Medical Murder: Disturbing Cases of Doctors Who Kill by Robert M. Kaplan

Author:Robert M. Kaplan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Summersdale Publishers Ltd.
Published: 2011-09-19T00:00:00+00:00

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Murdering the madam

Both marriage and death ought to be welcome: the one promises happiness, doubtless the other assures it.

Mark Twain, Letters

The majority of murders are domestic. Offenders kill someone known to them, usually in their family. The official term for this is uxorious homicide. As generic murderers, doctors are no different and most often kill their partners. To do this, they have an advantage on the rest of the population in having access to the means to do so. One of the earliest documented cases is that of Dr Thomas Smethurst. At the age of 24, he married a woman two decades his senior. As a practitioner Smethurst had some success promoting the water cure (as in spas), running a clinic in Surrey, publishing a book and editing a journal. By 1858 while living with his wife in a Bayswater boarding house, he began an affair with the younger Isabella Banks. Evicted by his wife from the boarding house, he and Isabella moved into Richmond, having gone through a bigamous marriage ceremony. The following year Isabella died after two months of severe gastrointestinal illness, leaving a sum of £100 to Smethurst. The two doctors who attended her during the illness believed that she had been given an ‘irritant’ poison and reported the matter to a magistrate. Smethurst was arrested and charged with murder.

A forensic expert, Dr Swaine Taylor, found arsenic in Isabella’s stools and in a bottle of mouthwash in Smethurst’s possession. However, cross-examined on his findings in court, Taylor admitted that his tests were contaminated and no arsenic was found in the victim’s organs. Despite this, Smethurst was convicted by the jury and sentenced to death. The Home Secretary had the case reviewed and Smethurst was pardoned, only to be convicted of bigamy and spend a year in prison. On release, undeterred by his original conviction for murder, he successfully sued Isabella’s relatives for his share of the will.

The courtroom failure of Dr Taylor, promoted as an expert in toxicology, was a media spectacle, and his forensic career ended in a humiliating fashion. This set a pattern that has continued up to the present: the rise and fall of the charismatic forensic expert, courted by lawyers, judges and the media, becoming an undisputable authority in their own right, only to come to dismal failure through a series of botched judgements.

To a psychopath, murder is the highest form of self-fulfilment. Such personalities have a grandiose self-image, engage in feckless self-promotion and make ideal con men. A good example of a rampaging psychopath in medicine is that of Dr Edward William Pritchard. Born in 1825, Pritchard served as a surgeon in the Royal Navy for six years but was persuaded by his wife to settle down in a Yorkshire practice. He made himself popular by writing articles in the local paper but ran into debt and had to sell the practice after six years. Pritchard then decamped to Glasgow, where he antagonised colleagues by giving lectures about implausible adventures and travels.

On

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