Russell S. Fisher

Russell S. Fisher, M.D. was born in Bernie, Missouri and attended schools in Maryland and Virginia. He graduated in 1937 from the Georgia Institute of Technology with a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering. He earned his medical degree from the Medical College of Virginia and was a Navy medical officer during World War II. Before coming to Maryland in 1949 as chief medical examiner, he taught legal medicine and pathology at Harvard.

Until 1939, Maryland had used a coroner system, wherein each jurisdiction had its own coroner, who was often a political appointee with scant forensic or pathological experience. The Chief Medical Examiner system examined all those who either died by accident or under unusual circumstances. Dr. Fisher was the one to make the transformational changes to the system.

Early in Dr. Fisher’s career as Chief Medical Examiner in Maryland, he gained attention when he discovered that what looked like a simple car accident, witnessed by two policemen, was actually a murder. The victim had injuries inconsistent with a car accident, and as it happened, her husband was in love with another woman, and had arranged his wife’s death.

In 1968, Dr. Fisher and three other physicians were charged with re-examining the autopsy materials connected with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. While nothing they found disagreed with the Warren Commission, there were no autopsy reports, images or descriptions for them to work from. A crucial piece of evidence, the President’s brain, has never been examined because it disappeared shortly after his death.

Dr. Fisher’s accomplishments echo through the years. Across the country, numerous medical examiners offices are led by the forensic pathologists he trained at the CME during his tenure. As he worked, he also taught those who worked for and with him. His work in forensics advanced the understanding of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, and also the work which was done at Shock Trauma. Criminals were caught, innocents were freed and wrongs were righted.

When Dr. Fisher was hired by the State of Maryland in 1949, the writer Earl Stanley Gardner, who created the Perry Mason series, was one of his advocates. The other was Francis Glessner Lee, a wealthy socialite who was studied forensics, and created “The Nutshell Case Studies”, a series of 1:12 scale vignettes of crime scenes which are still used to train police detectives today. The Nutshells are housed at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner because of Dr. Fisher. Mrs. Lee had gotten to know Dr. Fisher at Harvard and was convinced that even at age 33, he was the right person to become Maryland’s Chief Medical Examiner.

Although his appointments and memberships were many, he found the time to serve as President of MedChi from 1969 to 1970. In addition to his work as the Chief Medical Examiner, which he held from 1949 until his death in 1984, Dr. Fisher was a Professor of Legal Medicine and Forensic Pathology at the University of Maryland, a lecturer at Johns Hopkins, and a Consultant to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology and several Baltimore-area hospitals.