Reports of Trials for Murder by Poisoning; / by Prussic Acid, Strychnia, Antimony, Arsenic, and Aconita. Including the trials of Tawell, W. Palmer, Dove, Madeline Smith, Dr. Pritchard, Smethurst, and Dr. Lamson, with chemical introduction and notes on the poisons used

by G. Lathom Browne; active 19th century C. G. Stewart

Dr. Richardson, after generally asserting that the symptoms in Miss Bankes’ case were not in the main reconcileable with either slow arsenical or antimonial poisoning, or both, enumerated the following as absent if it was a case of slow antimonial and arsenical poisoning:—

“1st, the inflammation of the conjunctival membrane of the eye; 2nd, soreness of the inner surface of the nostril; 3rd, a skin disease peculiar to arsenical poisoning; 4th, excoriation, amounting to absolute destruction, possibly, of the surface at the orifice of the mucous tracts, the mouth, the anus, the lips, and the vagina—and, lastly, and, in his opinion, the most important, the absence of the peculiar nervous symptoms which he should expect to find which characterise arsenical poisoning—frequent convulsions of a violent kind, in many cases; or in others, where the symptoms may be prolonged, tremor of the whole limbs, a suppressed convulsion in fact. Although he should not expect to find all these symptoms in a case of arsenical poisoning, he believed it to be quite impossible that a case of arsenical poisoning could exist from which they would all be absent.—The results of the post-mortem” he said, “were inconsistent with arsenical poisoning, because the inflammation that would establish it was most demonstrated in the part ordinarily most free in such poisoning—that, had it been a case of arsenical poisoning, arsenic must have been found in the tissues, and, had it been given in chlorate of potass, the whole of it would not have been eliminated. He based this opinion on an experiment he had lately made on a large dog, to which in sixteen days he had given 18 grains of arsenic and 365 of chlorate of potass, in small doses, two or three times a day, and then killed and examined and chemically analysed in conjunction with Dr. Thudichum and Dr. Webb, two of the witnesses for the defence. In this animal he found arsenic in the liver, lungs, and heart, a trace in the spleen and in the kidneys, but the greater part in the liver. He could venture to say that he found half a grain.”

The Judge.—“Give me leave to say, that the value of this experiment is nothing if you give a dog arsenic day by day for sixteen days, and then it is killed, and some arsenic is found left in it; is that all it proves?”

Witness.—“No; it was done to prove whether the chlorate would eliminate the arsenic as fast as it was given.”

The Judge.—“All that the experiment proves is, that chlorate of potass does not eliminate the whole of the arsenic, because it eliminated all but half a grain.”

The witness then went on to show, by experiments on two other dogs, that the administration of chlorate made no difference either as regards symptoms, pathology, or the chemical result. Speaking again of the sweating as one of the symptoms in antimonial poisoning absent in Miss Bankes’ case, he admitted that he had seen it only in one case, and that, where it had been given in excess, for a long time, and in large doses medicinally, and that in two other cases of acute poisoning by antimony there was no particular eruption, because, as he said, the attack was not long enough. Such was all the experience he had had in cases of slow poisoning. As to the effects of antimony on the liver, he could only speak from some experiments on animals in 1856-7, and that, in reality, he had no experience at all in slow poisoning, except from experiments on animals. Of dysentery, too, he knew very little; had seen two or three cases, but had never met with it in the early stage of pregnancy; he had met with one between the third and fourth month, but not between the fifth and seventh week. He had analysed the bismuth usually administered in medicine, and had found nearly half a grain of arsenic in an ounce, and, in a case in which 90 grains of that drug had been given at the rate of 5 grains three times a day—for dyspepsia—with Drs. Thudichum and Webb he found about the fiftieth of a grain of arsenic in the urine.

The cross-examination of this witness was mainly occupied by questions about his evidence on Palmer’s trial, and in trying to elicit from him that these canine experiments had been made for the purposes of the present case. The latter he denied, but admitted that he had made them after reading the examinations before the magistrate and the coroner, and that though he did not communicate them to the prisoner, he talked about them so frequently to his colleagues at the Grosvenor School, that he was not surprised at being interviewed by the prisoner’s solicitor and asked to give evidence for his client. As to his evidence on Palmer’s trial, he maintained that he did not endorse the theory that Cook died of Angina pectoris; that he did not negative the idea of strychnia, but at last admitted that he could not deny that he went there to support the theory of Angina pectoris.[176] In the cases of the dogs his analysis was not quantitative: he was content with the fact that the arsenic was present. He negatived the idea that the ¼ of a grain of copper in the pill would produce a burning sensation from the mouth to the anus, but admitted that any irritant given for a long time would unquestionably produce that effect. The form of dysentery to which a lady with such a liver as Miss Bankes’ would be subject, would be subacute, not that arising from poison, but which is prolonged over a very considerable time: not chronic, but something between chronic and acute, but too severe to be strictly chronic; that would not harden the coats of the stomach; would produce a great deal of mischief in the bowels; would not thicken them, but probably lead to a deposit of false membrane: it would not harden them, but a false membrane would; if there was great congestion, the wall would be thicker. He had not acted as an accoucheur since 1854, but was of opinion that sickness accompanied by dysenteric diarrhœa, in the early stage of pregnancy, might have been the cause of all the appearances exhibited in this case. Diarrhœa was sometimes an incident of and caused by pregnancy; the opposite effect, constipation, was not more usual.

On re-examination, the witness qualified his admission as to the effect of the copper pill to this extent, that, “in a patient suffering from violent irritation, arising either from a natural or mechanical cause, sulphate of copper would have a tendency to increase that irritation; and he justified his reliance on the experiments on animals on their forming the great bulk of scientific knowledge in Europe on the subject of poisons and their operation on the human frame, and by the fact that the materials for forming a judgment of the effects of slow antimonial poisoning on the human subject were very bare,” and concluded by saying, that, “after his cross-examination, and his attention having been called to all the points deemed important, he still adhered to his opinion that the deceased lady might have died from natural causes.”