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Henry Faulds (1 June 1843 – 24 March 1930) was a Scottish doctor, missionary and scientist who is noted for the development of .
Following graduation, Faulds then became a medical missionary for the Church of Scotland. In 1871, he was sent to British India, where he worked for two years in Darjeeling at a hospital for the poor.
On 23 July 1873, he received a letter of appointment from the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland to establish a medical mission in Japan. He married Isabella Wilson that September, and the newlyweds departed for Japan in December.
Whilst accompanying a friend (American archaeologist, Edward S. Morse) to an archaeology 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 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 natural history 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 science 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 British 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 Historic Works on Fingerprints. galton.org 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.
His clinic in Tokyo was bought by Ludolph Teusler and became St. Luke's International Hospital.
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