James' World 2

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In 1971, a British doctor was trying to puzzle out a mystery: How can a child with no signs of external trauma or injury present with bleeding between the skull and brain? That doctor, A. Norman Guthkelch, was part of a wave of physicians and researchers newly concerned that an epidemic of severe child abuse had been passing, undetected, beneath doctors’ noses.

As one law-review article recounts, “Prior to the 1960s, medical schools provided little or no training on child abuse, and medical texts were largely silent on the issue.” A turning point was the publication of the 1962 article “The Battered-Child Syndrome,” which urged physicians to consider that severe child abuse may be at play when children came in with injuries such as bone fractures, subdural hematomas, and bruising.

The article goes beyond offering medical advice to prescribing an ethical framework that would take hold: “The bias should be in favor of the child’s safety; everything should be done to prevent repeated trauma, and the physician should not be satisfied to return the child to an environment where even a moderate risk of repetition exists.”

Armed with these new insights, Guthkelch hypothesized that the children showing up to his hospital were being abusively shaken. Although they did not show up with the usual fractures or visible forms of physical trauma, the presence of a subdural hematoma could indicate what would come to be widely known as “shaken baby syndrome.”

Decades later, Guthkelch would publicly worry that his hypothesis had been taken too far. After reviewing the trial record and medical reports from one case in Arizona, NPR reported that he was “troubled” that the conclusion was abusive shaking when there were other potential causes. “I wouldn’t hang a cat on the evidence of shaking, as presented,” Guthkelch quipped.

The narrow claim that shaking a baby abusively can result in certain internal injuries morphed into the claim that if a set of internal injuries were present, then shaking must be the cause. On today’s episode of Good on Paper, I talk with a neuroscientist who found himself personally embroiled in this scientific and legal controversy when a caretaker was accused of shaking his child.

Cyrille Rossant is a researcher and software engineer at the International Brain Laboratory and University College London whose Ph.D. in neuroscience came in handy when he delved into the research behind shaken baby syndrome and published a textbook with Cambridge University Press on the scientific controversy that embroiled his family.

Jerusalem Demsas: Many forms of scientific expertise in criminal-justice proceedings have been debunked or come under scrutiny in recent years. Things like bite-mark analysis and blood-spatter analysis used to be commonly understood as rigorous empirical analysis. But these questionable theories often fall apart on closer inspection. 

This is how science is supposed to work. Experts observe, they hypothesize, they test, and they revise their previous understandings of the world. And in academia and in scientific journals, that’s all well and good—but what happens when evolving science is brought into the courtroom? In a courtroom, no one is well positioned to rigorously evaluate a scientific debate: not judges, not jurors, and not even the people calling expert witnesses.

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Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

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