A manual of medical jurisprudence for India : including the outline of a history of crime against the person in India / by Norman Chevers.

  • Chevers, Norman, 1818-1886.
Date:
1870
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A manual of medical jurisprudence for India : including the outline of a history of crime against the person in India / by Norman Chevers. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    altogether beyond the province of the Medical Jurist, it is generally necessary,—first, that he should possess a wide and intimate knowledge of the dispositions, customs, prejudices, and crimes of the people among whom his investigations are to he pursued; and, secondly, that he should be made acquainted, as fully as possible, with every ascertainable detail of the cases upon which his opiniou is demanded. The circumstances which generally lead to the perpetration of various crimes against the person, the descriptions of crimes usually committed, and the means commonly employed to effect and to conceal them, form an essential portion of the Medical Jurist's knowledge. A very few illustra- tions will sufficiently set forth this principle. The body of a woman is discovered on the floor of a London garret. The evidences of want and sorrow are stamped upon her countenance, as deeply as the recent gashes and bruises which disfigure it. The sur- geon and the policeman hold an undivided opinion upon this case ;— it is not one of accident or robbery ; life has been taken away by the hand sworn to protect it ; and the criminal must be sought for with the fumes of liquor still in his brain, and with his victim's blood still upon his clothes and behind his nails. A girl lies dead in a small room in Paris ; the Medical Inspector, on entering, presses his handkerchief to his face, to exclude the suffocating atmosphere, glances at a charcoal pan beside the bed, tears out a caulking of rags from the crevices of the sash;—and the leading facts of the case are before him.* In like mannei*, the body of a female is discovered beside a tank in Bengal, mutilated by a dozen wounds, each sufficient to cause almost instantaneous death. The skull is cloven, a hand has been lopped off, the shoulder is gashed through muscle and bone to the lungs. Whether the remaius are those of a Hindu woman or of a Mussulmanee, the matter scarcely admits of a doubt ;—the murder has beeu committed by her husband or paramour, in a fit of jealousy; search must be made for a dhao, or bill-hook, which will probably be discovered with the evidences of crime upon its blade. Still again,—the body of a native of good condition would be found buried near a water-course, scored from head to heel with enormous gashes; these, however, would be entirely passed over in the examination, the evidences of strangulation by a Thug's girdle would alone be sought for. Various as are the modes of effecting and of concealing crime in different countres, a large experience will always show that a really new crime is an unexampled event in the cirmiual annals of any land. As the hunter and the brute-tamer learn to approach and to subdue the cunningest and the strongest beasts and the most venomous reptiles, * Happily the crime of suicide by charcoal fumes appears to be far less prevalent in Paris now than it was when the above was written, fifteen years ago.