“The gentleman,” he said, “who was called at the last moment would not have escaped quite so easily if I had had the books to which he referred under my hand, and been able to expose, as I would have done, the ignorance or presumption of the assertion he dared to make. I say ignorance or presumption; or, what is worse, an intention to deceive. I assert it in the face of the whole medical profession, and I am satisfied I shall have a verdict in my favour.”
He then concluded this part of his speech by calling attention to the fact, that three of the witnesses for the prisoner, Mr. Partridge, Dr. Robinson, and even Dr. Letheby, strongly as he was biased for the defence, agreed with Sir B. Brodie and the other medical witnesses for the Crown, that, “in the whole of their experience, learning, and information, they knew of no known disease to which the symptoms of Mr. Cook could possibly be referred—a fact the importance of which it was impossible to exaggerate.”
Assuming, then, that all were agreed, that from the time that the final paroxysm set in, the symptoms were similar to those of strychnia tetanus, he dealt with the point which the defence had raised—which he admitted deserved their most attentive consideration—that there were points of difference, which had led some of the witnesses to the conclusion that they could not have resulted from that cause.
“Let us see,” he said, “what they are. In the first place, they showed that the period which elapsed between the supposed administration of the poison, and the first symptoms, was longer than they have ever observed in animals upon which they have experimented. The first observation which arises is this: that there is a known difference between animal and human life, in the power with which certain specific things act upon their organization. It may well be that poison administered to a rabbit will produce its effect in a given time. It by no means follows that it will produce the same effect in the same time on an animal of a different description. Still less does it follow that it will exercise its baneful influence in the same time on a human subject. The whole of the evidence on both sides leads to establish this fact, that not only in individuals of different species, but in individuals of the same species, the same poison and the same influence will produce effects different in degree, different in duration, different in power. But again, it is perfectly notorious that the rapidity with which the poison begins to work depends mainly upon the mode of its administration. If it is administered in a fluid state it acts with great rapidity. If it is given in a solid state its effects come on more slowly. If it is given in an indurated substance it will act with still greater tardiness. Then what was the period at which this poison began to act after its administration, assuming it to have been poison? It seems, from Mr. Jones’s statement, that Palmer came to administer the pills somewhere about 11 o’clock, but they were not administered on his first arrival, for the patient, as if with an intuitive sense of the death that awaited him, strongly resisted the attempts to make him take them; and no doubt these remonstrances, and the endeavours to overcome them, occupied some period of time. The pills were at last given. Assuming—which I only do for the sake of argument—that the pills contained strychnia, how soon did they begin to operate? Mr. Jones says he went down to his supper, and came back again about 12 o’clock. Upon his return to the room, after a word or two of conversation with Cook, he proceeded to undress and go to bed, and had not been in bed ten minutes before a warning came that another of the paroxysms was about to take place. The maidservant puts it still earlier, and it appears that as early as ten minutes before twelve the first alarm was given, which would make the interval little more than three-quarters of an hour. When these witnesses tell us that it would take an hour and a half, or two hours, we see here another of those exaggerated determinations to see the facts only in the way that will be most favourable to the prisoner. I find in some of the experiments that have been made that the duration of time, before the poison begins to work, has been little, if anything, less than an hour. In the case of a girl at Glasgow it was stated that it was three-quarters of an hour before the pills began to work. There may have been some reason for the pills not taking effect within a certain period after their administration. It would be easy to mix them up with substances difficult of solution, or which might retard their action. I cannot bring myself to believe that if in all other respects you are perfectly satisfied that the symptoms, the consequences, the effects, were analogous, and similar in all respects to those produced by strychnia, you will conclude that in this case strychnia was not administered, and found your conclusion on the simple fact that a quarter of an hour more than usual may have elapsed before the pills operated. But they say the premonitory symptoms were wanting. They assert that in the case of animals the animal at first manifests some uneasiness, shrinks, and draws itself into itself, as it were, and avoids moving; that certain involuntary twitchings about the head come on, and that there were no such premonitory symptoms in Cook’s case. I utterly deny the proposition. I say there were premonitory symptoms of the most marked character. He is lying in his bed; he suddenly starts up in an agony of alarm. What made him do that? Was there nothing premonitory there—nothing that warned him the paroxysm was coming on? He jumps up, says, ‘Go and fetch Palmer—fetch me help! I am going to be ill as I was last night!’ What was that but a knowledge that the symptoms of the previous night were returning, and a warning of what he might expect unless some relief were obtained? He sits up and prays to have his neck rubbed. What was the feeling about his neck but a premonitory symptom, which was to precede the paroxysms that were to supervene? He begs to have his neck rubbed, and that gives him some comfort. But here they say this could not have been tetanus from strychnia, because animals cannot bear to be touched, for a touch brings on a paroxysm—not only a touch, but a breath of air, a sound, a word, a movement of any one near will bring on a return of the paroxysm. Now, in three cases of death from strychnia we have shown that the patient has endured rubbing of the limbs, and received satisfaction from that rubbing. In Mrs. Smyth’s case, when her legs were distorted, she prayed and entreated that she might have them straightened. The lady at Leeds, in the case which Dr. Nunneley himself attended, implored her husband between the spasms to rub her legs and arms in order to overcome the rigidity. That case was within his own knowledge, and yet in spite of it, although he detected strychnia in the body of the unhappy woman, he dares to say that Cook’s having tolerated the rubbing between the paroxysms is a proof that he had not taken strychnia. Then there is the case of Clutterbuck. He had taken an overdose of strychnia, and suffered from the reappearance of tetanus, and his only comfort was to have his legs rubbed. Therefore, I say that the continued endeavour to persuade a jury that the fact of Cook’s having had his neck rubbed proves that this is not tetanus by strychnia, shows nothing but the dishonesty and insincerity of the witnesses who have so dared to pervert the facts. But they go further, and contend that Cook was able to swallow. So he was before the paroxysms came on. But nobody has ever pretended that he could swallow afterwards. He swallowed the pills, and what is very curious, and illustrates part of the theory, is this, that it was the act of swallowing the pills, a sort of movement in raising his head, which brought on the paroxysm of which he died.”
Having thus called attention to the fact, that against the three cases of undoubted poisoning by strychnia (those of Mrs. Smyth, Mrs. Dove, and Mr. Clutterbuck), the sufferers in which begged to be rubbed, all that could be set up was, that animals when thus poisoned could not bear to be touched, the Attorney-General dealt with the fact of the rigidity of Cook’s body after death, on which Mr. Nunneley relied as a proof that it could not be a case of strychnia poisoning. He cited the evidence of Mr. Herapath, the very next analyst called by the defence, that in two of his experiments on animals “the bodies had been indurated and contorted,” as well that of Dr. Taylor that one of the animals in his experiments was so rigid after death that it could be held out in an horizontal position in the air as though it were on its four legs on a plane surface. “What,” he said, “are you to think of the honesty of this sort of evidence? “Again, on the question of the fulness or emptiness of the heart, he thus accounted for the variation of the symptoms:—
“It is obvious to any one who reflects for a single moment that the question whether the heart shall be found compressed, or the lungs congested must depend upon the immediate cause of death, and we know that in cases of tetanus death may result from more than one cause. All the muscles of the body are subject to the exciting action of this powerful poison, but no one can tell in what order those muscles will be affected, or where the poisonous influence will put forth the fulness of its power. If it acts on the respiratory muscles, and arrests the play of the lungs, and with it the breathing of the atmospheric air, the result will be that the heart will be left full. But if some spasm seizes on the heart, contracting it and expelling from it the blood that it contains, and so produces death, the result will be that the heart will be found empty. So that you never have perfect certainty as to how these symptoms will manifest themselves after death; but that is again put forward as if the fact of the heart being empty is a conclusive fact of the death not having taken place from strychnia. Yet those men who come here as witnesses under the sanction of scientific authority, must have heard both these cases spoken to by medical gentlemen who had examined those two unfortunate patients after death, and who told us that in both cases they found the heart empty. That gets rid of that matter. As death takes place from one or other of these causes, so will be the appearance of the heart, the brain, and the body after death. There is nothing in this for a single moment to negative the conclusion which you would otherwise arrive at from the other symptoms.”
For the difficulty which he admitted arose from the non-discovery of strychnia by the analyst, he assigned another reason besides that of the condition of the stomach and other parts from the negligence imputed to those who had conducted the post mortem examination—namely, the probable smallness of the fatal dose. In all the cases of experiments on animals in which the poison had been detected, the doses had been one or even two grains, yet half a grain would prove fatal; and where so little as that had been given in experiments, Dr. Taylor and Dr. Rees had failed to detect it. On the partisanship of Mr. Herapath, sitting by the side of the prisoner’s counsel, prompting questions, and on his assertion that he believed that Cook had been killed by strychnia and that Taylor could and ought to have detected it, his remarks were those rather of a French Public Prosecutor than an Attorney-General.
“I do not say that alters the fact; but I do say that it induces one to look at the credit of those witnesses with a very great amount of suspicion. I reverence a man who, from a sense of justice and a love of truth—from those high considerations which form the noblest character of man—comes forward in favour of a man against whom the world may turn in a torrent of prejudice and aversion, and who stands and states what he believes to be the truth. But I abhor the traffic in testimony to which, I regret to say, men of science sometimes permit themselves to condescend.”
Whether Newton was believed or not—and he showed how his statement was confirmed by Roberts’s account of Palmer’s conduct at the time of the second purchase of poison, he urged that of the latter fact there could be no doubt, and asked what was done with that strychnia. That Palmer obtained this strychnia was not controverted, and what he did with it was not attempted to be satisfactorily accounted for.
“Purchased for whom? for what? If for a patient why is he not produced? If for any other purpose, let us at least have it explained. Has there been a shadow of an explanation? Alas, I grieve to say, none at all. Something was said, in the outset of the case, about dogs that had been troublesome in the paddocks, but that was in September. If there was any recurrence of this, why are not the grooms here to prove this? Some one must have assisted Palmer to destroy these dogs. Where are those persons? Why are they not called? Not only are they not called, they are not even named. My learned friend does not venture to breathe even a suggestion.”[69]