Background
Milton Helpern was born on April 17, 1902 in East Harlem, New York City, New York, United States. He was the son of Moses Helpern, a men's clothing cutter, and Bertha Toplon.
(Hardcover - 1977)
Hardcover - 1977
https://www.amazon.com/Autopsy-Memoirs-Helpern-Greatest-Detective/dp/0312062117?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0312062117
Milton Helpern was born on April 17, 1902 in East Harlem, New York City, New York, United States. He was the son of Moses Helpern, a men's clothing cutter, and Bertha Toplon.
Helpern was educated entirely in the city, graduating from the College of the City of New York with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1922. He received his Doctor of Medicine in 1926 from Cornell University Medical College and became an intern in the Cornell (Second) Medical Division of Bellevue Hospital, specializing in pathology.
For many years, the hospital's Department of Pathology and the Office of the Medical Examiner of New York City shared the same mortuary; as a result, students and doctors frequently assisted the examiner with routine autopsies. The medical examiner's office derived from the old coroner system, which was introduced early into the American colonies. However, by 1900 it was racked by corruption, since the coroners (one for each city borough) were elected political hacks with no medical training.
In 1914 a commissioner appointed by the mayor to investigate the system recommended that it be replaced by a chief medical examiner for the city as a whole, with the examiner and his staff all to be doctors, pathologists, and microscopists, and subject to the Civil Service Law. In 1915 the state legislature passed the Medical Examiner Law, which became a prototype for many such laws.
In 1918 this law went into effect in the city, and Charles Norris was appointed the first chief medical examiner. When Helpern was doing his residency at Bellevue, he came into frequent contact with Norris, who regarded him as a personal protégé. Helpern said that although he enjoyed pathology as a resident, he was not particularly attracted to forensic medicine; he hoped to be named the head of a proposed hospital laboratory.
The Great Depression ended the laboratory project, and it was only at the last hour of the last day for submitting applications that Helpern decided to take the civil service examination for assistant medical examiner. He passed and joined Norris's staff in April 1931.
As a student at Cornell, Helpern had taught biology to help pay his tuition. He had been on the medical examiner's staff for perhaps six months when he was asked to replace another doctor who had been lecturing in legal medicine. Thus, about 1932, he began to teach with Thomas Gonzales, who became the second chief medical examiner, and Morgan Vance, also an assistant examiner, at Cornell, Columbia, New York University, and the New York Police Academy. The three doctors decided to combine their notes into a book, published in 1937 as Legal Medicine and Toxicology, which was long considered the definitive text in the field.
In 1943, Helpern was appointed deputy chief medical examiner, and became the third chief medical examiner of New York City in 1954. The medical examiner's office investigates a death in specific instances, which include death from criminal violence or in any "suspicious or unusual manner. " The routine work of this office is to diagnose, for insurance purposes, the type of natural disease that killed someone. But much of the time the medical examiners assist law-enforcement agencies in the investigation or prosecution of a possible crime. As the chief medical examiner, Helpern testified at innumerable trials and was a key witness in several of the most sensational murder trials of his day.
In the mid-1960's, he helped establish the guilt of Alice Crimmins in the murder of her children and was a chief witness in the bloody "career girl murders. " The extraordinary case of Dr. Carl Coppolino was his most memorable. Helpern said of this case: "Not only was the medico-legal aspect unique--it broke new ground in forensic toxicology--but the ballyhoo surrounding the trials was of an intensity that beat anything ever witnessed. " In 1965, Doctor Carmela Coppolino was found dead in bed of an apparent heart attack and was certified as having died naturally. However, a number of inconsistencies and the agitated testimony of a former lover of her husband led to the decision that Helpern and his assistants should perform an autopsy, which concluded that she had been injected by her husband with a muscle relaxant that stopped her breathing. The difficulty was that the suspected drug breaks down quickly in the body into two substances normally found in tissues, and no one had ever searched for this particular compound in any body, living or dead. Nevertheless, Helpern's office proved conclusively that Coppolino had been murdered by lethal injection, and in 1967 her husband, over the vociferous protestations of his attorney, F. Lee Bailey, was given a life sentence.
From all accounts, Helpern made an excellent witness at such trials. Often called "avuncular, " he had a sleepy-seeming manner and gave articulate responses in a warm voice. The New York Times called him a "prosecutor's dream, " and a law-enforcement official who often dealt with him described him as "among the most remarkably convincing of experts. " Because of these characteristics and because he and his associates did meticulous work, Helpern established a reputation as a "medical detective. " During his years as chief medical examiner, he was involved in cases all over the world, either giving expert testimony or examining and interpreting evidence.
In 1960 the headquarters of the medical examiner's office was moved to 520 First Avenue. Helpern had the following inscription placed in the new lobby: "This is the place where death delights to help the living. " In his memoirs, he insisted that one of the key functions of his office was to preserve the public's health, a field where death indeed "delights to help the living. " For example, Helpern was instrumental in identifying carbon monoxide emissions as a cause of many otherwise mysterious deaths during the 1940s and subsequently helped to establish a citywide gas inspection program in 1951.
In later decades he was effective in arranging organ transplants. But it was probably in his lecturing, writing, and teaching that Helpern most fulfilled the precepts of his motto. His easy, articulate manner made him a sought-after speaker, and he loved to talk about his profession. "This job is not morbid, " he once said. "You do these investigations in the interests of living people. " Helpern wrote more than one hundred articles on his subject, as well as coauthoring an early classic. He became the head of the Department of Forensic Medicine at the New York University School of Medicine and served on the faculty of Cornell University Medical College. He also inspired the establishment of the Milton Helpern Library of Legal Medicine, which has developed one of the finest collections on forensic medicine in the country. Helpern retired as chief medical examiner on December 31, 1973.
He was made a visiting professor at the Center for Biomedical Education at City College in 1974 and remained active as a speaker and in many professional organizations, some of which he had helped to found. He died in San Diego, California, while attending a convention of one such group. Helpern's last year in office was plagued by instances of professional negligence and financial improprieties among his staff.
Helpern married Ruth Vyner in July 1927; they had three children. She died in 1953, and Helpern married his secretary, Beatrice Liebowitz Nightingale, a widow with two children, in January 1955.