1883.] Poisoning Cases of the last Half-Century . 
519 
II. THE POISONING CASES OF THE LAST 
HALF-CENTURY.* 
S HE stories of Tawell, of Palmer, of Dove, of Madeline 
Smith, which in their turn filled the columns of the 
press and set in aCtion the tongues of half the king- 
dom, have not yet lost all their meaning. If we carefully 
read the book before us, we may see that it contains lessons 
of importance not merely to lawyers and physicians, but to 
much wider circles. The moralist may, for instance, be 
painfully struck with the startling cross-lights which a great 
crime throws upon society, and with the strange revelations 
which they bring. How many persons in the little town of 
Rugeley, besides Palmer, moved in the light of respecta- 
bility, perhaps even in the odour of sanCtity, until the trial 
of 1856 enabled us to look behind the scenes ! 
A much more important consideration, from our point of 
view, is that the heroes of the poisoning cases before us 
belonged, almost without exception, to the so-called respect- 
able classes. Their previous conduct had not, indeed, been 
morally free from reproach, and several of them had been 
concerned in doubtful transactions. But they were not 
habitual criminals ; they were not the companions of cri- 
minals, and they could not rank in that order of men who 
are “ well-known to the police,” and who are apt to be sus- 
pected in case of any untraced crime. One of them, indeed, 
could and did say “ My station in society places me beyond 
suspicion ! ” 
This point naturally brings us to the question of their 
education. Of the thirteen persons who have thus been 
placed before the tribunals on the charge of murder in so 
cold-blooded and treacherous a mode, four were members of 
a learned profession ; none, probably, were grossly ignorant, 
and none had in their early life been brought up in 
oblivion of the distinction between right and wrong, or 
systematically trained to a general warfare against society. 
These faCts, surely, are not without bearing upon the 
* Reports of Trials for Murder by Poisoning with Prussic Acid, Strychnia, 
Antimony, Arsenic, and Aconita, including the Trials of Tawell, Palmer, Dove, 
Madeline Smith, Dr. Pritchard, Smethurst, and Dr. Lamson, with a Chemical 
Introdu&ion and Notes on the Poisons used. By G. Lathom Browne, 
Barrister-at-Law, and C. G. Stewart, Senior Assistant in the Laboratory of 
St. Thomas’s Hospital. London : Stevens and Sons. 
