Medical Evidence for the Prosecution
The evidence of Dr. Arthur Richard Hopper, who had been Mr. and Mrs. Maybrick’s medical adviser for about seven years, was taken. He had not attended Mr. Maybrick during his last illness, but spoke about Mrs. Maybrick having asked him the year before to check her husband from taking dangerous drugs, and that Mr. Maybrick had admitted to him that he used to dose himself with anything his friends recommended, and that he was used to the taking of arsenic.
Dr. Richard Humphreys spoke as to the symptoms of the illness and his prescriptions, and that he had not suspected poisoning until it was suggested to him and his colleague, Dr. Carter, and that he had himself administered arsenic to the deceased, in the form of Fowler’s solution, on the Sunday or Monday before death, and that he refused a certificate of death only because arsenic had been found on the premises.
Dr. William Carter spoke of being called the Tuesday before death, and he agreed with Dr. Humphreys that an irritant poison, most probably arsenic, was the cause of death.
Dr. Alexander Barron gave evidence to the effect that he was unable to ascertain any particular poison.
Mr. Edward Davies, the analyst, was called, and gave evidence to the effect that he had found no weighable arsenic in the portions of the body selected at the post-mortem, but that he had subsequently found one fiftieth of a grain of arsenic in a part of the liver, nothing in the stomach or its contents, but traces, not weighable, in the intestines, and that he had found arsenic in some of the bottles and things found in the house after death and in the Valentine’s meat juice.
The first issue which the jury at the trial had to determine was whether it was proved beyond reasonable doubt that the deceased died from arsenical poisoning.
Mr. Justice Stephen, in his summing-up, put this issue to the jury in the following words:
“It is essential to this charge that the man died of arsenic. This question must be the foundation of a verdict unfavorable to the prisoner, that he died of arsenic.”
It must be assumed that this was a question exclusively for medical experts, notwithstanding which the judge, in summing up, told the jury:
“You must not consider this as a mere medical case, in which you are to decide whether the man did or did not die of arsenic poisoning according to the medical evidence. You must not consider it as a mere chemical case, in which you decide whether the man died from arsenic which was discovered as the result of a chemical analysis. You must decide it as a great and highly important case, involving in itself not only medical and chemical questions, but involving in itself a most highly important moral question.”