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Medical and Chemical Expertise in English Trials for Criminal Poisoning, 1750–1914

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 November 2012

Katherine D Watson
Katherine D Watson
Affiliation:
School of Arts and Humanities, Oxford Brookes University, Gipsy Lane, Oxford, OX3 0BP; e-mail: kwatson@brookes.ac.uk
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This article contributes to the literature on the history of medico-legal practice by using a survey of 535 poisoning cases to examine the emergence of forensic toxicological expertise in nineteenth-century English criminal trials. In emphasizing chemical expertise, it seeks both to expand upon a limited literature on the history of the subject, and to offer a contrast to studies of criminal poisoning that have tended to focus primarily on medical expertise. Poisoning itself is a topic of abiding interest to historians of forensic medicine and science because (together with insanity) it long tended to attract the greatest attention (and often confrontation) in criminal proceedings. In looking at a wide number of cases, however, it becomes apparent that few aroused true medico-legal controversy. Rather, the evidence from several hundred cases tried as felonies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries indicates that prior to the 1830s few presented any opportunity for “a battle of experts”. While Ian Burney and Tal Golan have shown that this was certainly not the case during the mid and late nineteenth century, this paper goes further by dividing the period under study into three distinct phases in order to show how expert testimony (and experts themselves) changed during the course of the century, and why this process opened a door to the potential for formalized controversy.

Type
Articles
Information
Medical History , Volume 50 , Issue 3 , 01 July 2006 , pp. 373 - 390
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2006. Published by Cambridge University Press

References

1 M A Green, ‘Dr Scattergood's case books: a 19th century medico-legal record’, The Practitioner, 1973, 211: 679–84; N G Coley, ‘Alfred Swaine Taylor, MD, FRS (1806–1880): forensic toxicologist’, Med. Hist., 1991, 35: 409–27; N G Coley, ‘Forensic chemistry in 19th-century Britain’, Endeavour, 1998, 22: 143–7.

2 T R Forbes, Surgeons at the Bailey: English forensic medicine to 1878, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1985, pp. 123–65; I A Burney, ‘A poisoning of no substance: the trials of medico-legal proof in mid-Victorian England’, J. Br. Stud., 1999, 38: 59–92; I A Burney, ‘Testing testimony: toxicology and the law of evidence in early nineteenth-century England’, Stud. Hist. Philos. Sci., 2002, 33: 289–314.

3 T Golan, Laws of men and laws of nature: the history of scientific expert testimony in England and America, Cambridge, MA, and London, Harvard University Press, 2004, p. 97.

4 The phrase is from S Landsman, ‘One hundred years of rectitude: medical witnesses at the Old Bailey, 1717–1817’, Law and History Review, 1998, 16: 445–94, p. 452.

5 Burney, ‘A poisoning of no substance’ and ‘Testing testimony’, op. cit., note 2 above; Golan, op. cit., note 3 above. Victorian and Edwardian England witnessed several deeply contentious cases, particularly those of Dr William Palmer, Thomas Smethurst, Florence Bravo, Adelaide Bartlett, Florence Maybrick, Dr Hawley Crippen and Frederick Seddon.

6 K Watson, Poisoned lives: English poisoners and their victims, London and New York, Hambledon & London, 2004. Cases of animal poisoning have been left out of the current analysis, and several new trials added.

7 M A Crowther and B White, On soul and conscience. The medical expert and crime: 150 years of forensic medicine in Glasgow, Aberdeen University Press, 1988; B White, ‘Training medical policemen: forensic medicine and public health in nineteenth-century Scotland’, in M Clark and C Crawford (eds), Legal medicine in history, Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 145–63.

8The Times, 13 Aug. 1821, p. 3c.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid., p. 3d.

11The Times, 12 Oct. 1825, p. 3c.

12 The National Archives: Public Record Office (hereafter PRO), ASSI 45/54, ‘Yorkshire 4 Aug. 1821—The King against Ann Barber, petit treason’.

13 PRO, ASSI 45/49 (Yorkshire), no title [depositions against Elizabeth Ward]; The Times, 15 Aug. 1816, p. 3b.

14 Found guilty and sentenced to death, her execution was twice postponed; in September 1816 she was granted a pardon by the Prince Regent, see Watson, op. cit., note 6 above, pp. 175–9.

15 Landsman, op. cit., note 4 above; Golan, op. cit., note 3 above; C Hamlin, ‘Scientific method and expert witnessing: Victorian perspectives on a modern problem’, Soc. Stud. Sci., 1986, 16: 485–513; C A G Jones, Expert witnesses: science, medicine, and the practice of law, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1994; T Golan, ‘The history of scientific expert testimony in the English courtroom’, Science in Context, 1999, 12: 7–32; J H Langbein, The origins of adversary criminal trial, Oxford University Press, 2003.

16 Forbes, op. cit., note 2 above; Clark and Crawford (eds), op. cit., note 7 above; R Smith, Trial by medicine: insanity and responsibility in Victorian trials, Edinburgh University Press, 1981; J C Mohr, Doctors and the law: medical jurisprudence in nineteenth-century America, New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993; J P Eigen, Witnessing insanity: madness and mad-doctors in the English court, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1995; J P Eigen, Unconscious crime: mental absence and criminal responsibility in Victorian London, Baltimore and London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.

17 C J Crawford, ‘The emergence of English forensic medicine: medical evidence in common-law courts, 1730–1830’, DPhil thesis, Oxford University, 1987; R Smith and B Wynne (eds), Expert evidence: interpreting science in the law, London, Routledge, 1989; M Clark and C Crawford, ‘Introduction’, in Clark and Crawford (eds), op. cit., note 7 above, pp. 1–21, on p. 17; I A Burney, Bodies of evidence: medicine and the politics of the English inquest, 1830–1926, Baltimore and London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.

18 Landsman, op. cit., note 4 above, pp. 446–7; Golan, op. cit., note 3 above, pp. 18–22.

19 Langbein, op. cit., note 15 above, pp. 67–105.

20 Ibid., pp. 8–9; M Redmayne, Expert evidence and criminal justice, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 198–220.

21 An Act to prevent the Destroying and Murthering of Bastard Children, passed in May 1624.

22 M Jackson, ‘Suspicious infant deaths: the statute of 1624 and medical evidence at coroners’ inquests’, in Clark and Crawford (eds), op. cit., note 7 above, pp. 64–86, on p. 67; M Jackson, New-born child murder: women, illegitimacy and the courts in eighteenth-century England, Manchester University Press, 1996, pp. 84–109 (see pp. 93–100 for the intense controversy that the hydrostatic lung test provoked in medico-legal writing).

23 D Harley, ‘The scope of legal medicine in Lancashire and Cheshire, 1660–1760’, in Clark and Crawford (eds), op. cit., note 7 above, pp. 45–63, on p. 56.

24 V McMahon, Murder in Shakespeare's England, London and New York, Hambledon & London, 2004, p. 123.

25 D Harley, ‘Political post-mortems and morbid anatomy in seventeenth-century England’, Soc. Hist. Med., 1994, 7: 1–28.

26 Ibid., pp. 22–23; Forbes, op. cit., note 2 above, pp. 46–7.

27 S Knight, The killing of Justice Godfrey, London, Grafton Books, 1986, pp. 127–9; A Marshall, The strange death of Edmund Godfrey: plots and politics in Restoration London, Stroud, Sutton Publishing, 1999, pp. 108–10, 147–51.

28 A Rosenberg, ‘The Sarah Stout murder case: an early example of the doctor as an expert witness’, in C R Burns (ed.), Legacies in law and medicine, New York, Science History Publications, 1977, pp. 230–9; J D J Havard, The detection of secret homicide, London, Macmillan, 1960, pp. 4, 37.

29 Golan, op. cit., note 3 above, pp. 22–51, especially pp. 44–5.

30 Ibid., pp. 52–54; Sir Geoffrey Gilbert, The law of evidence, considerably enlarged by Capel Lofft, 4 vols, London, A Strahan and W Woodfall, 1791, vol. 1, pp. 298–302.

31 Golan, op. cit., note 15 above, pp. 14–15, 26; Jones, op. cit., note 15 above, pp. 57–60.

32 See, for example, J Z Fullmer, ‘Technology, chemistry, and the law in early 19th-century England’, Technology and Culture, 1980, 21: 1–28; M A Crowther and B M White, ‘Medicine, property and the law in Britain 1800–1914’, Hist. J., 1988, 31: 853–70; K D Watson, ‘The chemist as expert: the consulting career of Sir William Ramsay’, Ambix, 1995, 42: 143–59; Golan, op. cit., note 3 above, pp. 54–106.

33 Gilbert, op. cit., note 30 above, p. 302; Landsman, op. cit., note 4 above, pp. 491–4; Burney, ‘Testing testimony’, op. cit., note 2 above, pp. 292–8.

34 M Harris, ‘Social diseases? Crime and medicine in the Victorian press’, in W F Bynum, S Lock and R Porter (eds), Medical journals and medical knowledge: historical essays, London, Routledge, 1992, pp. 108–25; A McLaren, A prescription for murder: the Victorian serial killings of Dr Thomas Neill Cream, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1993; J Knelman, Twisting in the wind: the murderess and the English press, University of Toronto Press, 1998; J P Eigen, ‘Sense and sensibility: fateful splitting in the Victorian insanity trial’, in R A Melikan (ed.), Domestic and international trials, 1700–2000, Manchester University Press, 2003, pp. 21–35; T Ward, ‘A mania for suspicion: poisoning, science, and the law’, in J Rowbotham and K Stevenson (eds), Criminal conversations: Victorian crimes, social panic and moral outrage, Columbus, Ohio State University Press, 2005, pp. 140–56.

35 Landsman, op. cit., note 4 above, pp. 463–4, 493; Forbes, op. cit., note 2 above, pp. 123–65; C Crawford, ‘Legalizing medicine: early modern legal systems and the growth of medico-legal knowledge’, in Clark and Crawford (eds), op. cit., note 7 above, pp. 89–116, on pp. 106–7.

36 Burney, ‘A poisoning of no substance’, op. cit., note 2 above.

37 Burney, ‘Testing testimony’, op. cit., note 2 above.

38 The inadequacies of the coroners themselves undoubtedly contributed to the “dark figure”. See M B Emmerichs, ‘Getting away with murder? Homicide and the coroners in nineteenth-century London’, Soc. Sci. Hist., 2001, 25: 93–100.

39 Attendance and Remuneration of Medical Witnesses at Coroners’ Inquests Act (1836).

40 Watson, op. cit., note 6 above, p. 165.

41 Forbes, op. cit., note 2 above, p. 21, shows that on average 46.3 per cent of Old Bailey homicide trials (1729–1878) included an autopsy report. During the nineteenth century the rate of post-mortem examinations made during inquests increased, from roughly 20 per cent to over 50 per cent, see Burney, op. cit., note 17 above, p. 195, n. 25.

42 The number of cases listed for each individual refers to entirely separate trials, with three exceptions: two of John Rayner's court appearances were in linked trials, as were those of Samuel Best Denton and Henry Nash.

43 R F Bud and G K Roberts, Science versus practice: chemistry in Victorian Britain, Manchester University Press, 1984, pp. 47–69; F L Holmes, Eighteenth-century chemistry as an investigative enterprise, Berkeley, Office for History of Science and Technology, University of California, 1989, pp. 85–102.

44The trial of Michael Whiting, for administering poison to George and Joseph Langman, Cambridge, 1812.

45 Coley, ‘Alfred Swaine Taylor’, op. cit., note 1 above, pp. 413, 426. Taylor recognized that samples had to be free from contamination, the poison had to be identified in the corpse as well as in food taken by the victim, and the quantitative amount of poison found had to be related to the fatal dose.

46 W T Vincent, The records of the Woolwich District, vol. 1, Woolwich, J P Jackson, 1888, pp. 534–42; K D Watson, ‘Criminal poisoning in England and the origins of the Marsh test for arsenic’, in J R Bertomeu-Sánchez and A Nieto-Galan (eds), Chemistry, medicine and crime: Mateu J B Orfila (1787–1853) and his times, Canton, MA, Science History Publications, 2006, pp. 183–206.

47 J Marsh, ‘Account of a method of separating small quantities of arsenic from substances with which it may be mixed’, Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, 1836, 21: 229–36.

48 See, for example, the cases of Robert and Ann Sandys, and Ann Edge (Cheshire, 1841); Hannah Roberts (Flintshire, 1842); Sarah Dazley (Bedfordshire, 1843); Betty Eccles (Lancashire, 1843).

49 H Reinsch, ‘On the action of metallic copper on solutions of certain metals, particularly with reference to the detection of arsenic’, Phil. Mag., 1841, 19: 480–3. This article was first published earlier in the same year in the Journal für praktische Chemie.

50 For more on Marsh, Reinsch and nineteenth-century chemical tests for arsenic, see W A Campbell, ‘Some landmarks in the history of arsenic testing’, Chemistry in Britain, 1965, 1: 198–202.

51 On the relationship between poverty and poisoning in the 1830s and 1840s, see Watson, op. cit., note 6 above, pp. 58, 81–91, 206–7.

52 See, for example, Herapath's testimony in these cases: PRO, ASSI 72/1 (Breconshire), ‘July 1849—Regina v. Margaret Michael’; PRO, ASSI 72/1 (Pembrokeshire), ‘Spring assizes 1863—Regina v. Jane Thomas and Anne Thomas’. Calvert drew some medical conclusions in an 1866 case, stating that the amount of prussic acid taken by the victim would not be fatal to a healthy person (PRO, PL 27/17, box 1 (Lancashire), ‘Lancaster summer assizes, 1866—The Queen v. Henry Hargreaves’), but in 1872 refused to speculate on whether a poison administered some months before death would account for the internal appearances found at autopsy (PRO, ASSI 65/8 (Cheshire), ‘24 Oct. 1872—Regina v. Edwin Eastwood’). Watson, ibid., pp. 169–70.

53 Havard, op. cit., note 28 above, p. 64, and Emmerichs, op. cit., note 38 above, pp. 94–7. G Robb, ‘Circe in crinoline: domestic poisonings in Victorian England’, J. Fam. Hist., 1997, 22: 176–90, pp. 179–80, 182, 185–6, notes contemporary unease about undetected poisonings.

54 Careers in pathology scarcely existed before the 1880s: see W D Foster, Pathology as a profession in Great Britain and the early history of the Royal College of Pathologists, London, Royal College of Pathologists, 1982, pp. 1–18.

55 Watson, op. cit., note 6 above, pp. 167–8.

56The Times, 13 Nov. 1847, p. 8e.

57 PRO, ASSI 6/5 (Monmouthshire), ‘Lent assizes 1848—Regina v. Mary Howells and James Price’.

58 ‘Action for recovery of fees for chemical analyses; implied contracts’, Pharm. J., 1851–52, 11: 185–8.

59 Howard Taylor has suggested that bureaucratic and political control of crime statistics, linked to the cost of prosecuting murder cases (poisonings being particularly expensive), led to an artificially maintained average annual number of murders. This meant that coroners and police, to stay within budget, often took no action in cases that might have been murders. See H Taylor, ‘Rationing crime: the political economy of criminal statistics since the 1850s’, Econ. Hist. Rev., 1998, 51: 569–90, pp. 583–8.

60Great Burdon slow poisoning case, Darlington, Robert Swales, 1855, p. 8.

61 Watson, op. cit., note 6 above, pp. 170–1; The Times, 2 May 1849, p. 8e (this was the case of Charlotte Harris).

62 Image testified against the locally notorious Catherine Foster (1847) and Mary Emily Cage (1851), both of whom were executed, and also William Rollinson (1852), who was reprieved from execution on account of his great age. Rayner witnessed the beginning of the mid-century trend in insurance-related child poisonings during his work on the cases of Robert Standring (1839) and Robert Sandys (1841), and continued it in the trial of Honor Gibbons and her mother Bridget Gerraty (1853).

63 Green, op. cit., note 1 above; University of Leeds, Brotherton Library, MS 534/1–3, ‘Thomas Scattergood, case notes’.

64 B Dyer and C A Mitchell, The Society of Public Analysts and other Analytical Chemists: some reminiscences of its first fifty years; and a review of its activities, Cambridge, published for The Society by W Heffer & Sons, 1932, pp. 1–3.

65Pharm. J., 3rd series, 1874–75, 5: 121–32.

66 Watson, op. cit., note 6 above, pp. 171–2.

67 R O Myers, ‘Famous forensic scientists, 5: Sir Thomas Stevenson (1838–1908)’, Medicine, Science and the Law, 1962, 2: 165–8; C E G, ‘Thomas Stevenson’, J. Chem. Soc., 1909, 95: 2213–15; S B A, ‘Sir Thomas Stevenson, MD, FRCP’, Trans. Med.-Leg. Soc., 1907–08, 5: 186–8; Streatham News, 1 Aug. 1908, p. 8.

68 That Taylor had a relationship with the Home Office is evident from a comment made years after his death, when an official referred to “the days when Dr A S Taylor was the Home Office Analyst”. See PRO, HO 45/10258/X67417, Memo, 12 May 1898.

69 PRO, HO 45/10258/X67417, memos of December 1898 and August 1899. Stevenson was to receive £150, and his junior (Arthur Luff) £75.

70 PRO, HO 45/10258/X67417, letter from A F O Liddell to T Stevenson, 8 May 1882, ref. A15734/6.

71 PRO, HO 45/10258/X67417, letter from T Stevenson to M D Chalmers, 9 May 1904. His junior colleagues Charles Tidy (in post 1882–92) and Arthur Luff (1892–1904) were qualified in both medicine and chemistry, though John Webster (who worked as a Home Office Analyst from 1900 until his death in 1927) held qualifications solely in chemistry.

72 C A Mitchell, Forensic chemistry in the criminal courts, London, Institute of Chemistry, 1938, pp. 13–14.

73 Bud and Roberts, op. cit., note 43 above, pp. 150–63.

74 Jones, op. cit., note 15 above, pp. 73–95; P H A Willcox, The detective-physician: the life and work of Sir William Willcox, London, William Heinemann Medical Books, 1970; D G Browne and E V Tullett, Bernard Spilsbury: his life and cases, London, George G Harrap, 1951.

75 Browne and Tullett, ibid., p. 403. See also Jones, ibid., pp. 86–92.

76 See, for example, Redmayne, op. cit., note 20 above, p. 198.

77 Golan, op. cit., note 15 above, p. 27.