On homicidal and suicidal wounds of the throat / by Alfred S. Taylor.

  • Taylor, Alfred Swaine, 1806-1880.
Date:
1868
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On homicidal and suicidal wounds of the throat / by Alfred S. Taylor. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    ON HOMICIDAL AND SUICIDAL WOUNDS OF THE THROAT. By ALFRED S. TAYLOR, M.D., F.R.S. The power of locomotion or struggling after wounds of the trachea, the common carotid artery, and the internal jugular vein—Inference of the time of death from the condition of the dead body—Remarks on the case of John Wiggins. There is no more difficult question which can be placed before a medical jurist than that in which he is required to say whether a fatal wound in the throat, involving the trachea and great blood-vessels, has been self-inflicted or inflicted by the hand of another. Murder may be charged against a person known to have been present at or about the time of death, and the defence may be that the act was one of suicide. A medical witness can rarely be in a position to return an absolute answer to such a question, or affirm that it was impossible that the wound could have been self-inflicted. At most he can say it was highly improbable, but he would find himself generally compelled to admit that the medical circumstances were recon- cileable with the hypothesis either of suicide or homicide. Every case of this kind must be determined not merely by the medical facts connected with the wound, which are scarcely similar in any two cases, but by the whole of the moral and A