25,000 POST-MORTEMS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 663, 21 March 1952, Page 12

25,000 POST-MORTEMS

BERNARD SPILSBURY, HIS LIFE AND CASES, by Douglas G. Browne and E. V. Tullett: Harran. Enélish nrice. 21/-.

(Reviewed by

F. J.

Foot

OST of us are confident that we will be present at no autopsy unless. it is our own. Sir Bernard Spilsbury conducted 25,000 post-mortems,. and this is an account of the more famous criminal cases in which he was engaged and of his ‘methods, and tells us something of the man himself. It is highly readable and of most satisfyingly macabre interest. Spilsbury was the most famous’ medical jurisprudent of our day. He was a remote man of few friendships, immersed in his work to the extent of being almost a machine. Nevertheless stories of his courtesy and kindness are legion. Sometimes he incurred unpopularity with his colleagues and some jealousy. It may be said that the unpopularity was undeserved, but that the jealousy was natural. The "thoroughness of his .work, his scrupulous fairness, clatity and accuracy made his evidence of the greatest value in the administration of justice. The authors have done their best to dispel the rather humourless Temoteness which surrounded the man

himself. There are a number of personal details and anecdotes. He disliked physical contacts, back slapping, etc., liked classical music, had little sense of smell and in his younger days was addicted to the society of older men. The authors take the fashionably sympathetic view of Edith Thompson (Rex v. Bywaters and Thompson), though why they should think her delight in making chutney. and jam inconsistent with her murderous propensities is mysterious. Indeed, as Alexander Woollcott pointed out, the two are inclined to be linked. Some other well-known cases are dealt with at length; that of the prisoner Armstrong, who claimed that he disliked dandelions so much that he made up individual packets of arsenic for each one; and the murderer Tunbridge, who was so lacking in a sense of what is fitting that he pushed his victim into the River Lea in the presence of a police sergeant. The story is told that at a dinner one night Spilsbury was asked by the hostess to carve the partridges, with the remark that he should be good at it. He said, "Do you know, I really prefer always to use my own instruments. Oddly enough, I have them here." To which his hostess rejoined, "Oddly

enough, I don’t think I could eat the nartridgec if won weed them "