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Bruised Witness: Bernard Spilsbury and the Performance of Early Twentieth-Century English Forensic Pathology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2012

Ian Burney  and
Neil Pemberton
Ian Burney
Affiliation:
Ian Burney, Senior Lecturer, Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, The University of Manchester, Simon Building, Manchester M13 9PL, UK. Email: [email protected]
Neil Pemberton
Affiliation:
Neil Pemberton, Research Fellow, Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, The University of Manchester, Simon Building, Manchester M13 9PL, UK. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

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This article explores the status, apparatus and character of forensic pathology in the inter-war period, with a special emphasis on the ‘people’s pathologist’, Bernard Spilsbury. The broad expert and public profile of forensic pathology, of which Spilsbury was the most prominent contemporary representative, will be outlined and discussed. In so doing, close attention will be paid to the courtroom strategies by which he and other experts translated their isolated post-mortem encounters with the dead body into effective testimony.

Pathologists built a high-profile practice that transfixed the popular, legal and scientific imagination, and this article also explores, through the celebrated 1925 murder trial of Norman Thorne, how Spilsbury’s courtroom performance focused critical attention on the practices of pathology itself, which threatened to destabilise the status of forensic pathology. In particular, the Thorne case raised questions about the interrelation between bruising and putrefaction as sources of interpretative anxiety. Here, the question of practice is vital, especially in understanding how Spilsbury’s findings clashed with those of rival pathologists whose autopsies centred on a corpse that had undergone further putrefactive changes and that had thereby mutated as an evidentiary object. Examining how pathologists dealt with interpretative problems raised by the instability of their core investigative object enables an analysis of the ways in which pathological investigation of homicide was inflected with a series of conceptual, professional and cultural difficulties stemming in significant ways from the materiality of the corpse itself.

This article presents early findings of a larger study of twentieth-century English homicide investigation which focuses on the interaction between two dominant forensic regimes: the first, outlined in part here, is a body-centred forensics, associated with the lone, ‘celebrity’ pathologist, his scalpel and the mortuary slab; the second is a ‘forensics of things’ centred on the laboratory and its associated technologies of trace analysis (hair, blood, fibres), deployed in closed technician-dominated spaces and in the regimentally managed crime scene. Future work will seek to illuminate the shifting landscape of English forensics by following the historical interplay between these two powerful investigative models.

Keywords

Forensic PathologyHomicide InvestigationExpert TestimonyPost-mortem ExaminationBruisingDecompositionExhumationBernard Spilsbury
Type
Articles
Information
Medical History , Volume 55 , Issue 1 , January 2011 , pp. 41 - 60
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2011. Published by Cambridge University Press

References

1 ‘I am a Martyr to Spilsburyism’, The Star, 20 April 1925.

2 ‘Sir A. Conan Doyle and the Thorne Case’, Morning Post, 21 April 1925; see also ‘“Not Quite Easy” at Thorne’s Fate: Sir A. Conan Doyle Would Like Him Reprieved’, The Evening Standard, 20 April 1925. Doyle’s interest in the case, presumably, stemmed in part because he was a resident of Thorne’s home village.

3 Spilsbury has been extensively, and often sensationally, served by biographers, past and present, notably Leslie Randall, The Famous Cases of Sir Bernard Spilsbury (London: Ivor Nicholson & Watson, 1936); Harold Dearden, Some Cases of Bernard Spilsbury and Others (London and New York: Hutchinson, 1948); D.G. Browne and E.V. Tullett, Bernard Spilsbury: His Life and Cases, (London: Harrap, 1951); Colin Evans, The Father of Forensics: The Groundbreaking Cases of Sir Bernard Spilsbury, and the Beginnings of Modern CSI (New York and London: The Berkley Publishing Group, 2006); and Andrew Rose, Lethal Witness: Sir Bernard Spilsbury, the Honorary Pathologist (London: The History Press, 2007). The Wellcome Archives have recently acquired a new collection that will enable historians to extend this largely biographical approach to Spilsbury. The Spilsbury Collection consists of over 20,000 autopsy reports written by Spilsbury on index cards, one per autopsy. These cards have many possible historical uses—for example, systematic analysis might reveal how many times Spilsbury used a microscope, or the relative frequency of different types of death he investigated on a routine basis. These cards might also be treated as historical artefacts in their own right, as remnants of a lost forensic world that, arguably, has been rendered obsolete by modern day scientific developments and advances in biomedicine.

4 Ian Burney, Bodies of Evidence: Medicine and the Politics of the English Inquest, 1830–1926 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), ch. 4.

5 In this account, we are only concerned with the work of Bernard Spilsbury and the Thorne case as far as they illuminate these core questions. We identify here what we believe to be some of the major threads of the case, but we do not identify all, as it is not our intention to offer an exhaustive discussion of the ‘facts’ of the case. Likewise, we avoid commenting on the full range of the medical evidence and certainly do not claim to offer a complete account of Spilsbury’s career as a forensic pathologist or as a medico-legal witness. Rather, we limit ourselves to one significant thread that weaves through the Thorne case—one that highlights early twentieth-century transformations in the corpse as an object of knowledge and source of expertise, in which tensions between the public and expert understanding of the way violence could be encoded on the body were of signal importance. We should also note that the Thorne case was not an isolated one, it was instead one of a series of highly publicised murder investigations led by Spilsbury in the 1920s–30s involving exhumed, decomposed and mutilated cadavers—most notably R v Mahon (1924), R v Fox (1930), and R v Mancini (1935). Though each of these cases involved their own distinctive elements, there was a remarkable continuity of subject matter—and in contestation—that linked them.

6 For an overview of forensic medicine and science in nineteenth-century England, see Tal Golan, Laws of Men and Laws of Nature: The History of Scientific Expert Testimony in England and America (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2004). For forensic toxicology, see Katherine Watson, Poisoned Lives: English Poisoners and their Victims (London: Hambledon and London, 2004); Ian Burney, Poison, Detection and the Victorian Imagination (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2006); José Ramón Bertomeu-Sánchez and Augustí Nieto-Galan (eds), Chemistry, Medicine, and Crime: Mateu J.B. Orfila (1787–1851) and His Times (Sagamore Beach, MA.: Science History Publications, 2006); for forensic psychiatry, see Roger Smith, Trial by Medicine: Insanity and Responsibility in Victorian Trials (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981); Joel Eigen, Witnessing Insanity: Madness and Mad-Doctors in the English Court (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995); and Joel Eigen, Unconscious Crime: Mental Absence and Criminal Responsibility in Victorian London (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); for criminology and criminalistics, see Simon Cole, Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Neil Davie, Tracing the Criminal: The Rise of Scientific Criminology in Britain, 1860–1918 (Oxford: Bardwell Press, 2006); and P. Becker and R. Wetzell (eds), Criminals and their Scientists: The History of Criminology in International Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); for forensic pathology, see Burney, op. cit (note 4).

7 See, for example, Michael Lynch and Sheila Jasanoff (eds), ‘Contested Identities: Science, Law and Forensic Practice, Social Studies of Science’. special issue of Social Studies of Science, 28 (1998); Jay Aronson, Genetic Witness: Science, Law, and Controversy in the Making of DNA Profiling (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 2007); and Michael Lynch, Simon Cole, Ruth McNally, and Kathleen Jordan, Truth Machine: The Contentious History of DNA Fingerprinting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

8 Anne Crowther and Brenda White, On Soul and Conscience: The Medical Expert and Crime. 150 Years of Forensic Medicine in Glasgow (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988); Norman Ambage, ‘The Origins and Development of the Home Office Forensic Science Service, 1931–1967’ (unpublished PhD thesis: University of Lancaster, 1987); Norman Ambage and Michael Clark, ‘Unbuilt Bloomsbury: Medico-legal Institutes and Forensic Science Laboratories in England between the Wars’, in Michael Clark and Catherine Crawford (eds), Legal Medicine in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 293–313.

9 Sydney Smith, Mostly Murder (London: Harrap, 1959); John Glaister Jr., Final Diagnosis (London: Hutchinson, 1964); Keith Simpson, Forty Years of Murder (London: Harrap, 1978).

10 See op. cit. (note 3).

11 We base this discussion of the Thorne case on investigative and trial documents at the National Archives, Kew (hereafter NA), newspaper accounts, and Helena Normanton (ed.), The Trial of Norman Thorne: The Crowborough Chicken Farm Murder (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1929).

12 NA, HO 144/5193, ‘Transcript of the Inquest of Elsie Cameron’, 17 January 1925.

13 Ibid.

14 Alfred Swaine Taylor, The Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence (London: John Churchill, 1865), 297.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid., 298.

17 Ibid., 293.

18 Ibid., 295.

19 Louis Pasteur, ‘Investigation into the Role Attributed to Atmospheric Oxygen Gas in the Destruction of Animal and Vegetable Substances after Death’ (1863), excerpted and translated in Mikulás Teich and Dorothy M. Needham, A Documentary History of Biochemistry, 1770–1940 (Leicester: Leicester University, 1992), 474–7.

20 Alfred Taylor, The Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence, Fred J. Smith (ed.), 5th edn, 2 vols (London: John Churchill, 1905), Vol. I, 83.

21 Ibid.

22 C.M, Tidy, Legal Medicine, 2 vols (London: Smith, Elder, 1882), Vol. I, 87–92.

23 “Funeral of Miss Cameron”, The Times, 27 January 1925, 8.

24 See, for example, Evans, op. cit. (note 3), 161–6.

25 Ibid., 174.

26 Spilsbury had left St Mary’s for a position at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in 1919.

27 ‘Elsie Cameron Exhumation Ordered on Behalf of Thorne’, The Daily Mail, 26 February 1925.

28 ‘Task by Lamplight at Typist’s Grave’, Evening News, 25 February 1925.

29 Tidy, op. cit. (note 22), 290. Interestingly, Tidy recommended that: ‘a post-mortem should not be conducted by artificial light unless in case of great emergency. Certain characteristic tints, such as the yellow colour produced by nitric or by picric acid, would probably escape notice either by gas or candle light.’

30 W.G. Robertson, Manual of Medical Jurisprudence and Toxicology, 4th edn (London: A. & C. Black, 1921), 89.

31 NA, HO 144/5193, ‘R. v John Norman Holmes Thorne, Trial Transcripts of Shorthand Notes of Trial’, 327.

32 Ibid., 129–35.

33 Ibid., 329.

34 Ibid., 371.

35 Ibid.

36 Ibid., 367.

37 Ibid.

38 Ibid., 141.

39 Ibid., 167.

40 Ibid., 141–3.

41 Ibid., 336–7.

42 Ibid. Emphasis added.

43 Ibid.

44 Ibid., 341–4.

45 Normanton, op. cit. (note 11), 274. For a full account of the professional and public face of toxicology as a nineteenth-century model of forensic expertise, see Burney, Poison, op. cit. (note 6).

46 ‘R. v John Norman Holmes Thorne’, 341–4.

47 Ibid., 377–80.

48 Ibid., 167–8. Spilsbury’s own slide preparations taken from the neck at the second autopsy, it should be noted, revealed no signs of extravasation. Defence witnesses agreed on this point, but explained the discrepancy between the Brontë and Spilsbury slides by the extreme localisation of the bruise—Brontë had taken a piece of flesh that had been bruised, Spilsbury had not.

49 Golan, op. cit. (note 6), 144–75.

50 Ibid., 169.

51 Normanton, op. cit. (note 11), 321–2.

52 Ibid., 347

53 See articles in op. cit. (note 2).

54 This Act gave legal sanction to the argument that certain kinds of evidence were of such a technical nature that they were beyond the comprehension of the ordinary layperson, and could only be assessed by an expert.

55 ‘Thorne in Despair: The Scene of Failure of Appeal’, News of the World, 17 April 1925.

56 Ibid.

57 ‘The Thorne Appeal’, Law Journal, 18 April 1925, 360.

58 Ibid.

59 Ibid.

60 ‘Mr Thorne’s Protest’, Daily News, 21 April 1925; ‘Thorne’s Letters from Gaol’, News of the World, 22 March 1925.

61 Ibid.

62 Ibid.

63 Ibid.

64 Not everyone, to be sure, sympathised with Thorne and his supporters. An editorial in The Evening Standard felt the need to remind its readers that the medical evidence was but one element in a whole mass of testimony. The Standard also made the obvious point in drawing attention to Thorne’s mutilation of Cameron’s body: ‘[why] would an innocent man, hack a body to pieces and bury it at night through fear of the consequence of leavings for the investigation of the authorities?’ Thorne, who had the ‘the strength of nerve to go through the horrible business of dismemberment and live callously in the neighbourhood of the insulted corpse,’ was clearly no out-and-out martyr. The Evening Standard, 21 April 1925.

65 R. v Fox (1930), R. v Mancini (1935), R. v Nodder (1947).

66 Bernard Spilsbury, ‘The Application of Physiological Principles to Medico-Legal Problems’, Medico-Legal and Criminological Review, 2 (1934), 340–4: 340.

67 Ibid.

68 Ambage and Clark, op. cit. (note 8).

69 T.H. Blench, ‘Crime Investigation in Paris’, Transactions of the Medico-Legal Society, 25 (1930–1), 167–91: 187.

70 Spilsbury’s contribution to a discussion following a paper read before the Medico-Legal Society, ibid., 186.

71 Evans, op. cit. (note 3), 180.

72 Rose, op. cit. (note 3).

73 Michael J. Saks and Jonathan J. Koehler, ‘The Coming Paradigm Shift in Forensic Identification Science’, Science, 309 (2005), 892–5, 895.