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When in his Annual Report for 1905 the Registrar General for Ireland pointed out to the lately arrived Lord Lieutenant, The Earl of Aberdeen, that annually in every 100 deaths in Ireland 16 were victims of tuberculosis, Lady Aberdeen took notice. In March 1907 she founded the WNHA with the clear duty of taking part in the fight against the appalling ravages of that disease, and organised a Tuberculosis Exhibition the following October. And so began a campaign that led to the building of Peamount Sanatorium in county Dublin, the Allan Ryan Hospital at Ringsend, and the Collier Dispensary in the city centre. However, the Irish parliamentarians at Westminster emasculated the Tuberculosis Prevention (Ireland) Act 1908 by ensuring that notification was not made compulsory. Passage of the National Health Insurance Act (1911) necessitated changes that resulted in the Tuberculosis Prevention (Ireland) Act (1913), but the crucial shortcomings of the earlier Act were not rectified: notification was necessary but still not compulsory. Lady Aberdeen recognised this serious flaw she was powerless to correct, and turned to propaganda, editing Sláinte, a monthly magazine founded in January 1909 by the WNHA, and editing a three-volume account of Ireland's Crusade Against Tuberculosis (1908-1909).

I have chosen this particular case from my experience not so much because it presents any novel, sophisticated or complex scientific method of forensic interest, but because i t shows strikingly how a relatively minor and unimportant personal experience can lead to the rapid solution of a major problem. About 2 years ago a partnership was formed between a subsidiary of the Thomson Organisation and another Company, whose main business was to handle a number of diaries and notebooks said to have been written by Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator. On the face of i t these were extremely important documents, because it was known that Mussolini did keep a diary throughout the years of his rise and fall, and there are some crucial points in Italian history on which the diaries could shed a badly-needed light.