Journal of the Society of Arts and Official Organ of the Royal Commission for the Chicago Exhibition.

  • Society of Arts (Great Britain)
Date:
1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Journal of the Society of Arts and Official Organ of the Royal Commission for the Chicago Exhibition. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

    11/20 (page 27)
    Novembens, 1S92.] of the law. With this part I may at once explain I have done precisely as I did when dealing with the sanitary part of the subject—put myself, that is to say, into personal communication with those members of the medical profession who, better instructed than myself, have had to cope with such cases in the courts of law, and whose experience is to be found in a concentrated form in the text-books on medical jurispru- dence. Taking note of Sir H. Thompson's statement to begin with, that only 102 exhumations had been made during the last twenty years and only one murder a year been discovered by them, I first applied to the proper official quarter for the record of such cases, and learnt, not only that no such return had ever been made, or was likely to be made, but that inasmuch as such return, if made, v/ould not include the exhumations ordered by coroners, it would not be accurate. From Dr. Thomas Stevenson, again, the eminent Government analyst and editor of Taylor's great work on medical jurisprudence, I learnt that, though he could not recall with- out great labour, all the cases he had met with, he had, yet, not only discovered poison by their exhumation, but had been able, by such exhumation and analysis, to prove the innocence of suspected persons. From Mr. Thomas Bond, consulting analyst to the Westminster Hospital, I learnt that though, like Dr. Stevenson, he could not furnish particulars of every case he had had to do with years ago, he had yet had no less than four such cases in the course of last year (i8gi), all of them proving, by exhumation of the body, murder by arsenic ; that this year (1892) he had made two such exhumations, which proved to him that a double murder had been committed—a man, in one of them, having been shot from behind at a distance of six feet or thereabouts, and a woman, also in the back, at a distance of one foot, a coroner's jury, however, having found the wounds in both cases accidental, and the result of a struggle between the two. That, on another occasion, he had exhumed a body after two months' burial, and found that death had resulted from the performance of an internal illegal operation, and that he had had a similar case since. That, in the case of Harriet Lane, murdered by Wainwright, after twelve months' burial, and though an attempt had been made to destroy the body by quicklime, he had proved murder by a bullet wound in the brain. That in the case of the Austrian, De Tourville, who killed his wife on the Stelvio, the case brought home to him had turned out, by exhumation of the bodies, to be only one of several, one of the victims being his first wife's mother, whose death, after twelve years' burial, was shown to have been caused, not, as was certified, by an accidental wound in the eye, but by a shot from behind. Mr. Bond, too, ends his letter with this pertinent reflection, that he had no doubt that many persons skilled in the use of poisons would more frequently resort to them if it were not for the knowledge that their operations were liable to be handi- capped by exhumation. Mr. Lowndes, again, the well-known surgeon of the Liverpool police, reports in the Times an equally instructive case. In this case two women, Higgins and Flannigan, had combined to murder, and did murder, by means of arsenic, a man of the name of Higgins, the husband of one of them, the crime being discovered by a ^osi-mortem examination of the body before its burial; and that this murder had brought to light, by exhumation, no less than ten others by the same women, at the examination of three of which he (Mr. Lowndes) had himself assisted, the cause of death in all of them having been certified to have arisen from poison. Yet, that as the case of the man Higgins was com- plete in itself, and the exhumation of the ten others had been merely corroborative, not essential, to the discovery of that case, there- fore, they ought not to be counted, and need not, in his (Mr. Lowndes's) opinion, stand in the way of a fair trial to do without exhumation ! Quitting, however, these cases, the result of current experience, and going for further in- formation to the text-books which positively bristle with them, we find in them abundant evidence of how fatal it would be to the ends of justice to do away with exhuma- tion and to rely on certificates merely. I need only refer here to a few of them. A man of the name of Winslow poisons his mistress by antimony; three other of his relatives are exhumed in consequence, and all of them are proved to have been put an end to by the same poison, notwithstand- ing which, and for some reason, satisfactory, possibly, to a cremationist, the man was acquitted. At Bilston, three children die in I one family, antimony being found in the bodies