Introductory lecture to a course on forensic medicine, delivered in the Anatomical Theatre of St. Bartholomew's Hospital / [Sir George Burrows].
- Sir George Burrows, 1st Baronet
- Date:
- [1831]
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Introductory lecture to a course on forensic medicine, delivered in the Anatomical Theatre of St. Bartholomew's Hospital / [Sir George Burrows]. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![evidence in courts of law, or before coroner’s juries, upon questions referring to sudden or violent death, is to me quite surprising. It is scarcely a year ago, that a gentleman of great respectability was found dead in his bed, at his own house in the Regent’s Park. Pie had been in ])erfect health on the previous evening; and there was some suspicion that he had poisoned himself. His body was therefore examined after death; and five medical men made the following con¬ joint report to the coroner’s jury: “After a minute and careful examination of the cavities of the body, viz. of the chest, the abdomen, and the head, the chief morbid appearances that were observed, were an effusion of blood into the right and left cavities of the chest, amounting to about six ounces on the one side and seven on the other; and a large accumulation of putrid blood in the stomach, mixed with its contents, half-digested food. The blood-vessels of the brain appeared more turgid than usual: these appearances, however, in the head were not sufficient to account for death. Upon mature consideration, the cause of death appears to us to have been the rupture of a blood¬ vessel on the stomach.” One of the examining physicians observed to the jury, that the deceased had died of the same disease as His Ma¬ jesty George the Fourth, only the blood-vessels were much larger in the late king*. Such, then, is a specimen of the pathology of five me¬ dical practitioners in the largest metropolis of the civilized world ! Such was their ignorance and incapacity to give in¬ formation on an important question, treated of in all works on forensic medicine! Are we not, then, indebted to those who have now at¬ tempted to enforce a more competent knowledge of these subjects upon the rising generation of medical men ? * The errors of this report are so obvious, that they require no furtlier exposure.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b30355680_0017.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
