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).

In the modern world, the setting of Joseph and Winter's piece, physical appearance can no longer be depended on as the sole identification method: plastic surgery and tummy tucks are the order of the day, and people can change their appearances virtually overnight. Now fingerprints are substituted for or placed in addition to a handwritten signature on a driver's license; DNA fingerprints can establish paternity, increase self awareness, potentially destroy chances at receiving insurance (DNA can provide a portal into someone's medical future), exonerate Christopher Columbus from introducing the White Plague to the new world and convict a person of murder (Joseph and Winter, 206). Criminals in the twentieth century all have their fingerprints on file, and some have their DNA on file as well. The age of computers and top-notch machinery brings with it the notion that in the technological twentieth century, a technological

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Approximate Word count = 627
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)