Identity

             Signatures: From Handwritten to Genetic
             Throughout history, contributing factors to a person's identity have changed dramatically. In an attempt to demonstrate this change, both Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Anne Joseph and Alison Winter's "Making the Match: Human Traces, Forensic Experts and the Public Imagination" can be used. Throughout the eighteen eighties: the setting of Jekyll and Hyde, the primary method of identifying people was non-scientifically; people were identified by their personality, social status, and physical characteristics. As the world has progressed to the "technological age" we now live in, a person's identification extends further: their fingerprints, their online "screen name-" because as Joseph and Winter explain "minuscule residues of peripheral human productions are supposed to contain the essence of an individual's identity" (193).
             During the time in which Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is set, some of the first trials in identifying people by methods other than their persona and facial appearance were taking place. Before then, and still then by most of society, "identification" was solely referring to physical characteristics - explaining why Jekyll could realize he had changed to Hyde by the change in his hand and the formation of his face: these were identification methods of the time. The nineteenth century also marks the birth of the idea that there is "something unique and essential about single individual[s]...[they are] constantly shedding clues that can be linked to them and their actions alone..." (Joseph and Winter, 194). An example of this progression is this: during the eighteenth century, the handwritten signature was the only existing kind and now signatures can be found in a fingerprint or a genetic (DNA) structure.
             In the modern world, the setting of...

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