Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 1, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 September 1876 — Poisoning as a Fine Art. [ARTICLE]

Poisoning as a Fine Art.

During the course of the trial of Palmer, now, as nearly as may be, twenty years ago, Dr. Taylor, the well-known writer on medical jurisprudence, expressed his belief that secret poisoning was far more common than was supposed, and that it was indeed prevalent to an alarming and dangerous degree. There is too iquch reason to fear that the statement was not at all exaggerated. “The secrets of the grave,” Dr. Taylor says, “are only known to thuse who practice medical jurisprudence. In the course of the last thirty years at least fifteen cases of the exhumation of dead bodies have been referred to me. On some of these inquests bad been held, but no inspections,were made. Verdicts of death from cholera and natural causes had been returned and at intervals of from one month to twenty-two months the bodies have been disinterred, and it has been then proved that the deceased had died from poison. In some of these cases the deaths were sudden and in others slow; in the latter the symptoms during life were mistaken for those of disease, medical certificates of the cause of death were given without sufficient inquiry, and thus it is that crime passes undetected, and several lives may be destroyed in succession before a criminal is arrested. There is a popular notion, in accordance with the ancient statute, that sudden deaths only require an investigation by the Coroner; but this is an error. A large proportion of sudden deaths take place from well-known natural causes, easily elicited by a proper medical inquiry, and they strictly demand no judicial proceedings. On the other hand, in all cases of chronic poisoning, the form which secret murder has of late years assumed, the patient has lingered on with intermitting symptoms, ana death has taken place only after an illness of some weeks’ duration. There is no provision for the detection of such cases. Their discovery appears to be a matter of accident.”

These measured words seem so horrible that at first one can hardly believe them true. It is a natural and, to a certain extent, a commendable tendency of most people to believe in the goodness of human nature, and when we are told that secret poisoning goes on in an absolutely whalesale manner we are disposed to think that the world cannot possibly be so wicked, and that the statement is one of those ex aggerations into which scientific men are apt to be unconsciously betrayed by over attention to their own especial subject. It is probable, however, that men such as Dr. Taylor, medical men and lawyers, to whom the moral nature of men presents itself as a phenomenon to be studied in exactly the same way as any other, have a more accurate knowledge of the wickedness that reallv goes on in the world than our first impulse would allow us to credit them with. When, the year before last, we were threatened with an outbreak of cholera, one of the most eminent physicians at present practicing in London observed gravely that he seriously hoped it was not going to be so, for that during an outbreak 01 cholera, when sudden deaths are taken very much as a matter of course, there is always a frightful increase of secret poisoning. —London Examiner.

—A pet dog of good size, belonging to a wealthy gentleman in New York, was buried in his master’s lot in Greenwood Cemetery, recently, by an undertaker. A burial permit had tohe obtained for him at headquarters, and the usual price for opening a grave was paid. A KOvncssT is on foot in Germany to introduce Roman type instead of the Gothic so long in use. ~