Madeleine [Smith] tried at the bar of common sense and common humanity : being a plea for the coroner's inquest in Scotland / by Historicus [i.e. David Dunbar Scott?.].

  • Historicus.
Date:
1858
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Madeleine [Smith] tried at the bar of common sense and common humanity : being a plea for the coroner's inquest in Scotland / by Historicus [i.e. David Dunbar Scott?.]. 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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    because not seen or known to do it lately, is silly in tlie extreme. That he took it in 1852, is certain—yet it was by the merest accidents that this came to be known—an accidental conversation about a journey and horses, and an accidental conversation about a white powder found in a wood. And because no such accidental revelations beyond the half-hour’s talk with M. de Mean occurred after his coming to Glasgow', therefore we must presume that he had abandoned a habit that had probably become a necessity of his existence! Why, have we not M. Thuau’s evidence, that he was in the habit of taking laudanum ? and yet none but he, not even his landlady, knew this. But so it is; let the mind once become unsettled by a tale of horrors, and human nature, even in the otherwise well-informed and sensible, shows all the weakness of the German peasants, whose dread of the comet led them to abandon the tillage of their lands. One would think Credo quia impossibile was their creed. Had his body been found saturated with alcohol instead of arsenic, not the slightest consequence would have been attached to no bottle of wine or spirits being found in his lodgings. We may not unreasonably surmise that he suspected arsenic at last as a cause of those illnesses, and thrown away all he had. Judicial murder at Lancaster. b5 r in DO mi >9$ H :§£ You have heard, Gentlemen, I dare say, of a judicial murder once committed in Lancashire in the case of a poor servant girl, who was hanged for cutting her mistress’s throat because she was the only person that resided with the old lady, and there was not the slightest trace of any thief or burglar having entered the house. The real murderer afterwards confessed to the deed, and explained how very simply he had accomplished it. The street was narrow—a mere lane—he had found his way into an empty house opposite the old lady’s, had laid a ladder across from an open window to that of her bed-room window sill, had raised the sash, gone in, committed the murder, and slipt out again without leaving the slightest trace of his presence. The jury, pretending to omniscience, pronounced that the old lady could not possibly have been murdered by any one but her maid, and rather than admit their possible ignorance, themselves committed a far more shocking murder. What the Lancaster jury did, the prosecutor in the case before us was so deluded as to call upon an Edinburgh jury to do, and so far as infamy went, they actually did by their verdict of “not proven.” And yet how much less excusable was the surmise of guilt in the latter case than in the former? So far from there being no indication of the entrance of a deadly poison into the body of the deceased, except in the way of recent murderous administrations, he himself had told the way to more than one witness who deponed to that effect in court; and, moreover, common sense sees, from what was revealed by the post mortem examination, that the arsenic found in the body could no more have entered there in the way alleged, than the murderer in the other instance could have entered the lady’s chamber by the keyhole of the door. Swallowing so much at once impossible. IT {%■ ioil The mere swallowing, indeed, at one time of so large an amount of arsenic as the surmise of murder assumes, has appeared to nearly the whole medical world beyond the influence of local prepossession to be