Ian Burney

A poisoning of no substance: the trials of medico-legal proof in mid-Victorian England.

“I am innocent of poisoning Cook by strychnine.” With these words, Dr. William Palmer went to the scaffold, convicted of having perpetrated precisely the crime he denied to the last. Palmers twelveday trial in May 1856, among the most celebrated English murder cases of the century, had received massive press attention, and his execution was no less scrutinized. Scaffold speeches being traditional opportunities for achieving closure on a case (preferably, though not exclusively, by confession and repentance), press reports devoted a good deal of space to the concerted efforts made to convince Palmer to comply with these expectations: “From the time of his sentence to the very moment when he ascended the scaffold,” one correspondent observed, “Palmer was persuaded, entreated, implored day by day, almost hour by hour, to confess his crimes, not to God, but to man.” Interrogated to the last, Palmer offered instead of closure a riddle, neither directly denying his guilt nor ratifying the grounds upon which his conviction rested. In doing so he seemed to take aim at the most contentious part of the trial, namely, the scientific evidence that had attributed the death of John Parsons Cook to strychnine poisoning. By disavowing strychnine as the agent of Cooks death, he at once repudiated the prosecutions fundamental contention and left open the possibility that, although he had been justly condemned as a murderer, his conviction was based on fallacious medico-legal grounds. Palmers dying words became the subject of widespread concern.

Testing testimony: toxicology and the law of evidence in early nineteenth-century england.

Examines how, when confronted with a case of possible criminal poisoning, early-19th-century English toxicologists sought to generate and to represent their evidence in the courtroom. Contends that in both these activities, toxicologists were inextricably engaged in a complex communicative exercise. On the one hand, they distanced themselves from the instabilities of language, styling themselves as testifiers to fact alone. At the same time, they saw themselves as deeply implicated in the difficulties of forging a coherent signifying system out of a disparate collection of signs that in themselves bore no intrinsic meaning. The article suggests first, why criminal poisoning featured so prominently in the burgeoning legal literature on evidence, which provided the framework for expert testimony in English courts; next, that the scientific evidence offered by toxicologists in poisoning cases can be usefully understood as a form of (unstable) language; and finally, that this recourse to signs informed the toxicologists encounter with another type of courtroom expert - the legal advocate - who was equally (though differently) interested in manipulating signs in order to construct (and deconstruct) legally sanctioned proof.

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

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.

Making space for criminalistics: Hans Gross and fin-de-siècle CSI

This article explores the articulation of a novel forensic object—the ‘crime scene’—and its corresponding expert—the investigating officer. Through a detailed engagement with the work of the late nineteenth-century Austrian jurist and criminalist Hans Gross, it analyses the dynamic and reflexive nature of this model of ‘CSI’, emphasising the material, physical, psychological and instrumental means through which the crime scene as a delineated space, and its investigator as a disciplined agent operating within it, jointly came into being. It has a further, historiographic, aim: to move away from the commonplace emphasis in histories of forensics on fin-de-siècle criminology and toward its comparatively under-explored contemporary, criminalistics. In so doing, it opens up new ways of thinking about the crime scene as a defining feature of our present-day forensic culture that recognise its historical contingency and the complex processes at work in its creation and development.

War on fear: Solly Zuckerman and civilian nerve in the Second World War

This article examines the processes through which civilian fear was turned into a practicable investigative object in the inter-war period and the opening stages of the Second World War, and how it was invested with significance at the level of science and of public policy. Its focus is on a single historical actor, Solly Zuckerman, and on his early war work for the Ministry of Home Security-funded Extra Mural Unit based in Oxford’s Department of Anatomy (OEMU). It examines the process by which Zuckerman forged a working relationship with fear in the 1930s, and how he translated this work to questions of home front anxiety in his role as an operational research officer. In doing so it demonstrates the persistent work applied to the problem: by highlighting it as an ongoing research project, and suggesting links between seemingly disparate research objects (e.g. the phenomenon of ‘blast’ exposure as physical and physiological trauma), the article aims to show how civilian ‘nerve’ emerged from within a highly specific analytical and operational matrix which itself had complex foundations.

The rise and fall of celebrity pathology

What has happened to the thoughtful, bowler-hatted figure of the forensic pathologist, the spectacular but fallible artist of battered flesh?

The Politics of Particularism: Medicalization and Medical Reform in 19th century Britain

Roy Porter loved a good story. His monumental works in medical history consistently focused on individual lives of doctors and patients, the micro-histories of their embodied experiences and their contextually specific and negotiated — and often contested — relations. Stories for Porter served not merely to entertain, though entertainment was, he lamented, an underrated virtue amongst historians. Instead, histories of the individual and the particular were his antidote to the historiographical affliction of abstraction. For the history of medicine, the principal symptom of this chronic malady was the uncritical use of grand analytical categories — modernization, professionalization, medicalization, and the like. These abstractions, Porter insisted, rested on the presumed triumph of what he termed ‘the medical model’, in which an institutionalized and authoritative medical science and technology progressively expropriated the experience of embodiment and illness, ultimately rendering patients ‘paradigmatically passive’.1 Such accounts, he maintained, tended to be cast in terms of linearity and inevitability, driven by an assumption of the power and efficacy of medical modernizers, of their ability to sweep aside existing structures and relationships and thereby remake the medical world in their own image.

A History of Forensic Science: British Beginnings in the Twentieth Century

himself. Such is the bare bones of the history of the Muspratts, and it is a very interesting story on several levels. Peter Reed, an experienced historian of the chemical industry and the alkali acts, has done it full justice, writing about the many different aspects of the family’s history from the chemical works, through the education of the sons and their political activities, to their patronage of the arts. The family was particularly interested in the theatre, James having been a friend of the dramatist and actor James Sheridan Knowles (two of James’s sons were named after him) in Dublin. All these aspects are treated very well and at the same level. The prose is clear and flows smoothly. The book is well-referenced and based on extensive research over several decades. Most histories of the Leblanc soda industry have tended to be regional (the works of David W. F. Hardie and Kenneth Warren, for example); this is the first sustained attempt to cover the history of one of the major families involved. Hence, this book is very much to be welcomed, and in many respects it will be of great value not only to historians of chemistry but also historians of Liverpool in particular. However, one wonders exactly what the point of this book is. Despite its title Peter Reed foreswears any attempt to produce an analysis of entrepreneurship or to explore its genetic transmission (or otherwise). Nor is it a technological history or a business history (although there are many pages relating both to the firm and to a lesser extent, the technology). As each chapter deals with a different facet of the family’s history, the timeline become rather jerky. A major figure dies in one chapter and then reappears still alive in the next. Personally I found these discontinuities rather disconcerting, if also both understandable and unavoidable. If one is mainly interested in the firm, the chapter on the arts is interesting as an example of the gentrification of the family, but perhaps somewhat superfluous. Could this book have been written differently? Perhaps the author could have used the family’s history to show more explicitly how the UK, Liverpool, and the chemical industry changed between 1822 and 1934. In particularly, he could have used the basic data to explore Martin Wiener’s (in)famous thesis about English culture and business, showing how at least some members of the firm had stayed in the business to the bitter end, rather than becoming the landed gentry that Wiener claimed all well-off Englishmen aimed to be in this period. Conversely, the cases of Sheridan and Frederic give a little support to Wiener’s claims. It is striking (and in a way rather moving) that the Muspratt family’s major legacies to posterity were the Liverpool repertory theatre company, the University of Liverpool, the Mersey road tunnel, and Liverpool John Lennon Airport rather than a surviving chemical firm or a chemical technology which is still used. But what a splendidly useful bequest they were! Every time a Liverpool family flies to Tenerife from John Lennon Airport, the legacy of Max Muspratt is in a sense perpetuated. Yet at the same it shows how fleeting an impact anyone can make on the progress of the chemical industry, or indeed of any industry. This book will prove interesting to anyone interested in the many themes covered in this book, and will be of particular use to scholars of the history of the alkali industry and the civic history of the north-west of England.

Book Reviews: Death Investigation in America: Coroners, Medical Examiners and the Pursuit of Medical Certainty.

Jeffrey Jentzen’s book offers valuable insight into the origins and development of the American system of death investigation. It charts the fortunes of the two main investigative models: the coroner’s inquest and the office of medical examiner, as they developed in a relationship of protracted rivalry from the days of the early republic to the present. For Jentzen, these represented not merely alternative mechanisms for generating knowledge about violent, unnatural or otherwise suspicious deaths, but also contrasting views about how such inquiries fit within the broader framework of American civic democracy. The inquest system, centred on a (mostly) non-medical and popularly elected coroner and his lay jury, stood, for its proponents, as a means of guaranteeing citizen representation in matters of local concern and of checking the power of bureaucratic officialdom. By contrast, the medical examiner system, which sought to replace lay coroners with medically qualified appointees, emerged as a feature of Progressive Era efforts to harness the authority of modern science to combat the forces of political corruption which, in their view, had turned offices such as the coronership into archaic, self-serving sinecures. Jentzen’s analysis begins in earnest with this reformist movement, following the fortunes of the medical examiner model as it developed as an aspiration and was contested legislatively, institutionally and professionally. Because of the fragmented nature of the federal system in the United States, the ensuing story is told through local examples, mostly, but not exclusively, drawn from large metropolitan jurisdictions in the northeast and mid-west. New York City, with its notorious political machine, features prominently in the campaign to replace coroners with medical examiners, as one of the leading reformists, Richard Childs, made this part of his wider crusade against electoral corruption. Childs’ efforts met with a measure of success when, in 1918, the New York State legislature mandated the gradual replacement of coroners with physician examiners trained in pathology. A parallel movement, animated not by the ideals of progressivist renewal but by establishment anxiety about rising crime rates and radical subversion in the inter-war period, pushed for improved institutional and educational provision: a 1928 Rockefeller-funded review identified the need for improving standards, training and supporting infrastructure for death investigation; in 1937, Harvard University, aided by the heiress to the International Harvester fortune, established a department of legal medicine which raised the discipline’s profile and served as a base-camp for medically-minded reformers; and, in 1951, leading reformers capped decades of effort by publishing a ‘model law’ designed for adoption by State legislatures seeking to replace coroners with medical examiners. These initiatives met with some measure of success, and by the early 1960s almost half of all elective coronerships had been abolished. The aim of eliminating all vestiges of the inquest eventually stalled, however. By the end of the 1960s the coroner system still operated in thirty-nine states, and the final decades of the century witnessed a ‘demedicalization’ of death investigation. Jentzen, a former medical examiner himself, makes little attempt – rhetorically or conceptually – to hide his disappointment in what he sees as the ultimate failure of his predecessors to displace the corrupt and out-moded office of coroner. This is evident throughout the book, from its opening pages, which note that by the mid-twentieth century only six jurisdictions had ‘progressed’ (p. 3) to the medical examiner’s system, to its penultimate sentence, which welcomes a National Research Council endorsement of medical examiners in 2009 as having ‘vindicated’ (p. 213) the case against coroners. Jentzen’s advocacy injects his narrative with an admirable sense of purpose, yet it also results in some oversimplification and a lack of analytical symmetry in his treatment of the examiner–coroner debate. As he himself notes, some of the most notable twentieth-century coroners were active and successful scientific modernisers, yet they are treated with suspicion, their support for medical reform described as ‘disingenuous’ (p. 57), and their innovations as driven by a ‘hunger for media fame’ (p. 54). Moreover, and despite his assertion that medical examiners and coroners represented alternative visions of democratic accountability, Jentzen declines numerous opportunities systematically to explore this latter vision on its own terms. His analysis thus reads as a rather one-sided lament, in which the forces of good fail through a combination of largely exogenous circumstances – personalities, internecine bickering, manipulation and misunderstanding – rather than through any form of historical logic, however problematic that logic might be. In the end, this is an informative and engaging account of long-standing and on-going debates over the American way of investigating death, albeit told from only one of the warring camps’ perspectives.

Allergy: The History of a Modern Malady

tions of practice, theory, scientific cultural traditions, and political contest all mixed together. This refracted picture, derived from different perspectives, achieves a melded, more comprehensive, and thus accurate historical account than one focused on one aspect or another. Many kinds of history of immunology have been published over the past twenty years: overviews of scientific findings and theories; conceptual histories of immune theory; sociological accounts; technological and methodological developments; practice-based descriptions; political-economic overviews; various ‘internalist’ memoirs and so on. Each has its role and place, and while we must remain critical, to champion one genre over another reflects more the bias of the proponent than the promotion of history of science as a whole. This collection of essays, despite its purported theme and purpose, cannot but reflect the heterogeneity of contemporary historiography. That is most fortunate, for only in the pluralistic pursuit of history, will its scholars begin to do justice to their subject.