Background
Goddard was born on October 30, 1891, in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of Henry Perkins and Eliza Acheson Goddard.
forensic scientist researcher army officer academic
Goddard was born on October 30, 1891, in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of Henry Perkins and Eliza Acheson Goddard.
Goddard was educated in Baltimore, where his father was an insurance executive and writer. In 1911 Goddard graduated cum laude from the Johns Hopkins University with the B. A. He received the M. D. from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 1915.
Briefly in 1915 Goddard worked as a medical assistant at the Johns Hopkins medical school. He enlisted in the United States Army in 1916 and was commissioned first lieutenant in the army medical corps. After a year as assistant to the adjutant at the Army Medical School, Washington, D. C. , he was assigned to Camp Upton, New York, as a cardiovascular consultant. Later in 1918 he was named camp surgeon and eventually promoted to major. After serving more than a year in Europe, in 1920 Goddard resigned his commission to serve as cardiovascular consultant with the clinic of Dr. James McLester in Birmingham, Alabama. In 1921 he became assistant director of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, where he also taught cardiography. He was recommissioned in the army ordnance reserve in 1922 and served tours of duty at most of the larger United States arsenals. In 1924 he became assistant professor of clinical medicine at Cornell University medical college. Later that year he was named director of the first outpatient clinic in the nation, the Cornell Pay Clinic in New York City. Goddard's lifelong interest in firearms became a full-time pursuit in 1925, when he resigned from Cornell and established the Bureau of Forensic Ballistics in New York City. Soon he developed techniques for identifying the weapon that fired a given bullet. With others he developed the comparison microscope and helixometer, instruments essential to scientific crime detection. Between 1925 and 1929 Goddard gained an international reputation as a firearms identification expert. He traveled nationwide and abroad demonstrating his techniques and instruments to law enforcement officials. He also participated as a consultant in numerous criminal investigations. His methods of identifying weapons won widespread acceptance in American and foreign courts. Goddard went to Europe in 1929 to study the criminal investigation techniques of law enforcement agencies in thirteen nations. On his return he founded the Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory, which a year later became part of Northwestern University. Goddard was named a professor of police science at the university law school. The laboratory employed X-ray and ultraviolet examination; chemical, fingerprint, and handwriting analyses; and toxicologic and serologic examination of evidence to solve crimes. It also experimented with truth serum and the polygraph. Goddard's police science courses were the first offered in the United States. They were attended by hundreds of law enforcement officials, including Federal Bureau of Investigation agents. His techniques and instruments were widely adopted by lawmen, and the FBI set up a crime laboratory patterned after Goddard's model. In 1930 Goddard founded and edited the American Journal of Police Science (later absorbed by the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology), the nation's first scientific police journal. The Great Depression greatly reduced the availability of funds for additional experimentation, and Goddard resigned his position with the crime laboratory in 1934. He received a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship in 1935 to write an arms-identification text, which was never published. A year later he received a second fellowship from the Oberlaender Trust to study the criminal sciences in Europe. In 1940 Goddard was named military editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, a post he held until his death; and in 1941 he became the first American on the board of editors of the Britannica. In addition to the articles he contributed to the encyclopedia, he also wrote scores of pieces on military history, crime detection, ballistics, and related subjects for numerous legal, medical, military, and criminal science journals and magazines. With the United States entrance into World War II, Goddard was recalled to military duty as a lieutenant colonel in army ordnance. His first assignment was with the historical section of the Army War College in Washington, D. C. Appointed chief historian of the Ordnance Department in 1942, he directed the compilation of the wartime history of the department. In 1947 Goddard went to Tokyo as assistant chief of the historical branch at the general headquarters of the Far East command. In 1948 he developed the Far East Criminal Investigation Laboratory and served as its chief. The laboratory became the center for scientific investigation of crime in the Far East and was utilized by military and civilian law enforcement groups. Goddard attained the rank of full colonel in 1950. The next year he was made chief of the historical unit of the Army Medical Service, with responsibility for editing and publishing a projected forty-volume series on the history of medicine in World War II. He supervised the publication of the first volumes in the series before illness forced him to retire from military service in 1954. He died in Washington, D. C. on February 22, 1955.
Goddard revolutionized the methods of criminal investigation in the United States. Because of his medical training and firearms expertise, his methods of scientific crime detection won widespread and almost immediate acceptance by law enforcement officials and the courts. His chief contribution was the development of forensic ballistics.
On August 3, 1915 Goddard married Eliza Cunningham Harrison; they had two daughters.
