ABSTRACT
Professor Henry Holmes Croft's laboratory, which the author considers to be the first forensic science lab in Canada, was a round appendage that still exists at the southwest corner of University College. Croft was succeeded in 1873 by Dr. William Hodgson Ellis. A record of his forensic cases survives in his laboratory notebook in the Centre of Forensic Sciences library. Before 1932, aside from the work of Professors Croft, Ellis, and Joslyn Rogers, the only forensic activities in Ontario were the autopsies performed by a small cadre of hospital pathologists. One of these, Dr. Edgar Frankish, was appointed director of a new Attorney General's Medico-Legal Laboratory in 1932. In 1951, the attorney general decided to revitalize the laboratory and asked Dr. Noble Sharpe, a pathologist at Grace Hospital, to lead it. Dr. Sharpe recognized that forensic science by then encompassed a much broader range of disciplines and recommended instead that a scientist be the director.
