Abstract
In his 1878 Lectures on Medical Jurisprudence, prominent medico-legal author Francis Ogston referred to ‘Physical Proofs’ as the only kind of evidence that came ‘properly … within the province of the medical jurist’.1 Although medical witnesses spoke about issues related to behaviour and character implicitly, and occasionally explicitly, ‘physical proofs’ underpinned most medical expertise in trials for sexual offences. In Middlesex, Gloucestershire, Somerset and Devon, medical witnesses generally focused on bodily signs rather than symptoms such as pain.2 This focus was in part due to the limited ability of young complainants to describe symptoms and the consequence of a general turn towards treating the patient’s body as ‘object’ rather than the patient as ‘subject’.3 This is not to say that the patient’s voice was completely removed from all clinical encounters. However, symptoms were generally superfluous to the medico-legal ‘script’, which followed particular lines of enquiry deemed legally relevant.
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Notes
Francis Ogston, Lectures on Medical Jurisprudence (London: J. & A. Churchill, 1878), p. 124.
For some discussions on the patient as ‘object’ and the rise of clinical observation, see Mary Wilson Carpenter, Health, Medicine and Society in Victorian England (Santa Barbara; Denver; Oxford: Praeger, 2010), p. 25.
Anne Digby, The Evolution of British General Practice, 1850–1948 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 190.
Mary E. Fissell, ‘The Disappearance of the Patient’s Narrative and the Invention of Hospital Medicine’ in British Medicine in an Age of Reform, ed. Roger French and Andrew Wear (London; New York: Routledge, 1991), 92–109, p. 93.
Some of these methods were in development in the nineteenth century but were rarely implemented until police laboratories of the 1930s, the staff of which also educated local police forces in new forensic methods; see, for example, a Metropolitan Police Laboratory serologist’s lecture to Exeter City Police; John C. Thomas, ‘The Examination of Blood and Seminal Stains’, Police Journal 10 (1937), 490–503.
Nick Lee, ‘Faith in the Body? Childhood, Subjecthood and Sociological Enquiry’ in The Body, Childhood and Society, ed. Alan Prout (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 149–71, p. 154.
Alfred Swaine Taylor, Medical Jurisprudence, 4th edn (London: J. & A. Churchill, 1852 [1844]), p. 593. This quote was unchanged throughout all the editions, up to and including 1910.
Taylor, A Manual of Medical Jurisprudence, 9th edn (London: J. & A. Churchill, 1874 [1844]), p. 678. This statement was a new addition to the 9th edition but was retained throughout all the others up to 1910.
Alfred Swaine Taylor, The Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence, ed. Thomas Stevenson, 6th edn, vol. 2 (London: J. & A. Churchill, 1910 [1865]), p. 437.
Léon Henri Thoinot, Medicolegal Aspects of Moral Offenses (Philadelphia: F. A. Davis Company, 1911), p. 66.
Helen King, Hippocrates’ Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 71.
William A. Guy and David Ferrier, Principles of Forensic Medicine, 5th edn (London: H. Renshaw, 1881 [1844]), p. 66. Only six per cent of medical witnesses in the South West and four per cent in Middlesex made any form of microscopic analysis.
Robert Gray, ‘Medical Men, Industrial Labour and the State in Britain, 1830–50’, Social History 16 (1991), 19–43, p. 38.
John Roberton, ‘On the Alleged Influence of Climate on Female Puberty in Greece’, Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal 62 (1844), 1–22.
Sarah Toulalan, ‘Introduction’ in Bodies, Sex and Desire from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Kate Fisher and Sarah Toulalan (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 1–26, p. 15.
Sara Read, Menstruation and the Female Body in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), p. 49.
George R. Drysdale, The Elements of Social Science; or Physical, Sexual and Natural Religion. An Exposition of the True Cause and Only Cure of the Three Primary Social Evils: Poverty, Prostitution, and Celibacy, 25th edn (London: E. Truelove, 1886 [1854]), p. 66.
On the absence of a ‘bacteriological revolution’ more generally see Michael Worboys, ‘Unsexing Gonorrhoea: Bacteriologists, Gynaecologists and Suffragists in Britain, 1860–1920’, Social History of Medicine 17 (2004), 41–59.
Michael Worboys, ‘Was there a Bacteriological Revolution in Late Nineteenth-Century Medicine?’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biology and Biomedical Sciences 38 (2007), 20–42.
Taylor, Principles and Practice, ed. Frederick J. Smith, 5th edn, vol. 2 (London: J. & A. Churchill, 1905 [1865]), p. 135.
For example in F. Swinford Edwards, ‘The Treatment of Gonorrhoea with Special Reference to Bladder Irrigation’, The Lancet, 12 April 1902, 1029–31, p. 1029.
W. T. Stead, ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon: the Report of our Secret Commission’, Pall Mall Gazette, 6–10 July 1885.
Gayle Davis, ‘The Cruel Madness of Love’: Sex, Syphilis and Psychiatry in Scotland, 1880–1930 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), p. 241.
Roger Davidson, ‘“This Pernicious Delusion”: Law, Medicine, and Child Sexual Abuse in Early-Twentieth-Century Scotland’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 10 (2001), 62–77, pp. 68–69.
Louise Jackson, Child Sexual Abuse in Victorian England (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 78–79.
John Adams, ‘What Acts are Essential to Constitute Rape?’, The Lancet, 25 March 1843, 933, p. 933.
British Parliamentary Papers (BPP), Judicial Statistics of England and Wales for 1870–1889 (London: H.M.S.O., 1871–1890).
Carolyn A. Conley, ‘Rape and Justice in Victorian England’, Victorian Studies 29 (1986), 519–36, p. 521.
Carolyn A. Conley, The Unwritten Law: Criminal Justice in Victorian Kent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 83.
Kim Stevenson, ‘“Unequivocal Victims”: The Historical Roots of the Mystification of the Female Complainant in Rape Cases’, Feminist Legal Studies 8 (2000), 343–66.
David Bentley, English Criminal Justice in the Nineteenth Century (London: Hambledon Press, 1998), p. 148; Exeter, DRO, Devon Epiphany Sessions: The Names of the Grand Jurors, 1901, QS/B/1901/Epiphany; Exeter, DRO, Devon Michaelmas Sessions: The Names of the Grand Jurors, 1903, QS/B/1903/Michaelmas.
Johann Ludwig Casper, Handbook of Forensic Medicine, trans. from 3rd edn by G. W. Balfour, vol. 1 (London: New Sydenham Society, 1861), p. vi.
See the discussion of middle-class jurors in Martin J. Wiener, Men of Blood: Violence, Manliness, and Criminal Justice in Victorian England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 38.
Some influential factors, such as witness conduct and the direction of judges, are not recorded in depositions. Newspapers fill some of these gaps, but are far from a direct lens into jurors’ decision-making processes. They tell us as much about the construction of stereotypes as ‘real’ events in the courtroom; see Kim Stevenson, ‘Unearthing the Realities of Rape: Utilising Victorian Newspaper Reportage to Fill in the Contextual Gaps’, Liverpool Law Review 28 (2007), 405–23.
Charles Knight, ‘Quarter Sessions’, The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 31 January 1839, 40, p. 40.
C. E. A. Bedwell, ‘Littler, Sir Ralph Daniel Makinson (1835–1908)’, rev. Eric Metcalfe, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/34557> (accessed 23 July 2015).
Andrew Ashworth, Sentencing and Criminal Justice, 5th edn (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010 [1992]), p. 52.
Sarah Toulalan, ‘“Is He a Licentious Lewd Sort of a Person?”: Constructing the Child Rapist in Early Modern England’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 23 (2014), 21–52, p. 38.
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Bates, V. (2016). Injury: Signs and the Sexual Body. In: Sexual Forensics in Victorian and Edwardian England. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137441720_3
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