Full report of the trial of Thomas Hall for the murder of Captain Henry Cain : Before his honor Mr. Justice Williams, at the Supreme Court, Dunedin, January, 1887.

Hall, Thomas, -1887?

Date:: MDCCCLXXXVII

Credit: Full report of the trial of Thomas Hall for the murder of Captain Henry Cain : Before his honor Mr. Justice Williams, at the Supreme Court, Dunedin, January, 1887. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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$'ul depressant, and would tend to aggravate ihe action of the disease. Therefore the ne- cessary action of the administration of anti- mony would be in such a case to accelerate ind precipitate the termination, which in the natural order of things would occur later. The case for Crown could, perhaps, be put by an illustration, though I need hardly tell you that QO illustration, however plausible it may seem, an safely be relied on. You have, of course, seen a locomotive engine in the process of shunt- ng a truck. The engine gives to the truck a iertain impetus. The truck, therefore, is im- pelled by a certain initial velocity, but from the moment of impact there are several forces terd- ing to bring the truck to a standstill: graviia- tion, resistance of the atmosphere, and friction. A.fter a certain time and at a certain point if the line is level the truck will come to a standstill. If there is somebody in the truck who puts on a brake it will come to a standstill sooner. Now that may be taken as an illustration of Captain Cain s ease as the Crown has asked you to look at it. They say the wheels of Captain Cain's life were going slower and slower, and would have come to a standstill at no distant point in any case, but that the administration of antimony was prctically in the nature of putting on a brake or something of that kind, which from the nature of things would make the wheels stop at an earlier period. On the part of the defence it has been suggested that this case is not satisfactorily made out, and that there are other reasonable hypotheses which would account for the death; and, notably, it was suggested that a reasonable way of accounting for the death was that it might have been occasioned by uremic poisoning, or by t ff u- sion of blood on the brain, and that either of these causes might happen altogether inde- pendently of the administartion of antimon3\ I propose, as I have said, to bring the evidence on this part of the case before you first. The evi- dence divides itself into two parts—the pheno- mena which were observed, and the inferences which the various skilled witnesses drew from these phenomena. I am afraid it is impossible in considering the evidence first to take the phenomena and then the inferences. It would be the clearest way of putting it, but there is such a mass of evidence that I think I should have some difficulty in doing so. I am afraid we shall have to discuss the phenomena and the inferences which the doctors draw—at any rate to some extent—together. While on this point I might just as well point out to you the distinction in the nature of the evidence of experts, especially between what they have seen and evidence of the conclusions they arrive at from their observations. You have to look at the inferential evidence of experts with con- siderably greater caution, and to weigh ^t more carefully than you have to weigh the evidence of the facts which they say they have seen them- selves. [His Honor here proceeded to review the evidence with regard to the appearances Captain Cain presented in his life, and also the j^o^i mortem appearances, reading and commenting upon extracts from the evidence of the medical men, and of the witnesses who had attended Captain Cain during his illness. Referring in the course of his comments to Dr Ogston's evidence, his Honor said that notes of course should have been taken in any such case ;. but it came to this, he did not take them at the time, and some few days afterwards he did^ but from circumstances not under the control of the court those notes were missing. So Dr Ogston had really to rely on his memory, but he spoke mainly to broad facts.] His Honor then continued as follows: — The next branch of the inquiry is whether the anti- mony found in the body was administered by the prisoner. Antimony, as you have heard, is not a natural part of the body, and it must have been administered during life, and probably in solution, and the most ordinary form in which it is found in solution is tartar emetic. How, then, did this antimony come there ? You will of course have to be satisfied beyond all reason- able doubt that its presence was not the result of accident. We know Dr Macintyre never pre- scribed antimony, and the only possible sugges- tion of accident is with regard to that bottle of cough mixture which wa? bought on January I45. and the contents of which were not known. It was not part of Dr Maeintyre's prescription, and the witness Gunn said that in all patent cough mixtures there is either antimony or ipecacuanha wine. But we have evidence that antimony is very little used, and although put down to him it does not seem that the bottle was for- him, or that his attendants ever had the recol- lection of administering anything but the cough mixture and things Dr Macintyre prescribed. During the last 14 days of his life we know that Cain was bedridden ; so that he could not have got up and administered the antimony to him- self. I mention these things because it is necessary for you to be reasonably satisfied that it was not by accident and that Cain did not take it of his own accord. Then how is the prisoner connected with the administration of the antimony ? I need hardly say it is not sufficient to show that Cain did not take it of his own accord, and that it was not accidentally administered, and that the prisoner, amongst a number of other persons, had an opportunity of doing it. You want more than that to connect the prisoner with the transaction. The first thing we hear of him in connection with poison is that he had Taylor on Poisons some time in 1884. He was suffering from sciatica, neuralgia, and asthma, and pos- sessed himself of this book. Then we have the evidence of Hutton as to his buying another copy, according to him, in June and also re- ferring to Headland's boc>k on the Action of Medicines, especially inquiring about antimony. This was before he made friends with Cain, and beseems also to have spoken about antimony for use in cigarettes for asthma. Dr Ogston seems to think it impossible that antimony could be used in cigarettes, but there is another reference to a book in which arseniate of antimony is spoken of as used in cigarettes for asthma. Any- how, we know that early in the year the priso- ner had the book on poisons, and a considerable quantity of antimony—two drachms. Later ia the year 1885 he bought some atropia and wine-$