Bernard Spilsbury
Sir Bernard Henry Spilsbury (16 May 1877 – 17 December 1947) was an English pathologist. His cases include Hawley Harvey Crippen, the Seddon case and Major Armstrong poisonings, the "brides in the bath" murders by George Joseph Smith, Louis Voisin, Jean-Pierre Vaquier, the Crumbles murders, Norman Thorne, Donald Merrett, the Podmore case, the Sidney Harry Fox matricide, the blazing Car murder, Mrs Barney, Tony Mancini and the Vera Page case. He also had a critical role in developing Operation Mincemeat, a deception operation during World War II which saved thousands of lives of Allied service personnel.
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[edit] Personal life
Spilsbury was born on 16 May 1877 at 35 Bath Street, Leamington Spa, Warwickshire. He was the eldest of the four children of James Spilsbury, a manufacturing chemist, and his wife, Marion Elizabeth Joy.
On 3 September 1908, Spilsbury married Edith Caroline Horton. They had four children together: one daughter, Evelyn, and three sons, Alan, Peter, and Richard. Peter, a junior doctor, was killed in the Blitz and Alan died of TB shortly after the Second World War.
The deaths (of Peter, in particular) were a blow from which Spilsbury never truly recovered. Depression over his declining health is believed to have been a key factor in his decision to commit suicide by gas in December 1947, in his laboratory at University College London.[1]
In later years, his dogmatic manner and his unbending belief in his own infallibility gave rise to criticism; even in the later years of his life, judges began to express concern about his invincibility in court and recent researches have indicated that his inflexible dogmatism led to miscarriages of justice.[2]
[edit] Career
Educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, he took a BA in natural science in 1899, M.B., B.Ch. in 1905 and an MA in 1908. He also studied at St Mary's Hospital in London from 1899. He specialised in the then-new science of forensic pathology. In October 1905 he was appointed resident assistant pathologist at St Mary's Hospital when the London County Council requested all general hospitals in its area to appoint two qualified pathologists to perform post-mortems related to sudden deaths.
[edit] Important cases
The case that brought Spilsbury to public attention was that of Dr Crippen in 1910, where he also gave forensic evidence in the trial about the likely identity of the human remains found in Crippen's house. Spilsbury concluded that a scar on a small piece of skin from the remains pointed to Mrs Crippen as the victim.
He gave evidence at the trial of Herbert Rowse Armstrong, the solicitor convicted of poisoning his wife with arsenic.[3]
But the case that put him on the road to becoming Britain's most famous forensic pathologists was the Brides in the Bath murder trial of 1915. Three women had died mysteriously in their baths, in each case the death seeming to be an accident. George Joseph Smith was brought to trial for the murder on one of these women - Bessie Mundy. Spilsbury testified that since Bessie's thigh showed evidence of 'goose skin', and since she was, in death, clutching a bar of soap - it was certain that she had died a violent death, and in fact has been murdered. It elevated Spilsbury to be seen as a 'medical detective', and he became known as a real-life Sherlock Holmes.
He was also involved in the case of the Brighton trunk murders, and although the accused man, Mancini, in whose flat the body of a murdered prostitute was found, was acquitted at the trial, Mancini confessed to the killing just before his own death, many years later, so vindicating Spilsbury's evidence.[4]
He was able to work with minimal remains, such as that involved in the "Blazing car murder", when a near destroyed body was found in the wreck of a burnt-out car near Northampton in 1930. He gave evidence of how the man had died, although the victim was never identified, and so helped convict Alfred Rouse. During his career Spilsbury performed thousands of autopsies, not only for murder victims but also of executed criminals. He was able to appear for the defence in Scotland, where his status as a Home Office pathologist in England and Wales was irrelevant: he testified for the defence in the case of Donald Merrett, tried in February 1927 for the murder of his mother and acquitted as not proven.[5]
Spilsbury was knighted in 1923. He was a Home Office approved pathologist, lecturer in forensic medicine in the University College Hospital, London School of Medicine for Women and St. Thomas' Hospital. He also was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine.
Files containing notes on deaths investigated by Spilsbury went under the hammer at Sotheby's on 17 July 2008,[6][7] when they were acquired by the Wellcome Library in London.[8] The index cards documented deaths in London and the Home Counties from 1905 to 1932. The hand-written cards, discovered in a lost cabinet, were the notes that Spilsbury apparently accumulated for a textbook on forensic medicine which he was planning, but there is no evidence that he ever started the book.[9]
[edit] Media
On 12 June 2008 BBC Radio 4's afternoon play The Incomparable Witness by Nichola McAuliffe was a drama about Sir Bernard Spilsbury, 'the father of modern forensics'.
Spilsbury was commemorated by an English Heritage Blue plaque attached to his former home at Marlborough Hill, London, NW8[10]
[edit] Posthumous reputation
In recent years, there has been some reassessment of Spilsbury's reputation which has raised questions over his degree of objectivity. An article in the British Medical Journal noted how "the virtuosity" of Spilsbury's performances in the mortuary and the courtroom "threatened to undermine the foundations of forensic pathology as a modern and objective specialism". Spilsbury is particularly criticised for his insistence on working alone; a refusal to train students; and an unwillingness to engage in academic research or peer review. This, says the article's author, "lent him an aura of infallibility that for many raised concerns that it was his celebrity rather than his science that persuaded juries to credit his evidence over all others."[11]
[edit] Also see
[edit] References
- ^ "Oxford DNB article: Spilsbury, Sir Bernard Henry". www.oxforddnb.com. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/36217. Retrieved 2010-11-17. (requires login or UK library card)
- ^ EXPERT EVIDENCE – THE PROBLEM OR THE SOLUTION? The role of expert evidence and its regulation THE JOHN BOLTON MEMORIAL LECTURE given to the ACADEMY OF EXPERT WITNESSES by The Rt Hon The Attorney General 25 January 2007
- ^ Wilson 1984, p. 60
- ^ Wilson 1984, p. 428
- ^ Colin Evans (2003). A question of evidence: the casebook of great forensic controversies, from Napoleon to O.J.. John Wiley and Sons. p. 55. ISBN 0471440140.
- ^ Richard Alleyne (26 Jun 2008). "For sale: The gruesome research of Britain's most famous pathologist". Daily Telegraph. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/2199398/For-sale-The-gruesome-research-of-Britains-most-famous-pathologist.html.
- ^ "Forensic expert's notes on sale". BBC News. 2 July 2008. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7485733.stm.
- ^ "Sir Bernard Spilsbury's case-cards in the Wellcome Library". http://library.wellcome.ac.uk/doc_wtx058306.html. Retrieved 2011-08-28.
- ^ Sir Bernard Spilsbury, Britain’s first forensic scientist The Times 2 January 2009
- ^ English Heritage Blue Plaque for father of forensic pathology, Sir Bernard Spilsbury
- ^ Ian Burney, "The Rise and Fall of Celebrity Pathology", BMJ 341 (Dec 2010), p.1319-1321
[edit] Sources
- Wilson, Colin; Patricia Pitman (1984). Encyclopedia of Murder. Pan Books. ISBN 0330283006.
- Jane Robins - The Magnificent Spilsbury and the Case of the Brides in the Bath (2010) John Murray
- Douglas Browne and E. V. Tullett - Bernard Spilsbury: His Life and Cases (1951)
- Colin Evans - the Father of Forensics
- J.H.H. Gaute and Robin Odell - The New Murderer's Who's Who, 1996, Harrap Books, London
- Andrew Rose "Lethal Witness" Sutton Publishing 2007 - also to be published in the US by Kent State University Press
