The Damnation of John Donellan (28 page)

However, depending upon the conscience of my judge, and the unprejudiced impartiality of the jury, I trust my honour will be protected by their verdict.

Donellan did not explain the issue of the bottle-washing, which Judge Buller was later to pronounce was ‘above all' the greatest circumstance which ‘left [his] guilt without the smallest doubt'.

The variance of his evidence with Anna Maria's is only hinted at in the final paragraph. Was he thinking of his mother-in-law when he talked of ‘unjustifiable steps'?

Perhaps a hint was too subtle for the jury.

All Donellan's hopes now rested on a final witness.

Listening all day in court, having travelled from London the day before, the surgeon and anatomist John Hunter was dressed in his usual crumpled suit of clothes. Fifty-three years old, he was famous for his short temper and unkempt appearance; but there was no doubting the luminosity of his reputation.

The list of John Hunter's accomplishments was truly impressive. Having begun studying anatomy in the 1740s and established his own school of anatomy in 1764, he was elected Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1767 and had served as an army surgeon in France and Portugal. A specialist in venereal disease for at least
fifteen years, he had been resident surgeon at St George's Hospital in London for thirteen years and Surgeon General to George III for five. He counted the painter Joshua Reynolds and the naturalist Joseph Banks among his friends.

Hunter's anatomical expertise was second to none: during his 33-year career he had conducted thousands of dissections, and had a vast museum of specimens which were to be bequeathed to the nation after his death. The museum was condemned in a print of 1782 called ‘The Resurrection' which shows nine dissected corpses trying to find their respective heads, legs and stomachs – and was also a sideswipe at Hunter as a ‘resurrectionist', a man who was not above body-snatching.

Hunter's London home was the original inspiration for the story of Jekyll and Hyde, its frontage as Number 28 Leicester Square being highly respectable, the scene of literary and musical gatherings organised by his wife (although the giraffe in the hallway would have been a mite distracting). The rear – 13 Castle Street – was quite a contrast; it was the entrance to the mortuary and dissecting rooms, guarded by a drawbridge. Corpses from hospitals, street brawls, prisons and executions trundled through there daily, the grisly cartloads a source of terror to local children.

Hunter's Earls Court country house was no less extraordinary. A strange collection of animals grazed the lawns; a crocodile's jawbone hung over the door; and he kept wild cats, including a lion and two leopards, in cages in the grounds. A cart drawn by three Asian buffaloes regularly transported Hunter to London. Hunter was a passionate observer of life in all its forms, with an affection for ‘monsters' – a two-headed calf and a bottled set of premature human quintuplets among them.

But in addition to his peculiar passions, Hunter was intelligent and precise, and he did not jump to conclusions or seek popular glory. Unfortunately, it was the scientific accuracy for which he was renowned which was now to prove such a disappointment for Donellan.

Hunter was forthright in his dismissal of Rattray's conclusions:

Q: Can any certain inference, upon physical principles, be drawn from those symptoms described or from the appearances, externally or internally of the body, to enable you, in your judgement, to decide that the death was occasioned by poison?

A: The whole appearances upon the dissection explain nothing but putrefaction.

Q: Are those symptoms you have heard described such, in your judgement, as are the results of putrefaction in dead subjects?

A: Entirely.

Q: Are the symptoms that appeared after the medicine was given such as necessarily conclude that the person had taken poison?

A: Certainly not.

Q: If an apoplexy had come on, would not the symptoms have been nearly or somewhat similar?

A: Very much the same.

So far, so good. Defence counsel Newnham now asked if Hunter had ever known of a ‘young subject' dying of apoplexy. Hunter answered that he had, though ‘not frequent'.

The questioning now moved to the subject of experiments. Hunter had been known to say that he himself had drunk laurel water and was still alive to tell the tale; unfortunately, however, he was not asked about that now. Instead, Newnham tried to discredit the conclusions drawn by Rattray.

Q: Is any certain analogy to be drawn from the effects of any given poison upon an animal of the brute creation, to that it may have upon a human subject?

A: As far as my experience goes … they are very near the same; opium will poison a dog similar to a man; arsenic will have very near the same effect upon a dog as it would have, I take it for granted, upon a man … I believe their operations will be nearly similar.

Newnham tried again.

Q: Are there not many things that will kill animals almost instantaneously that will have no detrimental or noxious effects upon a human subject?

A: A great deal depends upon the mode of experiment; no man is fit to make one but those who have made many and paid considerable attention to all the circumstances that relate to experiments.

This was more like it.

A little brandy will kill a cat; I have made the experiment, and killed several cats, but it is a false experiment. In all those cases where it kills a cat, it kills the cat by getting into her lungs, not her stomach … Now in those experiments that are made by forcing an animal to drink, there are two operations going on; one is refusing of the liquor by an animal – its kicking or the working of its throat to refuse it; the other is, a forcing of liquor upon the animal; and there are very few operations of that kind but some of the liquor gets into the lungs; I have known it from experience.

Next Newnham moved on to the specific failings of the autopsy by Samuel Bucknill.

Q: If you had been called upon to dissect a body supposed to have died from poison should you, or not, have thought it necessary to have pursued your search through the guts?

A: Certainly … that is the tract of the poison, and I certainly should have followed that tract through.

Newnham now considered Theodosius's symptoms.

Q: You have heard of the froth issuing from Sir Theodosius's
mouth a minute or two before he died; is that peculiar to a man dying of poison, or is it not common in many other complaints?

A: I fancy it is a general effect of people dying in what you may call health in an apoplexy or epilepsy, in all sudden deaths …

Q: Have you ever had an opportunity of seeing such subjects?

A: Hundreds of times.

Q: Should you consider yourself bound, by such appearances, to impute the death to poison?

A: No, certainly not; I should rather suspect an apoplexy, and I wish, in this case, the head had been opened to remove all doubts.

Q: If the head had been opened, do you apprehend all doubts would have been removed?

A: It would have been still farther removed; because, although the body was putrid, so that no one could tell whether it was a recent inflammation, yet an apoplexy arises from an extravasation of blood in the brain, which would have laid in a coagulum. I apprehend, though the body was putrid, that would have been much more visible than the effect any poison could have had upon the stomach or the intestines.

Q: Then, in your judgement upon the appearances the gentlemen have described, no inference can be drawn from thence that Sir Theodosius Boughton died from poison?

A: Certainly not; it does not give the least suspicion.

Newnham concluded his examination here; Hunter's answers were just what he had hoped for. The country's leading authority had suggested that apoplexy could have been to blame for Theodosius's death, and that poison was by no means suggested by Theodosius's symptoms. He had also underlined the point that putridity had obscured what useful information might have been gleaned from the corpse, and emphasised the failings of the surgeons by not examining the brain.

Mr Howarth, he of the florid phrase, took up the cross-examination. Hunter's answers seemed bemused at first, then calmly insistent.

Q: Having heard the account today, that Sir Theodosius Boughton, apparently in good health, had swallowed a draught which had produced the symptoms described, I ask you whether any reasonable man can entertain a doubt but that draught, whatever it was, produced those appearances?

A: I don't know well what answer to make to that question.

Q: Having heard the account given of the health of this young gentleman, on that morning, previous to taking the draught, and the symptoms that were produced immediately upon taking the draught, I ask your opinion, as a man of judgement, whether you don't think that draught was the occasion of his death?

A: With regard to his being in health, that explains nothing; we see the healthiest people dying suddenly … as to the circumstance of the draught, I own they are suspicious.

At this point Justice Buller, evidently deeply irritated by Hunter's dismissal of the other medical witnesses, weighed in:

COURT: You are to give your opinions upon the symptoms only, not upon other evidence given.

Q: I ask whether, in your opinion, that draught did not occasion his death?

A: I can only say that it is a circumstance in favour of that opinion.

COURT: That the draught was the occasion of his death?

A: Not because the symptoms afterwards are those of a man dying who was before in perfect health; a man dying of apoplexy or epilepsy, the symptoms would give one of those general ideas.

COURT: It is the general idea you are asked about now …
whether you are of the opinion that the draught was the occasion of his death?

A: If I knew the draught was poison, I should say most probably … but when I don't know the draught was poison … I cannot answer positively to it.

Q: Then you decline giving any opinion upon the subject.

COURT: You recollect the circumstance that was mentioned of a violent heaving in the stomach?

A: All that is the effect of the voluntary action being lost, and nothing going on but the involuntary.

Q: Then you decline giving any opinion on the subject?

A: I don't form any opinion myself; I cannot form an opinion …

But the prosecution was not to be deflected: Howarth needed this renowned expert's opinion, and he was determined to get it.

Q: If you are at all acquainted with the effects and operations of distilled laurel water, whether the having swallowed a draught of that would not have produced the symptoms described?

A: I should suppose it would; I can only say this, of the experiments I have conducted with laurel water, it has not been near so quick … never produced so quick an effect as described by those gentlemen.

Q: But you admit that laurel water would have produced symptoms such as have been described?

A: I can conceive it might.

But this was hardly the point. It had not been proved that the mixture was laurel water – the case was brought on one woman's sense of smell alone – so to put that supposition now was to ask the witness to imagine a set of circumstances with the counsel's intention of then drawing a fact from a supposition.

The defence counsel Newnham now interjected in an attempt to bring Hunter's evidence back on track: he gave Hunter the chance to infer a fact from a supposition, too.

Q: Would not an apoplexy or an epilepsy, if it had seized Sir Theodosius Boughton at this time, though he had taken no physic at all, have produced similar symptoms too?

A: Certainly.

Newnham also tried to show that there was a significant parallel between Theodosius's health and his father's:

Q: Where a father has died of an apoplexy, is that not understood, in some measure, to be constitutional?

A: Whatever is constitutional in a father, the father has the power of giving that to the children …

Howarth returned to the questioning here:

Q: Do you call apoplexy constitutional?

A: I conceive apoplexy as much constitutional as any disease whatsoever.

Q: Is apoplexy likely to attack a thin young man who had been taking a course of cooling medicines before?

A: Not so likely, surely; but I have in my account of dissections two young women dying of apoplexies.

Q: … 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 place.

Buller appeared to lose his temper at this point.

Here was a witness who, in contrast to former medical ‘experts', was (quite rightly) unwilling to commit himself without knowing the patient or the medicines that the patient had been prescribed. But his unwillingness to be swayed, his lack of a commitment, was not what Buller wanted to hear.

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 from any other cause.

Hunter was not a man to be bullied, however. He could not give an opinion because he did not have the evidence. He could only say what, in his experience, happened if a person drank laurel water (and it is to be noted that Hunter's opinion was that it would not have the immediate effect described) or if a person had apoplexy. He had testified that a young person could have a stroke and that strokes could run in families. But without a proper autopsy – and he was forthright in his opinion that the autopsy had not been thorough – he could not say if a stroke had occurred.

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.

His answer was perfectly correct, but it was an answer that Buller would use to condemn Donellan.