Henry Faulds

Henry Faulds was a Scottish physician and missionary whose years in Japan led him to study fingerprints as a means of personal identification. He communicated his observations to the journal Nature in 1880 and proposed that impressions left at a scene could assist an investigation. How the English Fingerprint Method Arose is a later pamphlet in which Faulds set out his account of the method’s development and the priority dispute surrounding it. Wellcome Collection preserves the work and dates it to about 1915, making it a direct record of his own argument. Historical material from New York’s Division of Criminal Justice Services places Faulds alongside William Herschel and Francis Galton in the emergence of modern fingerprint systems. The pamphlet is polemical as well as technical, so readers should understand it as one participant’s documented position rather than a neutral history. It remains valuable for showing how Faulds connected medical observation, repeatable patterns, and practical identification.