Faulds established the first English speaking mission in Japan in 1874, with a hospital and a teaching facility for Japanese medical students. He helped introduce
Joseph Lister's
antiseptic methods to Japanese surgeons. In 1875, he helped found the Rakuzenkai, Japan's first society for the blind, and set up
lifeguard stations to prevent drowning in nearby canals. He halted a
rabies epidemic that killed small children who played with infected mice, and he helped stop the spread of
cholera in Japan. He even cured a plague infecting the local fishmonger's stock of
carp. In 1880 he helped found a school for the blind. By 1882, his
Tsukiji Hospital in Tokyo treated 15,000 patients annually. Faulds became fluent in Japanese, and in addition to his full-time work as a doctor, he wrote two books on travel in the Far East, many academic articles, and started three magazines. Whilst accompanying a friend (American archaeologist,
Edward S. Morse) to an
archaeological dig he noticed how the delicate impressions left by craftsmen could be discerned in ancient clay fragments. Examining his own fingertips and those of friends, he became convinced that the pattern of ridges was unique to each individual. Shortly after these observations his hospital was broken into. The local police arrested a member of staff whom Faulds believed to be innocent. Determined to exonerate the man, he compared the
fingerprints left behind at the crime scene to those of the suspect and found them to be different. On the strength of this evidence the police agreed to release the suspect. In an attempt to promote the idea of
fingerprint identification he sought the help of the noted
naturalist Charles Darwin. Darwin declined to work on the idea, but passed it on to his relative
Francis Galton, who forwarded it to the
Anthropological Society of London. When Galton returned to the topic some eight years later, he paid little attention to Faulds' letter. As a result of this interchange some controversy has arisen about the inventor of modern
forensic fingerprinting. However, there can be no doubt that Faulds' first paper on the subject was published in the scientific journal
Nature in 1880; all parties conceded this. The following month Sir
William Herschel, a
British civil servant based in
India, wrote to
Nature saying that he had been using fingerprints (as a form of
bar code) to identify criminals since 1860. However, Herschel did not mention their potential for forensic use. Over the years, Faulds conducted a bitter controversy with Herschel over the use of fingerprints, demanding proof in 1894 that Herschel had ever used fingerprints officially, which Herschel duly provided, and then writing a series of books and pamphlets many years later containing variations of the argument that he had been cheated his due credit (see for complete facsimiles of these and other fundamental works on fingerprinting, and the Herschel/Faulds letters). These books were published from 1905 onward, long after fingerprinting had come into widespread use. ==Return to Britain==