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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Katherine Watson, Poisoned lives: English poisoners and their victims, London and New York, Hambledon and London, 2004, pp. xiv, 268, illus., £19.99 (hardback 1-85283-379-4).

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This book provides a fresh look at the social history of poisons and poisoners based on around 500 cases of criminal poisoning that occurred in England between 1750 and 1914. Watson analyses not only published sources but also the rich documents stored at the National Archives at Kew. As a consequence, the study offers reliable statistical data about poisoning and includes a broad range of cases, not only the most famous and popular poisoning trials. First of all, Watson describes the main poisons employed in the nineteenth century, their effects on human bodies and the three ways of detecting them: clinical symptoms, post-mortem autopsies and chemical tests. The different value of these signs changed over the period and depended on the poison (as exemplified by the extreme cases of arsenic and strychnine). Moreover, Watson provides statistical data about the principal poisons used in English criminal cases and how they could be obtained by murderers and given to their victims. Most of the poisons were employed in many common activities (agriculture, medicine, vermin control, manufacturing, etc.) and there were no effective legal restrictions on the sale of poisons before the Arsenic Act of 1851. The large number of cases studied by Watson offers a good opportunity to undermine some broadly diffused ideas about poisons and poisoners. Contrary to common opinion, which emerged from several famous nineteenth-century cases such as those of Dr William Palmer (England), Lucretia Chapman (USA) or Madame Lafarge (France), not all poisoners were women or doctors. Of 540 criminal cases studied by Watson, the number of male accused poisoners roughly equals the number of female. Most of them have a family connection with their victims (mother or stepmother, husband, wife, etc.) and just a small number were physicians or nurses. The most famous nineteenth-century cases involved middle-class murders or professional bourgeois groups but the main group of poisoners were members of the lower classes who usually turned to poison as a means of escaping their intolerable situations. Watson devotes a large number of pages to a detailed analysis of the reasons which drove poisoners to commit their crime: the “reasons of the heart” (unhappy marriages, adultery), unwanted children (extreme poverty, reluctance to assume responsibilities of fatherhood, indifference) and “the root of all evil”: money. Around 120 cases were clearly carried out for financial motives: insurance money, inherited properties, frauds and other cases in which the poisoners expected to gain or save money after killing their victims. Because of their important role, Watson looks at the influence of life insurance companies and burial societies and shows that the absence of real control methods on death certificates induced greedy relatives to commit many “insurance poisonings” between 1840 and 1890. Many other poisoning crimes were motivated by despair and vengeance, particularly in the murders committed by domestic servants and children. After poverty, jealousy, money and vengeance, mental illness was another important cause of murders and suicides by poisoning. This last small group of cases (less than a tenth of poisoning crimes studied by Watson) are however very significant because they act as a bridge between the two major branches of nineteenth-century legal medicine: toxicology and psychiatry. While chemical proofs offered a solid basis for expert witnesses, insanity was a slippery domain. The diagnosis of insanity was an endless source of trouble for medical experts who openly disagreed about the psychological (or physiological) origins of mental disease and the degree of individual responsibility associated with mental instability. Because most of these crimes were murders followed by suicides or attempted suicides, Watson offers some hints about the causes of suicide and, in so doing, she engages in a brief dialogue with early twentieth-century sociologists such as Emile Durkheim and Maurice Halbwachs, who wrote many influential pages about that topic. Victims, poisoners and their motives are the most important historical actors analysed in the book. Just one brief chapter focuses on expert witnesses. Watson analyses how, before the advent of scientific police, inquests were held by coroners and justices of the peace. Most frequently, coroners opened an inquest after being alerted by neighbours, doctors, relatives or victims. If no doubts were raised at the time of death, crimes were likely to escape justice. Moreover, not all the potential witnesses (including many local doctors) were able to recognize the symptoms associated with poisoning. The study shows that inquests were highly dependent upon local conditions, particularly the capabilities, zeal and financial resources of coroners, magistrates and police. The absence of remuneration for coroners and expert witnesses has been regarded as a major problem for the development of legal medicine. Watson also discusses how Thomas Wakley managed to promote the role of scientific and medical expertise, even though he was not the first medical coroner nor did he completely succeed in reforming the coroner's practice. At the end of the nineteenth century, the number of coroners with medical training was only about 15 per cent of the group serving in England and Wales. Watson discusses other trends which increased the participation of the medical profession in the courts: control of death certificates, official legal status and remuneration for medical witnesses, resources for autopsies and toxicological tests, etc. In complex inquests, local medical practitioners were replaced by famous doctors from large urban centres who could develop a national reputation as toxicologists, Alfred Taylor and Thomas Stevenson being the most famous during the second half of the nineteenth century. New and more complicated toxicological tests encouraged that trend because local doctors lacked both chemical training and laboratory resources. In spite of the problems mentioned, Watson concludes that “the English inquest was nonetheless an important factor in the detection of secret poisoning” (p. 173). Finally, always relying on particular cases, Watson discusses the practice of criminal law in nineteenth-century Britain: the development of modern police offices, and their role in the investigation of cases of poisoning. The book mostly offers a biographical profile of poisoners and their victims and a broad discussion about their concerns, motives and feelings. The impressive richness of the sources analysed leaves many avenues for future research: the diverse chemical tests and the actual toxicological practices, the emergence and construction of reliable toxicological proofs, the changing value of legal and toxicological evidence in courtrooms, the tensions between provincial experts and famous London toxicologists, the frequent controversies between experts, the influence of poisoning trials in the public understanding of science, etc. It would be useful if future studies developed these questions as brilliantly as Katherine Watson has in this work, which will appeal not only to historians of medicine, technology and science but also to a general audience.