Part 11
I do not find that meets the case?--It leaves the question open; it takes place through an influence on the heart sometimes, and through an influence on the respiration; it is now more open, particularly from the cases which have occurred of death from strychnia.
In the animals poisoned by strychnia that you examined was there blood in the right cavity?--Yes, in both.
You state in your book, and you tell me that when death does not take place suddenly in a fit of spasms, the person continues to be affected for twelve or fourteen hours, with small or milder paroxysms. Is that a statement which, according to your subsequent knowledge, is correct?--I have known the effects cease in a shorter time.
You state on page 903, after mentioning a case where the body was rigid, “the state of rigidity, however, does not invariably occur; on the contrary, in animals the limbs become very flaccid immediately after death, but the usual rigidity supervenes at an early period.” I presume the rigidity of which you speak is the rigidity of death, rigor-mortis?--Yes.
You have a note--“I have not altered the statement as to this point in a former edition, yet I strongly suspect that authors who describe the spasms which produce death, and continue the rigidity after death, must be inaccurate.” Is that your present opinion?--I think it is very likely, the interval being very short, that the attention may not have been attracted to the fact of there having been an interval of flaccidity. There have been some cases mentioned, very strong indications certainly, of the spasm having continued from the spasm of life to what we call spasm of death; but I still think the differences which are indicated in different cases may be explained on the supposition that there has been a want of minute and accurate attention.
Now, you mention a case on page 906, where a boy, when he was touched, was immediately thrown into a fit. Is it your present impression that, in cases of poisoning by strychnia, there is a tendency to throw the patient into a fit when touched?--That is the only case. In animals it is very remarkable; it is not noticed in the generality of cases. I have been struck with the fact that it has not more often been noted. Dr. Watson’s book mentions one. It is not that the absence of it is noted, but that it is not mentioned at all. I have invariably observed it in animals, unless you touch them very gently indeed.
[Sidenote: R. Christison]
You stated that care was taken in administering strychnia to animals to administer it to them fasting. Do you think it not likely it would supervene more quickly if administered to an empty stomach?--Certainly.
If resinous substances were used in a pill, would they not be found in the stomach on analysis afterwards?--No; if they were not acted upon they might pass into the intestines and be carried off.
Then the strychnia would be discharged with them, would it not?--Certainly, or gradually acted upon with the resinous substances.
I suppose if the resinous substances prevented the poison acting rapidly, it would prevent its absorption into the blood?--For a time.
If so, the more likely to leave portions of it in the stomach or intestines as the case may be?--The more likely.
Re-examined by the ATTORNEY-GENERAL--Would that materially depend on the quantity of the dose?--Both on the dose and on the time during which the pill was allowed to remain. It appears that colour tests are not to be relied upon in the case of strychnia in an impure condition. In the first place, you may not find indications of strychnia, and secondly, they are subject to fallacy, even if the strychnia is pure, from other substances not containing strychnia presenting similar appearances.
The Court then adjourned.
Sixth Day, Tuesday, 20th May, 1856.
The Court met at ten o’clock.
[Sidenote: John Jackson]
Dr. JOHN JACKSON, examined by Mr. JAMES--I am a member of the College of Physicians. I have been in practice for twenty-five years in India, and have seen cases of idiopathic and traumatic tetanus. Idiopathic is more common in India than in this country. I have seen not less than forty cases. It is common with children. In children there is a more marked symptom of lockjaw, but in adults there is no difference between the symptoms of idiopathic and traumatic. I have always seen idiopathic tetanus preceded by a peculiar expression of the countenance, stiffness in the muscles of the throat and of the jaw. In infants it will kill in forty-eight hours; in adults, arising from cold, it is of longer duration, and may continue many days, going through the same grades as the traumatic form.
Cross-examined by Mr. SERJEANT SHEE--The patient always appears uncomfortable for some time before the attack comes on. His appetite and desire for food are not much affected. He may take his food as usual within twelve hours of the preliminary symptoms.
During the twelve hours, supposing the attack to be the first one under which he suffers, does he seem not to relish his ordinary food?--His attention is more directed to the stiffness of his mouth and the stiffness of his neck.
You said to within twelve hours of the attack he relishes his food as if no attack was impending, but does he not appear less desirous of food and less inclined to eat it?--I have never heard that complaint.
Re-examined by the ATTORNEY-GENERAL--What interval has occurred in those cases that have come under your attention between the preliminary symptoms and the tetanic convulsions?--In an infant, not more than twelve hours, and in an adult, from twelve to twenty-four hours; sometimes more than that.
And from the commencement of the tetanic convulsions to death, what time?--That will vary; three days to ten days; it may take place early sometimes, perhaps in two days, but that is early.
Does that apply to traumatic as well as to idiopathic tetanus?--They are both alike, when the disease sets in, as regards the course of the symptoms.
Are the symptoms more or less severe in India than in this climate?--I do not see there is any difference; when once set up, the symptoms of tetanus are the same.
[Sidenote: John Jackson]
In all your experience, did you ever know a case in which the disease ran its course and ended in death in the space of twenty minutes or half an hour?--I have never seen it.
* * * * *
[The rest of this day, after Dr. Jackson’s evidence, was occupied with taking evidence that there was nothing in Palmer’s papers to show joint transactions between him and Cook; as to Pratt’s and Padwick’s accounts; as to Palmer’s pecuniary position generally; as to the forgery of his mother’s name, and the forgery of an endorsement on a cheque for £375 of Cook’s name, by which he passed into his own account that sum which was intended for Cook.]
The Court then adjourned.
Seventh Day, Wednesday, 21st May, 1856.
The Court met at ten o’clock.
Speech for the Defence.
[Sidenote: Serjeant Shee]
Mr. SERJEANT SHEE--May it please your lordships, gentlemen of the jury--I should pity the man who could rise to perform the task which it is now my duty to attempt unoppressed by an overwhelming sense of diffidence and of apprehension. Once only before has it fallen to my lot to defend a fellow-creature upon trial for his life; it is a position, even if the effort should last but for a day, of a nature to disturb the coolest temperament and try the strongest nerves; how much more so when, during six long days, in the eye of my unhappy client, I have been standing between him and the scaffold; conscious that the least error of judgment on my part might consign him to a murderer’s doom, and that through the whole time I have had to breast a storm of public prejudice such as has never before imperilled the calm administration of justice! Gentlemen, it is useless for me to conceal what you know perfectly well, what your utmost endeavours cannot wholly have effaced from your recollection, that for six long months, under the sanction and upon the authority of science, an opinion has universally prevailed that the voice of the blood of John Parsons Cook was crying up unto us from the ground, and that that cry was met by the whole population under an impression and conviction of the prisoner’s guilt in a delirium of horror and indignation by another cry of “blood for blood”! You cannot have failed to have entered upon the discharge of the duties, which you have, as I have observed, most conscientiously endeavoured to perform, without having been to a great extent influenced by that cry; you could not know that it would be your duty to sit in that box to pass between the Crown and the prisoner; you may with perfect propriety, understanding that the facts had been ascertained before a coroner’s jury, and reading such evidence as was there taken, have formed an opinion upon the question of the guilt or innocence of the prisoner; but you cannot but know that whatever that opinion may have been it is your duty to discard it, at least until you have heard the evidence on both sides.
[Sidenote: Serjeant Shee]
Gentlemen, the very circumstances under which we meet in this case are of a character to excite mingled feelings of encouragement and alarm. Those whose duty it is to watch over the safety of the Queen’s subjects felt so much apprehension lest the course of justice should be disturbed by the popular prejudice which had been excited against the prisoner, so much alarmed that an unjust verdict might in the midst of that popular prejudice pass against him, that a resolution was taken, not only by the Queen’s Government and the Legislature, upon the motion of the noble and learned judge, who presides here, in the House of Lords, that an Act of Parliament should be passed to prevent the possibility of the ordinary forms of law being, in the case of William Palmer, made the instrument of popular vengeance. The Crown, under the advice of its responsible Ministers, resolved also that this prosecution should not be left in private hands, but that its own law officer, my learned friend the Attorney-General, should take upon himself the responsibility of conducting it properly, at once sternly in his duty to the public and fairly to the prisoner at the bar; and my learned friend, when that duty was entrusted to him, did what I must say will, in my opinion, for ever redound to his honour--he insisted that in a case in which so much prejudice had been excited all the evidence which it was intended on the part of the Crown to press against the prisoner should, as soon as he received it, be communicated to the prisoner’s counsel; everything, I must say and tell my unhappy client, everything which the constituted authorities of this land, everything which the Legislature and the law officers of the Crown could do to secure a fair and impartial trial in this case, has been done, and the whole responsibility, if unhappily injustice should on either side be done, now weighs with terrible pressure upon my lord and upon you.
[Sidenote: Serjeant Shee]
Gentlemen, one great misfortune has befallen the accused--a most able man who had been selected by him as his counsel many weeks ago has been, unfortunately, by illness prevented from discharging that duty to him. I have endeavoured, to the utmost of my ability, to supply his place; I cannot deny that I am awed--that I am moved--by the task I have undertaken; but the circumstances to which I have already adverted, the national effort, so to speak, through the Government of the country, to ensure a fair trial is a great cause of encouragement, and I am not dismayed. I have this further cause for not being altogether overcome by the duty which I have of defending the prisoner and of discussing the mass of evidence which has been laid before you, that though, of course, like everybody else, I knew generally and loosely, very loosely indeed, the history of these transactions at Rugeley, I had formed, when the papers came into my hands, no opinion upon them, no opinion upon the guilt or the innocence of the prisoner at the bar, and my mind was perfectly free to form what I trust will be declared by you a right judgment in this case. I commence his defence, I say it in all sincerity, with an entire conviction of his innocence. I believe that there never was a truer word pronounced than the words which he pronounced when he said “Not guilty” to this charge. If I fail in establishing that to your satisfaction I shall be under a great misgiving that my failure was more attributable to my own ability to do justice to this case than to any weakness in the case itself; and I will give you this proof of the sincerity with which I declare upon this evidence my conviction of his innocence, that I will meet the case of the prosecution foot to foot at every stage. I will grapple with every difficulty which has been suggested by my able friend the Attorney-General. You shall see that I avoid no point because I fail to approach it, and if you find that I do thus deal fairly with you from the beginning, and it is my duty to do so, I hope I may be sure, indeed I know I may be sure, of a willing and considerate attention to an address which must, I fear, be long, but in which there shall be no observations, no tone, and no topic of discussion which do not properly belong to the case.
Gentlemen, the case which the Crown undertakes to establish against the prisoner at the bar, and to support by entirely circumstantial evidence, is, or may be, shortly stated thus. They say that the prisoner having in the second week in November made up his mind that it was his interest to get rid of John Parsons Cook, deliberately prepared his body for deadly poison by the slower poison of antimony, and afterwards despatched him by the deadly poison of strychnia. No jury will convict a man of the crime thus imputed to the prisoner, unless in the first place it be made clear that he had some motive for its commission, some strong reason for desiring the death of Cook; unless, in the second place, the symptoms of the deceased before death, and the appearance presented by his body after death, were consistent with the theory of death by strychnia poison, and inconsistent with the theory of death from other and natural causes; unless, thirdly, the circumstantial evidence against him is such as to be inexplicable upon the supposition of his innocence. Now, it is under these three heads that I intend to discuss the evidence that you have heard; and it must be plain to you that if I adhere to that order and method of treating the vast amount of proof which has been laid before you, I must exhaust the whole argument, and leave myself no chance without immediate detection of evading any difficulty in the defence.
[Sidenote: Serjeant Shee]
Before, however, I proceed to grapple in these close quarters with the case of the Crown, as made by the Attorney-General, allow me, that you may at once see the whole scope of the address with which I have to trouble you, to claim its proper place in the discussion for a fact which, though by no means concealed from you by the Attorney-General, yet appeared to me in that address by which he at once seized upon your judgment to have been thrown too much into the shade, the fact that strychnia was not found in the body of John Parsons Cook. If he died from the poison of strychnia, he died within two hours of the administration to him of a very strong dose of it--he died within a quarter of an hour or twenty minutes of the effects of that dose being visible in the convulsions of his body; the post-mortem examination took place within six days of his death--there is not the least reason to suppose that between the time of the ingestion of the poison, if poison was taken, and the paroxysm in which he died, there was any dilution of it in the stomach, or any ejection of it by vomiting. Never, therefore, were circumstances more favourable; unless the science of chemical analysis is altogether a failure for detection of the poison of strychnia, never was there a case in which it ought to have been so easy to produce it. Now, the fact is, and it is beyond all question, that it was not found. Whatever we may think of Dr. Alfred Taylor, of his judgment, and of his discretion, we have no reason to doubt that he is a skilful analytical chemist--we have not the least reason to suppose, we know the contrary, that he and Dr. Rees, who assisted him, did not do all that the science of chemical analysis could enable man to do to detect the poison of strychnia. They had distinct information from the executor and near relative of the deceased, either personally or through his solicitor, that he, for some cause or other, had reason to suspect the poison of strychnia; they undertook the examination of the stomach, which, I think, upon the whole evidence, without adverting to that part of it now in detail, you will be satisfied was not in an unfavourable condition for a sufficiently accurate analysis, with the expectation that if strychnia had been taken it would be found, and without any doubt as to the efficiency of their tests to detect it; and yet in their letter of the 4th of December they say, “We do not find strychnia, prussic acid, or any trace of opium; from the contents of the stomach having been drained away it is impossible to say whether any strychnia had or had not been given just before death, but it is quite possible for tartar emetic to destroy life, if given in repeated doses; and, as far as we can at present form an opinion, in the absence of any natural cause of death, the deceased may have died from the effects of antimony in this or some other form.” Having afterwards attended the inquest, and heard the evidence of Elizabeth Mills and Mr. Jones, of Lutterworth, and the evidence of a person of the name of Roberts, who spoke to the purchase of strychnia poison by Palmer on the morning of the Tuesday, Dr. Taylor came to the conclusion that the pills which were administered to Cook on the Monday and Tuesday night contained strychnia, and that Mr. Cook was poisoned by it; and he came to that conclusion, though he had expressed an opinion in writing that he might--and these are his very words--have been poisoned by antimony, of which some trace was found by him in the body, while no trace was found of strychnia.
[Sidenote: Serjeant Shee]
Gentlemen, I am not about to discuss that part of the case in detail, but I call your attention to it for the purpose of claiming for it its proper place in this discussion, and that you may know at the commencement of my address what the whole course of my argument will be, and not be under the impression that, because I do not under the three heads to which I have directed your attention advert particularly to that head. I intend to pass it over. I tell you exactly what the case for the defence will be, as to the point that strychnia was not found in Mr. Cook’s body. Let me state it as fairly as I can--the gentlemen who have come to the conclusion that strychnia may have been there, though they did not find it, have arrived at that conclusion by experiments of a very partial kind indeed; they contend that the poison of strychnia is of that nature, that when once it has done its fatal work, and become absorbed into the system, it ceases to be the thing which it was when it was taken into the system; it becomes decomposed, its elements separated from each other, and therefore no longer capable of responding to the tests which, according to them, would certainly detect the poison of undecomposed strychnia; that is their case. They account for the fact that it was not found, and for their still retaining the belief that it destroyed Mr. Cook, by that hypothesis. Now, it is only a hypothesis; there is no foundation for it in experiment; it is not supported by the evidence of any eminent toxicologist but themselves--it is due to them to say, and to Dr. Taylor in particular to say, because it will be quite out of my power to speak of Dr. Christison through any part of this discussion except with the respect and consideration which is due to a man of eminent acquirements and of the highest character; it is due to Dr. Taylor to say that he does propound that theory in his book, but he propounds it as a theory of his own; he does not vouch, as I remember, any eminent toxicologist in support of it; and when we recollect that his knowledge on the matter consists--good, humane man!--in having poisoned five rabbits twenty-five years ago, and five since this question of the guilt or innocence of Palmer arose, his opinion, I think, unsupported by the opinions of others, cannot have much weight with you; however, what I have to say now upon that point is, that I will call before you many gentlemen of the highest eminence in their profession, analytical chemists, to state to you their utter renunciation of that theory. I will call before you Mr. Nunneley, a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, and Professor of Surgery at the Leeds School of Medicine, who attended that case of strychnia poison that took place at Leeds, and to which we have agreed that no reference shall be made by name. I will call before you Dr. Williams, Professor of Materia Medica at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, and surgeon for eighteen years to the City of Dublin Hospital, who will tell you that he also entirely rejects that theory, and believes that it has no foundation in experiment or authority. I will call before you Dr. Letheby, one of the ablest and most distinguished among the men of science in this great city, Professor of Chemistry and Toxicology in the Medical College of the London Hospital, and medical officer of health of the city of London, who also rejects that theory as a heresy unworthy of the belief of scientific men. I will call before you Dr. Nicholas Parker, of the College of Physicians, a physician of the London Hospital and Professor of Medicine to that institution, who concurs with Dr. Letheby in his opinion; Dr. Robinson, also of the Royal College of Physicians; Mr. Rogers, Professor of Chemistry to St. George’s School; and lastly, I will call before you probably the most eminent chemical analyst in this country, Mr. William Herapath, of Bristol, who totally rejects the theory as utterly unworthy of credence--all of these gentlemen contending, and ready to depose to it on their oaths, that not only if half a grain, or the fiftieth part of a grain, but I believe they will go on to say that if five, or ten, or twenty times less than that quantity had entered into the human frame at all, it could be and must be detected by tests which are unerring. They will tell you this, not as the result of a day’s cruelty for ever regretted on five rabbits, but upon a large and tried experience upon the inferior animals, made and created, as you know they were, for the benefit of mankind; upon a very extensive experience in many cases, as to many of them, of the effects of strychnia on the human system. And not to detain you on this part of the case, to which I only now advert, not intending to press it on you later at any length, that you may see what the nature of the defence in point of medical testimony will be, I will satisfy you by evidence which I think must control your judgment, that the only safe conclusion at which you can arrive is that strychnia not having been found in Cook’s body, under the circumstances of this case never could have been there. You will find that they all agree in this opinion, that no degree of putrefaction or fermentation in the human system could in their judgment so decompose the poison of strychnia as that it should no longer possess those qualities which in its undecomposed state cause it to respond to the tests which are used for its detection.
[Sidenote: Serjeant Shee]