A Preliminary Report on the Medico-Legal Value of the Finding of Blood on Nail Parings

In view of this ruling it seemed important to verify these statements by experiment. After testing the sensitivity of the reagents, I examined the nail parings' of forty under-trial prisoners and of twenty convicted prisoners from Meerut District Jail. The parings were taken by the jail barber using his ordinary instruments and without any special precautions against contamination. Of the 600 separate nail parings so obtained three gave a positive reaction, and six gave a positive trace with the benzidine test. The remaining 591 were all negative. These specimens were received in bulk, so it is impossible to say whether the positively reacting nails all came from one person or from nine separate persons. The benzidine test which was used throughout these experiments is very sensitive, but it is not