Fatal Evidence

Professor Alfred Swaine Taylor & the Dawn of Forensic Science

Helen Barrell

• Publisher: Pen & Sword History
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781473883437
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Medicine Biographies

"An engrossing read... Her description of the ways in which forensic experiments evolved is as fascinating as the courtroom dramas they accompanied." —Jess Kidd, The Guardian, "Best Summer Books 2018, as Picked by Writers" A surgeon and chemist at Guys Hospital in London, Professor Alfred Swaine Taylor used new techniques to search the human body for evidence that once had been unseen. As well as tracing poisons, he could identify blood on clothing and weapons, and used hair and fiber analysis to catch killers. Taylor is perhaps best remembered as an expert witness at one of Victorian England's most infamous trials—that of William Palmer, "The Rugeley Poisoner." But he was involved in many other intriguing cases, from a skeleton in a carpet bag to a fire that nearly destroyed two towns, and several poisonings in between. Taylor wrote widely on forensic medicine. He gave Charles Dickens a tour of his laboratory, and Wilkie Collins owned copies of his books. His work was known to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and he inspired the creation of fictional forensic detective Dr. Thorndyke. For Dorothy L. Sayers, Taylors books were the back doors to death. From crime scene to laboratory to courtroom and sometimes to the gallows, this is the world of Professor Alfred Swaine Taylor and his fatal evidence. " A must read for any lover of crime writing, criminology, and Victorian cultural history." — Fortean Times "Totally fascinating... Refers to many famous and not-so-famous cases, as well as giving an insight into this clever, enthusiastic, honourable and dedicated man. Very clearly written and very enjoyable read." —Michelle Birkby, author of The Baker Street Inquiries series

Chapter 1

Go Thy Way, Passenger

1806–31

Take notice, roguelings

Alfred Swaine Taylor was born on 11 December 1806, in Northfleet, Kent, the first child of Thomas and Susannah Taylor. The small town on the chalky banks of the river Thames is about 25 miles east from the centre of London, and was known in the early nineteenth century for its watercress and flint. Taylor’s maternal grandfather, Charles Badger, had been a wealthy local flint knapper, supplying the essential component for flintlock pistols. Taylor’s father was a captain in the East India Company, and perhaps moved to Northfleet from his native Norfolk when, in 1804, the company leased twelve moorings in the town for its ships.

Taylor’s middle name, Swaine, presumably harks back to an ancestor on his father’s side as he had several relatives with the same middle name. Just after Taylor’s second birthday, he was joined by a brother, Silas Badger Taylor. There were to be only two Taylor children; their mother died aged 37, in December 1815, three days before Taylor’s ninth birthday. Her headstone can still be found in the churchyard at Northfleet. It reads: ‘She was worthy of example as a Wife a Mother and a Friend. Go thy way passenger and imitate Her whom you will some day follow.’

By 1818, Taylor’s father had become a merchant, half of Oxley and Taylor, who were based at the chalk works in Northfleet. They advertised themselves as ‘exporters and dealers in all sorts of flints, rough or manufactured, chalk etc, to India, and all parts of England’. The company would later expand to include an office off Lombard Street in London, and Silas would grow up to continue their father’s business. By the 1830s, Oxley and Taylor would sell guns, and were travel agents, selling berths on ships bound for New York.

Taylor was a studious boy, not considered strong enough for the rough and tumble life of a public school. Soon after his mother’s death, he was sent to Albemarle House, the school of clergyman Dr Joseph Benson. Located in Hounslow, on a major stagecoach route to the west of London, it was a journey of about 40 miles from Northfleet. Pupils from across the country could reach the school with ease, and its semi-rural location was healthier than the city or town. Albemarle House, ‘a school of the first respectability’, had been established at some point during the mid-eighteenth century; it was a large, imposing Georgian edifice.

The building has since disappeared, as have the gibbets that once stood very near the school by the junction of two major roads. The bodies of executed highwaymen swung there as a warning to anyone who thought to ply their trade on Hounslow Heath. They made a terrifying sight: ‘The chains rattled; the iron plates barely held the gibbet together; the rags of the highwaymen displayed their horrible skeletons within.’ The gibbets could be seen with ease from the school until their removal in about 1806. In the late eighteenth century, a jocular wag wrote a six-line poem, ‘Addressed to Two Young Gentlemen at the Hounslow Academy’:

Take notice, roguelings, I prohibit

Your walking underneath yon Gibbet;

Have you not heard, my little ones,

Of Raw Head and Bloody Bones?

How do you know but that there fellow,

May step down quick, and up you swallow?

Although the gibbets had gone by the time Taylor attended Albemarle, their legend must have lingered on amongst the pupils at the school.

An aquatint of Albemarle House, from 1804, shows a military parade in action outside, even though it doesn’t appear to have been a military academy. [Plate 2] The soldiers might have been pupils, drilled as volunteers for the war against Napoleon, or were professionals from Hounslow Camp, using space outside the school to practise. In the late 1830s, an advert for the school offered ‘high Classical and Mathematical Reading, preparatory to the Universities or the Public Schools’. French was taught by a resident Parisian and instruction was given in ‘English Literature, Commercial Science, and every subject of Education essential to the improvement of the Mind, and the refinement of the Understanding’. All of which would stand Taylor in good stead.

‘Physiologist Taylor’

By 1822, Taylor’s schooldays were over: in June that year, not yet 16, he was apprenticed to a surgeon. All manner of occupations could be entered by apprenticeship; Taylor’s brother would be apprenticed to a London waterman.

There were various ways to enter medicine at this period, whether one wished to be a physician, apothecary or surgeon. Unless they attended the medical schools attached to Scottish universities, British physicians trained at universities in Continental Europe, briefly studying at Oxford or Cambridge to have the degree of MD conferred on them; their knowledge came mainly from books. As surgeons and apothecaries were apprenticed, they had more practical experience with the sick. There was rivalry between the three professions in London, the Guilds and Worshipful Companies protecting the interests of their members, sometimes at the expense of the sick. But at least it meant that medical professionals were regulated to an extent, and only the best candidates were selected as apprentices.

Taylor was apprenticed to Dr Donald McRae, a surgeon in Lenham, Kent, about 25 miles south-east of Northfleet. It was the birthplace of his maternal grandmother and it is possible that Taylor still had relatives there. McRae was in his thirties, originally from Inverness in Scotland. How proficient he was as a surgeon is unknown; by 1841 he had given up medicine for banking.

The terms of Taylor’s apprenticeship stated that after a year of provincial medicine with McRae, he would become a pupil at a London hospital. In October 1823, Taylor entered the United Hospitals of Guy’s and St Thomas’s in Southwark, south London. Sometimes, provincial apprentice surgeons served part of their training in a hospital, usually spending six months to a year there. They gained invaluable experience, witnessing cases in numbers that wouldn’t be seen in a rural practice, and they could perform dissections and observe operations. The studious Taylor would stay at Guy’s for the rest of his career.

St Thomas’s was an ancient hospital, founded by mediaeval monks for the treatment of the poor, on the Thames’s south bank near London Bridge. In the early eighteenth century, one of St Thomas’s wealthy governors, Thomas Guy, was urged by a physician friend to build a new hospital. Guy was aware that many of the patients were not well enough to work once they were deemed cured and had been discharged. So he established his hospital as a place for ‘incurables’ – a hospital for convalescence and rehabilitation. Guy’s opened its doors in 1726, a year after its benefactor’s death, occupying new buildings beside St Thomas’s.

A medical school of sorts was run at Guy’s from its inception. Its physicians, surgeons and apothecaries took on apprentices and pupils, and it had a surgical theatre from 1739 so that students could observe operations, even though few surgeries were performed. The hospital staff were voluntary, and were each paid £40 a year. The sum was stipulated at the foundation of Guy’s and was only increased at the creation of the NHS. It was in the interest of staff to take on pupils and apprentices in order to increase their income.

A lecture theatre was an important lure for students, and one was built at Guy’s in 1770. A fee was paid to be enrolled as a pupil, and they followed medical practitioners on their rounds. They paid extra for classes, lectures and dissection. Lectures in anatomy and surgery were most in demand, and were taught at St Thomas’s. Guy’s provided lectures in medicine, chemistry, botany, physiology and natural physiology.

When Taylor arrived at the United Hospitals in 1823, he took great interest in his chemistry lessons, taught by William Allen and Arthur Aikin. Allen was a Fellow of the Royal Society, highly respected in his time as a man of science, but he was not a medical man. Neither was Aikin, whose focus was on geology and coalfields, but both were amongst the leading chemists of their time. It has been said that Taylor was the favourite pupil of celebrated surgeon Sir Astley Cooper. Cooper was so famous that after he died, a commemorative statue was placed in St Paul’s Cathedral, albeit with the wrong year of death on its plinth.

Taylor spent the summer of 1825 in Paris; cadavers for dissection were more easily acquired on the Continent. His trip paid off, because when he returned to London, he was awarded St Thomas’s anatomy prize. He became known for his aptitude in physiology, earning himself the nickname ‘Physiologist Taylor’. That same year, Guy’s Medical School was founded, so an anatomical theatre, a dissecting room and a museum were built.

In 1826, Taylor’s life was changed when he read Elements of Medical Jurisprudence, by American physician Theodric Romeyn Beck. Taylor later wrote, ‘The subject, from the lucid manner in which it was treated by the author, fixed my attention, and induced me for the time to put aside anatomy and physiology for the sake of this new branch of medical science.’ Reading Beck’s book was the deciding moment in Taylor’s career, when he chose medical jurisprudence as his ‘special object for study and practice’.

In 1828, aged 21, he became a licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries, and he took off on a tour of medical schools in Europe. He returned to Paris, attending lectures by eminent men of the time, such as pathologist and haematologist Gabriel Andral; surgeons Guillaume Dupuytren and Alexis Boyer; physician and embryologist Étienne Serres; chemist and physicist Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac; and mineralogist and geologist Alexandre Brongniart. Considering Taylor’s later specialisms, perhaps the most important lectures of all were those of toxicologist Joseph Bonaventura Orfila. He had published his two-volume work Traité des poisons from 1814 to 1815. His book explained the symptoms of poisoning, antidotes, and methods to detect poisons, as well as how to combine the postmortem with analytical chemistry, thus merging all of Taylor’s interests into one discipline.

A hollow crust spread over an abyss

Travel at this time was by ship or horse, but perhaps for reasons of economy, Taylor made much of his European journey on foot. Despite improvements in Continental travel by the late 1820s, such as better roads and fewer Italian banditti, Taylor’s progress was not only slow but fraught with danger. His ship from France to Naples was racked by storm, and he was chased off Elba by pirates. He was arrested: once for having dangerous books, and then for espionage after he sketched some fortifications in northern Italy. He was only freed when most of his artwork was destroyed, and he was sent under escort to the border. Somehow, Taylor’s sketch of Greek ruins in southern Italy survived; its careful intricacy shows his keen eye for detail.

He made his way round the medical schools and hospitals of Naples, Rome, Florence, Bologna, Milan, Heidelberg, Leiden, Amsterdam and Brussels. On his way, he travelled through the Auvergne, and hiked up the volcanic Puy de Dôme in central France. While in Naples, he wrote two ophthalmological articles in Italian for the Giornale Medico Napolitano; ‘Sull’Inversione degli oggetti nel fondo del Occhio’ (‘On inverting objects at the back of the eye’), and ‘Sul conformarsi dell’ occhio alla distanza degli oggetti’ (‘On adapting the eye to the distance of objects’).

He headed to the Solfatara, near Naples, an extinct volcano where sulphur and alum were procured, and looked around the refining factory. On hearing rumbles deep underground, he was told by guides that ‘the Solfatara is even now but a hollow crust spread over an abyss,’ but Taylor had heard the same rumbling at the Puy de Dôme and in the Alps. He assigned it to crumbling in certain parts of the crater; the way the noise travelled through the hillside made it sound more terrifying than it was.

Near the Solfatara was the Grotta del Cane, a small cave in the side of a hill, where an invisible, suffocating gas lay on its sloping floor in a lake, ‘to about the height of the knee’. The gas ran up through the rocks from an extinct volcano, and was generally thought to be sulphurous. Taylor, however, had read up on it, and theorised that it was carbonic acid. Chemistry was not easy to study in Italy at the time, and with difficulty he had managed to get hold of limewater and phosphorus for his experiments. He believed that the results, including a torch extinguishing at the surface of the gas lake, proved his theory to be correct. Later experiments by others showed that it was carbon dioxide, but at least Taylor had demonstrated that the gas wasn’t a compound of sulphur.

The cave’s name derived from locals showing tourists the effects of the gas lake on dogs. Standing at normal adult height, humans were unaffected. Taylor, who later in his career objected to unnecessary animal experiments, watched as a dog held down in the gas lake ‘made violent attempts to escape’ because it couldn’t breathe. When released from the cave, the dog began to recover. Taylor noted that, unsurprisingly, ‘there was no individual present willing to undergo the experiment, to the same extent, on his own person,’ so he lowered his face to the surface of the gas and noticed how it started to affect his sinuses. When he wrote about his visit a few years later, he accompanied it with a diagram showing a man in top hat and swallowtail coat, the level of the gas coming up to mid-thigh; this is presumably his self-portrait.

He arrived back in London in the winter of 1829. In March 1830, he became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons by examination, and he returned to France again in the summer, just as revolution tore through Paris. When Parisians hurled paving slabs and flower pots at the soldiers who shot at them, Taylor was at the Hôpital de la Pitié. He had a chance, unusual for a British student at the time, to see gunshot wounds and their treatment on a large scale.

In London again, Taylor set up in general practice, but this stage of his career lasted only a short while. The Society of Apothecaries were demanding improved education in the neglected field of medical jurisprudence, and Taylor was ready in the wings.

Unrecognised by any

Scotland had created the first British chair in Medical Jurisprudence and Police (‘police’ meant ‘public health’) in 1807 at the University of Edinburgh. As far back as 1789, lectures had been given there on the subject by Andrew Duncan. He had tried to convince the university of the subject’s importance ‘to every medical practitioner, who is liable to be called upon to illustrate any question comprehended under it before a court of justice’. The fate of the accused depended on the words of the medical professional, whose reputation was also on trial.

The adversarial justice system was developing, so that increasingly prosecution and defence would have counsel, and could employ expert witnesses. Counsel was usually a quick-witted barrister ready to unpick a witness’s words or run them down with a rhetorical juggernaut: ‘How cautious must, then, a medical practitioner be, when examined before such men, when it is their duty to expose his errors, and to magnify his uncertainties, till his evidence seem contradictory and absurd?’ The first professor of Medical Jurisprudence at Edinburgh was Duncan’s son; it did little to advance the subject in Britain, hindered because it was only an elective part of the course.

In 1822, 25-year-old Dr Robert Christison took the chair. Like Taylor, his background was in medicine and chemistry, and he had spent some time in Paris. He had read Orfila and attended one of his lectures. In 1823, he published a paper on poisoning by oxalic acid with his colleague Jean-François Coindet, and he began to be called into court as an expert witness by defence counsels. His lectures were poorly attended, and attracted mainly lawyers rather than medical students. From an initial class size of twelve students, by 1825 numbers had dwindled down to only one. That same year, Christison petitioned the university to include his course as an optional subject in medical degrees.

Christison became well known after he was a medical witness at the 1828 trial of Burke and Hare. Helping medical students gain access to cadavers, they had avoided digging up the dead and had taken to murder instead. Christison’s opinion was sought on wounds and bruises; had they been given before death, during the act of killing, or after death due to the rough handling of the corpse? As part of his research to find out how the body bruised after death, Christison administered blows to corpses; a practical and yet ghoulish experiment, which nearly sixty years later, another Edinburgh Medical School graduate, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, had Sherlock Holmes carry out in A Study in Scarlet. In 1829, Christison’s A Treatise on Poisons was published and quickly became a standard text on toxicology. It had gone through four editions by the time of its last in 1845.

The University of London caught up with the academics north of the border, establishing the first chair of medical jurisprudence in England in 1828. Demonstrating the influence that the Scottish had in the field, the first professor, John Gordon Smith, was an Edinburgh graduate. He had served as an army surgeon until 1815, when he moved to London, but restrictions prevented him from practising there because his MD was from a Scottish university. In 1821, his book The Principles of Forensic Medicine was published, and in 1825 and 1826, he lectured on the subject, which had made him an ideal candidate when the university created its chair.

But the course wasn’t compulsory; few were attracted by an elective course, and it wasn’t funded beyond the fees of the small number of students who attended. Smith felt that it was ‘unrecognised by any of the medical authorities in this kin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Note on Text
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Go Thy Way, Passenger
• Chapter 2 More of Impulse than Discretion
• Chapter 3 Fearful and Wonderful
• Chapter 4 The Light of an English Sun
• Chapter 5 One of the Most Eminent Men
• Chapter 6 My Heart is as Hard as a Stone
• Chapter 7 The Means of our Preservation
• Chapter 8 The Only Friend I had in the World
• Chapter 9 The Formidable Scourge
• Chapter 10 His Very High Position
• Chapter 11 Romantic, Mysterious, and Singular
• Chapter 12 Enter Not into the Path of the Wicked
• Chapter 13 Truth Will Always Go the Farthest
• Chapter 14 Grieved Beyond all Endurance
• Chapter 15 You are the Villain
• Chapter 16 Blood Enough
• Chapter 17 The Eminent Opinion of Professor Taylor
• Timeline
• Acknowledgements
• Further Reading
• Selected Bibliography
• Notes
• Plate section