April 2017
southbristolvoice
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n HISTORY The story of William Herapath the power of life and death in a courtroom
William Herapath: His hallmark was careful, repeated experiments, designed to prove his case conclusively – and to convince a jury cholera was spread though “bad air” – a reasonable guess in the days when cities such as Bristol stank of sewage and rotting animals. His cure was fumigation with a mix of manganese oxide, table salt and sulphuric acid. Unfortunately, it was the wrong guess; pioneering doctors such as Bristol’s William Budd realised victims of cholera shared the same water supply. The disease spread through water, not air. But Herapath did not suffer from this misdiagnosis: he soon had a national reputation from another route – the courts. His expertise as a chemist of precision led him to claim that he could detect poisons in tiny quantities with scientific certainty – even long after the victim of a poisoning had died.
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n 1833, Mrs Clara Ann Smith, a widow aged 60, was lodging at the house of landlady Mary Ann Burdock in Trinity Street. Mrs Smith died suddenly, after severe stomach pains, on October 26, 1833. Mrs Burdock
arranged her burial at St Augustine’s. Claiming not to know any of Mrs Smith’s relatives, or even her Christian name, Mrs Burdock paid for the interment herself. Mrs Smith did have relatives, though. After 14 months a nephew heard about the death. Making inquiries, he grew very suspicious, for he knew she had been wealthy, and the family eventually convinced the coroner that the grave should be opened. We fast-forward to the trial of Mrs Burdock on April 10, 1835. Herapath was just one of the medical men cross-examined; but he was by far the most important. He described how he was present on Christmas Eve, 1834, when Mrs Smith’s coffin was lifted from its grave, and he saw the casket opened. “Dr Riley and Mr Kelson opened the body,” reported the Bristol Mercury, “and put the viscera into two clean basins, which witness [Herapath] prepared for the purpose – into one the stomach and duodenum,
and into the other the intestines; on which he tied up the basins in a napkin, and gave them to a person to carry them to the Medical School, never having lost sight of him till he arrived at the school with him. “The body was in a remarkable state of preservation, which witness attributed to the presence of some antiseptic, such as arsenic; the intestinal canal was nearly as perfect as if recently abstracted; he tested first the contents of the small basin, which was the stomach; spread it flat on a new deal board, and slit it open; when his attention was immediately attracted by a large quantity of yellow powder …” It wasn’t an accident that Herapath was asked to examine the body. The authorities already suspected that Burdock had poisoned Mrs Smith with arsenic. A witness said she had asked for some of the poison to be bought for her, for the purpose of killing rats. Yet witnesses said rats had never been seen in her house. There was evidence that Mrs Smith had been about to invest £500 before she died. And that Burdock, before the death, had been short of money; while after it, she refurnished her house, and lent £400 to an acquaintance, and in May 1834 she deposited £400 in a Bristol bank. If this was not enough, there was the testimony of Burdock’s maid, Mary Ann Ellen. Burdock, she reported, told her after Mrs Smith’s death: “Don’t tell anyone that ever you lived with the deceased, and if any one should ask you, say she was a foreigner from a far way off in the East Indies; and, mind, make sure you don’t tell anyone that you saw me put anything in the gruel, for perhaps they might think it curious.” It was a heavy weight of circumstantial evidence; but Burdock denied her guilt. To prove it required evidence that the death had been by poisoning. Herapath claimed he could do it. He talked the jury through his experiments. The other doctors present when he opened the stomach agreed that the yellow substance looked like arsenic, and they believed the symptoms before death showed Ms Smith was poisoned.
But Herapath proved it, describing in detail how he conducted not one but three series of tests to show that the yellow substance was arsenic. From one he produced a distinctive green residue, the results he showed to the jury. He “repeated the experiments five or six times; but was satisfied with the result on the first experiment; no other substance, treated in the same manner, would produce the same results.” Such a wealth of detail, produced by a man so clearly in command of his subject, convinced the jury. Smith was found guilty of murder. Such was her infamy that when she was hanged at the gates of the New Gaol on April 15, 1835, an estimated 50,000 people thronged Cumberland Road. The case made Herapath a celebrity. It was the first time poison had been detected in a body so long after death. The case fascinated the public, and Herapath was called as witness to many more trials. He gave evidence at Taunton Assizes in the case of Sophia Edney, who had a husband she wanted rid of and had read of the Burdock case. But instead of being deterred by the thought that an expert such as Herapath could prove her guilt, it seems she was more impressed by how little arsenic was needed for a fatal dose. She sprinkled some arsenic on a dish of fried potatoes for her spouse. But Herapath showed the jury the distinctive results of the three tests he had done, which proved the presence of minute quantities of the poison, each in a clearly-labelled test tube. Edney was hanged.
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orensics was not the end of Herapath’s innovations. He was the first man in England, outside London, to administer anaesthetic during an operation. The surgeon was James Lansdown, already described in an earlier Voice feature. Herapath and a colleague, Dr Fairbrother, knew about operations conducted in America on patients anaesthetised by ether. Laughing gas, or nitrous oxide, had been used as a Continued on page 40
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