WOMAN’S UNUSUAL POST

Press, Volume LXXXV, Issue 25994, 23 December 1949, Page 2

WOMAN’S UNUSUAL POST

CRIMINOLOGIST IN CANADA When the Science Congress was held in Christchurch early this ygar, a professor on the staff of the University of Amsterdam surprised some Christchurch women by telling them that among the many women professors and lecturers on the staff of his university was a woman professor of penal laws. She was, he said, an attractive married woman with a family and was very efficient at her work. Although he had not made special inquiries in the matter, he thought she was the -cnly woman professor of nenal laws in the world. Now frofn Canada comes news of the only feminine criminologist in Eastern Canada. She is Miss Vcrda Vincent, who has become, accustomed to the awed and incredulous comments which her profession evokes. After 11 years, however, she has not yet learned to face an accused criminal, against whom she must bear testimony, without certain misgivings. Born in Rondon, Ontario, she graduated in general science after completion of her high school education, later majoring in laboratory research of a hospital type. Every criminal case in Ontario which requires the services of a medico-legal laboratory passes through Miss Vincent’s hands, and she sometimes surprises even herself, according to Carroll Allen, ’writing in the “Toronto Globe and Mail.” Intensely feminine and quick to respond to people in trouble, she was not sure she could maintain a coldly objective attitude in a profession which concerned itself so directly with the lives or deaths of. men -and women. What would be her reaction when a man’s life rested on the findings of her experiments? When the Government-medico-legal laboratory was founded with Dr. E. R. Frankish at its head. Miss Vincent became assistant, and in 1941, when Dr. Frankish died, she took charge. ‘.‘Whenever I see a prisoner on the stand,” she says, “I wonder just how guilty he is of the crime he has committed and what part of the guilt could be attributed to society. I think of the expense of the trial, and wonder what would have been the ultimate effect on him if that money had been utilised for his education when he was younger. I think of all the unpredictable and unassessable things that have happened to him since his birth, and calculate how responsible they are for his present state. And then I shut all this out of my mind, and see only the facts that I have seen a few days earlier in the laboratory.”