Q. Where a father has died of an apoplexy, is not that understood, in some measure, to be constitutional? A. There is no disease whatever, that becomes constitutional, but what can be given to a child. There is no disease which is acquired, that can be given to a child; but whatever is constitutional in the father, the father has a power of giving that to the children; by which means it becomes what is called hereditary; there is no such thing as an hereditary disease; but there is an hereditary disposition for a disease.
Mr. Howorth. Do you call apoplexy constitutional?
A. We see most diseases are constitutional; the small-pox is constitutional, though it requires an immediate cause to produce the effects. The venereal disease is hereditary. I conceive apoplexy as much constitutional as any disease whatever.
Q. Is apoplexy likely to attack a thin young man who had been in a course of taking cooling medicines before? A. Not so likely, surely, as another man; but I have, in my account of dissections, two young women dying of apoplexies.
Q. But in such an habit of body, particularly attended with the circumstance of having taken cooling medicines, it was very unlikely to happen? A. I do not know the nature of medicines so well as to know that it would hinder an apoplexy from taking effect.
Court. Give me your opinion in the best manner you can, one way or the other, whether upon the whole of the symptoms described, the death proceeded from that medicine, or any other cause? A. I do not mean to equivocate, but when I tell the sentiments of my own mind, what I feel at the time, I can give nothing decisive.
Extracts from the Evidence delivered on the Trial of Robert Sawle Donnall, Surgeon and Apothecary, for the wilful Murder, by Poison, of his Mother-in-Law, Mrs. Elizabeth Downing, Widow, at the Assize at Launceston, March 31, 1817.
(Taken in short-hand by Alexander Fraser.)
EVIDENCE FOR THE CROWN.