Naret argued, ‘it is absolutely essential to quickly appoint a physician to inspect the body, so that there would be no doubt. Otherwise, conditions will result in the loss’—presumably of evidence and medico-legal certainty, but also of the opportunity to file charges in consular courts.Footnote ⁶⁸ But Naret was tired of dealing with Hays's repeated refusals and financial demands. He began to look around for other options—a move that would highlight a new facet of the transnational debates over medico-legal expertise.

In his frustration with Hays, Naret asked Phasakorawong to appoint a Siamese physician, Luang Damrong Phaetyakhun, to take over the duties of medical examiner.Footnote ⁶⁹ Phasakorawong responded that the idea of appointing ‘Luang Damrong to take over the duties of inspecting corpses and conducting autopsies instead of Dr Hays seems like a good one’, but he had one reservation.Footnote ⁷⁰ Phasakorawong was afraid that ‘even though it is true that Damrong Phaetyakhun was indeed trained and certified in medicine he was also a Thai and a servant of the King’ of Siam.Footnote ⁷¹ Phasakorawong feared that foreign consular courts therefore might not accept forensic medical evidence that was produced and attested to by Luang Damrong. He suggested that they might instead try to hire another European physician who had recently entered the service of the Ministry of the Palace, whom the foreign legations might view as more trustworthy than a Siamese subject.

This exchange reveals that, although much of the debate remained unchanged from the time of Prince Naret's first proposal to address the growing gap in medico-legal standards of evidence in December 1892, the intervening months had seen some significant developments in the efforts of the Siamese state to reform forensic investigations in Bangkok. Naret continued to insist upon finding the most economical solution to the state's problem of insufficient medico-legal expertise; his persistence in trying to enlist Dr Hays to examine cases of unnatural death attests to this. At the same time, however, Naret was beginning to grasp the key issue of speed in inspecting bodies and determining the cause of death. He realized that carrying out the autopsy in a timely manner was just as important as having a qualified physician determine the cause of death. Promptness, along with appropriate medical credentials and documentation, was added to the growing list of requisites for medico-legal evidence that would meet the standards of the foreign consular courts. But, just as the Siamese officials came to terms with the essentials of forensic medical investigations, the parameters of authority and credibility seemed to be shifting, as Phasakorawong astutely suspected.

The plural legal regime created by extraterritorial law in Siam meant that the Siamese state had to conform to the standards of evidence upheld by the foreign consular courts if they hoped to pursue criminal charges against foreign subjects residing in Siam. The discourses of modern legal medicine and the tacit standards of evidence in the foreign consular courts had thus become hegemonic. Yet Phasakorawong realized—well before Naret—that there were other, extrajudicial factors involved when foreign consular courts assessed evidence in a case of unnatural death and deliberated whether to bring charges against a foreign resident. Not all medical credentials were created equal, and the professional credentials of Siamese physicians did not guarantee that consular courts would recognize their authority. In recognizing the fact that the race of the physician mattered when it came to inspecting bodies and submitting medico-legal evidence to the foreign consular courts, Siamese officials were coming to terms with one of the most pervasive features of knowledge production in the colonial world. As Pauline Kusiak has argued, ‘debates about what counted as knowledge, and about who counted as legitimate knowledge producers, were written into the very fabric of colonial socio-technical systems’.Footnote ⁷²

Moreover, in spite of the discourse of scientific objectivity, and the belief that a physician could ascertain the exact cause of death through forensic investigation, consular courts also seemed to take into account political affiliations when assessing forensic evidence. This amounted to another strike against Siamese physicians who would submit forensic evidence against a foreign subject before a consular court. In order to participate in the new system of authoritative expert knowledge—and to protect their subjects from the injustices of extraterritorial law—the Siamese state had to hire foreign medical professionals and ensure proper documentation in cases of unnatural death. A Siamese physician such as Luang Damrong simply would not do. The Siamese state eventually turned instead to a British physician, Dr P. A. Nightingale, in order to try and institute medico-legal evidentiary procedures that would meet the standards of foreign consular officials and their courts.

By the middle of the last decade of the nineteenth century, senior officials in the Siamese state were coming to terms with the shifting nature of authority over death and the new standards of evidence and expertise established by the foreign consular courts. Recognizing the gap in standards of evidence between Siamese and foreign courts, they took action to try and mitigate the perceived disadvantage that this situation created for Siamese legal subjects. Of course, this turn to forensic medicine was ultimately part of a pragmatic engagement with the conditions of extraterritoriality in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Siam. The changes in political rhetoric as the Siamese state adopted forensic medicine to address the injustices of extraterritoriality were not absolute; they applied very selectively to legal cases involving dead Siamese legal subjects that required engagement with the local legal institutions of the imperial powers. Imperial politics determined the nature and extent of the Siamese state's engagement with forensic medicine, and the relations of science and sovereignty were definitively marked by this context.