Lauren's Death's Acre Essay

Death’s Acre; Inside the Body Farm by Dr. Bill Blass and Jon Jefferson, is a book written on the experiences of the profession and personal life of Dr. Bill Blass. The book goes into thorough detail of what Dr. Blass must go through during forensic cases and how it has taken a toll on his personal life. Dr. Bill Blass is a forensic anthropologist and the founder of the Body Farm. The Body Farm, is a location at the University of Tennessee’s medical center, where dead bodies are observed to notice a pattern of decomposition.
Throughout the book, Dr. Bill Blass speaks in first person of his experiences with murder cases and deaths, the examination of body, and the ideas that led him to create the Body Farm. Dr. Bill Blass uses a lot of interesting techniques throughout the book, that readers become quite familiar with. Among those techniques are the ways of figuring out who a body is based on the bones. The four most important things to figure out, otherwise known as the “big four,” are sex, age, race, and stature. Sex can be indicated by the size of the bones, if they are larger they are male, if they are smaller, they are the bones of a female. Age can be determined by a plethora of things, for instance, weather or not the sutures of the skull have fused together. Race can be determined by the size of the skull or certain other factors, such as the teeth. The teeth are very important in determining the identity of a body, because along with dental records, prove a body’s identity.
Many other interesting techniques are used throughout the book to determine other things such as, how long the body has been dead, and in murder cases, weather or not the person used self defense. An interesting thing that is brought up quite a few times throughout the book is that the body decomposes faster when the body is bloody. That is because maggots and blowflies like to eat away at the bloody spots of the body.
The book Death’s Acre; Inside the Body Farm by Dr. Bill Blass and Jon Jefferson was very interesting in the way that it described different techniques and concepts used by forensic scientists, forensic anthropologists and detectives. The book showed a series of cases that Dr. Bill Blass worked on and how they were solved. It also showed the thought process of the invention of the Body Farm, where a lot of very helpful research to Forensics is conducted. The book also told of many complications that scientists go through.