TY - JOUR T1 - Personal identification: Methods for the identification of individuals, living or dead. Y1 - 1919/08/09 N1 - 10.1001/jama.1919.02610320066031 JO - Journal of the American Medical Association SP - 442 EP - 442 VL - 73 IS - 6 N2 - Since human beings are not registered regularly by the government—in many places not even at the time of their birth—it is not infrequent for a human being to become lost from his community and, through lack of any means of identification, to disappear as if—in the words of the "Hun"—he had been "sunk without a trace." For many years the chief interest attached to personal identification lay in its relationship to the proving of guilt of those who had violated the law. It has frequently been necessary, however—and is daily becoming more so—to prove identification in connection with such legal problems as inheritance, when death occurs by burning, drowning, or other mutilating causes. In this book the authors consider identification as it is made by all of the various methods thus far known. The work is divided into two parts, describing, first, methods which furnish partial identification, including the more SN - 0002-9955 M3 - doi: 10.1001/jama.1919.02610320066031 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1001/jama.1919.02610320066031 ER -