Dr. James Ewing, professor of pathology at Cornell University Medical College (New York City), sent me the following reply to my letter to him regarding Marlowe's death:
I do not see how the wound that you describe by a dagger entering the orbit above the right eye could cause instant death. Yet it seems possible that if the dagger went deeply into the brain, it might sever blood vessels and cause hemorrhage which would lead to almost immediate unconsciousness and death in a short time, without recovering consciousness.
Professor W.G. MacCallum, head of the department of pathology at Johns Hopkins University, wrote me as follows:
I should think that a wound such as you described ... would hardly have gone further than through the frontal sinus and into the frontal lobe of the cerebrum and I don't see either how it caused instant death.
Of course, one might imagine that the force of the blow was such as to stun him and allow time for fatal haemorrhage in that position. The only other thing one could think of would be perhaps that with extreme violence some further injury might have been produced in a more vital part of the brain, but on the whole it seems to me questionable that instant death would follow such a blow.
Dr. Otto H. Schultze, professor of pathology and medical jurisprudence, Coroner's physician in New York from 1896 to 1914, medical assistant District Attorney of New York County from 1914 to date, and the author of several works on the medico-legal aspects of homicide, wrote as follows in reply to my inquiry: