Friday, 16 July 1999 - 06:37 pm
What if this was a response to the question "Do you have a fireplace in your room? I like to keep warm when I have sex."--??
In other words, maybe the Ripper intentionally sought out a woman who had facilities for cauterization available. Maybe he was figuring on needing such facilities, because he had become slightly infected in Mitre Square and learned his lesson there. He is planning his farewell murder, and wants it to be the grandest of all, so he plans how to satisfy his need for cauterization proactively.
Thinking Albert Fish--perhaps he has come to LIKE cauterization. Who knows what kind of wacky fetishes and perversions he might have had? Maybe he took the time to also singe his penis in Miller's Court, just for jolly. See what I mean?
David
Saturday, 17 July 1999 - 02:38 am
Saturday, 17 July 1999 - 03:47 am
Saturday, 17 July 1999 - 09:03 am
Simple point, but relevant to this particular thread I would have thought.
Saturday, 17 July 1999 - 09:39 am
Saturday, 17 July 1999 - 11:06 am
Checking 1888 records would be a waste of time. Dozens were admitted to infirmaries and hospitals with a great variety of wounds, injuries, sickness and fever. These could be sustained in a myriad of ways, and finding anyone so admitted, or dying, would prove nothing at all. Injuries sustained by workers in those days of no safety at work were numerous.
Have any of the above enthusiastic contributors really thought this one through? I think not.
Saturday, 17 July 1999 - 11:12 am
Firstly - very good suggestions by Jill and Diana and others. And maybe slightly premature pessimism by Wolf, who seems to be forgetting that every hypothesis begins as a leap of imagination. The next step is to test it against the facts, and if the facts refute it, it has to be forgotten. But if they don't, then it has justified itself so far, and become a theory - that is, an idea that isn't proved but which is not refuted by any of the evidence.
It is not fanciful to suggest the idea of blood poisoning,it would only be fanciful to continue to suggest it if evidence develops to rule it out. But that stage has not been reached yet.
ABOUT THE DEATH CERTIFICATES. Checking the death certificates need not be that daunting, if they recorded occupation. If we assume the strong likelihood that this was a medical man, then we could begin by looking for deaths from sepsis amongst doctors or med. students in the Whitechapel area, and widen the search only if no applicable candidate is found.
DR. HARE. I'm perplexed by your observation Are you a medical doctor? I haven't practised for a year or two, but unless things have moved on a lot I don't see how your observations make any sense.
Sure, the longer a body has been dead, the more potentially dangerous it becomes to tamper with. But septicaemia can result from ANY infection in any wound, not simply from autopsy accidents. Our Jack would have been up to his wrists in faecal matter, which is loaded with potentially lethal bacteria even in a living individual. Any laceration sustained in these conditions would have a high chance of going seriously septic. Given the lack of all effective treatment, the generally insanitary conditions pertaining, resultant septicaemia would at the very least be a serious possibility.
In the opinion of this doctor anyhow
Mike
Saturday, 17 July 1999 - 12:07 pm
Saturday, 17 July 1999 - 01:44 pm
As for studying death certificates of medical personel, that has come from a believe that the fire in Kelly's room was made to cauterize a wound that there is no evidence that ever existed. So far you are making two huge assumptions based on absolutely no evidence.
Wolf.
Saturday, 17 July 1999 - 02:00 pm
~"Tetanus is a dangerous nerve ailment caused by the toxin of a common bacterium, Clostridium tetani. Bacterial spores are found in soil — most
frequently in cultivated soil, least frequently in virgin soil. They also exist in environments as diverse as animal excrement, house dust, operating
rooms, contaminated heroin and the human colon. If the spores enter a wound that penetrates the skin and extends deeper than oxygen can reach, they germinate and produce a toxin that enters the bloodstream.
This toxin, tetanospasmin, ranks with botulism toxin as the most potent known microbial poison. It is taken up from the blood by the outermost
nerves and moves inward toward the spine at a rate of about 10 inches a day. After 7 to 21 days, it begins to short-circuit nerve signals and block
the relaxation of muscles. This results in sustained muscle contractions, notably the lockjaw for which tetanus is nicknamed.
Spasms of the jaw or facial muscles may follow, spreading to the hands, arms, legs, and back and blocking the ability to breathe. Spasms are often
precipitated by noise or touch. Once tetanus has spread, the mortality rate is approximately 40 percent, even in modern medical facilities.
An estimated one million infants die of tetanus in developing countries each year because of poor hygiene. Since childhood immunization laws were passed in the United States in the 1970s, only about 50 cases a year are reported in this country; about three-quarters are elderly people or people who have never been immunized.
Symptoms
You should suspect tetanus if a cut or other wound is followed by one or more of these symptoms:
Stiffness of the neck, jaw and other muscles, often accompanied by a grotesque, grinning expression.
Irritability.
Uncontrollable spasms of the jaw and neck muscles.
Painful, involuntary contraction of other muscles."
Saturday, 17 July 1999 - 05:57 pm
Interesting ideas all round, although I do share some of the reservations of the less enthusiastic. With my decided ignorance of medical matters, however, I hope a possibly stupid question will be forgiven.
Why has it been concluded that there would have been a ‘lack of all effective treatment?’ Given that antiseptics had been introduced to surgery some twenty years before 1888, had our killer been a medical man wouldn’t he have had ready access to a number of effective treatments for a potentially infected wound?
Best Wishes
alex
Sunday, 18 July 1999 - 01:04 am
There is such a flood of creative suggestions here. I'd just like to add a few comments.
Wolf - I think you are missing a few strands of the discussion. The notion that Jack was a medical man isn't based on the 'cauterisation' idea. It's been around a lot longer than that and is backed up by good evidence. I believe the suggestion was first made 111 years ago by Doctor Bagster Philips. Recently the matter has been discussed here, when I and other people put forward our reasons for thinking he was probably right.
In brief - Jack managed to locate and dissect away a human uterus in the dark in less than five minutes. This is not easy (believe me, I've seen inside enough ladies' bodies, the uterus is a very small shy organ, you have to know where to go to find it, and even then, if it's stuck to surrounding tissue with fibrous scar tissue etc. it can still evade easy detection). This feat is not something the untrained layman would have a prayer of doing, even with a good light and Gray's Anatomy open beside him. In five minutes, in the dark, under pressure - he had to know what he was doing, had to have done it many times before. So - a medical man.
The counter argument is that it was too messy and unprofessional a job to have been done by anyone medically qualified. From my perspective this is slightly crazy. Firstly you should see the mess that med. students can make of their dissections. And, think of the cicumstances. In five minutes on an unlit street, Jack was doing well to get into the body cavity at all and extract anything. I doubt a trained surgeon could have done much better.
And I am not assuming Eddowes was the source of his infection by saying Jackie was up to his wrists in faecal matter. I suspect, Wolf, that you have never performed a dissection. The man who gutted Kelly would have been up to his wrists in every one of her bodily products - beyond doubt.
TETANUS
Yes, it might be a risk. Basically any infection with any organism becomes a risk as soon as there is a wound and the more generally septic the environment the greater the risk.
Mr.Chisholm. hello, we haven't exchanged views before. You ask why do we say there was no effective treatment for sepsis at that time, so I will try and explain.
Antiseptic procedures are aimed at reducing the amount of bacteria to enter a wound. They are not antibiotics, and are ineffective at dealing with any bacteria that enter the bloodstream. If Jack cut himself while his hands were in contact with faecal matter, pathogens would have entered the cut immediately and begun proliferating, and even if he managed to get home and dab the Victorian equivalent of TCP on his wound, it would be pretty ineffective.
Basically, before the introduction of antibiotics and sulfa drugs in about 1945, there was nothing a clinician could to to treat serious bacterial infections, and many septic conditions that are now considered trivial were then almost routinely fatal.
And in conclusion. Good science is about establishing a hypothesis then trying to disprove it. Taking the step of checking death certs. for medical men in the area is not disappearing into fantasy-land, it is following scientific principles. So Diana and Jill, don't be disheartened, a lot of us think this is a clever and worthwhile idea, and it just might find Jack himself.
Mike
Sunday, 18 July 1999 - 09:34 am
I said I would go to the library to investigate healthcare in the previous century and before. I didn't found much, but one book: "Er is leven voor de dood: Tweehonderd jaar gezondheidszorg in Vlaanderen" (Translation: There is life before death: Two hundred years of healthcare in Flanders) Publisher Pelckmans. Sorry, all books about international healthcare were already lent, but still you can get a general view.
Part one deals about the years 1750-1870 (and a little bit beyond). In the chapter of General Developments under Medical Personel I found this:
Although anaestatic characters such as ether, chloroform and laughing gas were already known around 1830 but they began using them from the 1840s (first operation in Brussels under anaestatic in 1847). In 1880 there were still doctors who only used it when the patient explicitly asked for it.
Anaestatics are not of real importance in line of the blood poisoning, but it relates how the medical world practiced.
Further reading ecplains that doctors operated in their own coat. The survival chances for a patient were very slim (around 1850 no woman survived a Caesarian in Brussels). Only from the last quarter of the 19th century antiseptic and aseptic methods found there way to the Belgian operating rooms very slowly. Antiseptic methods were introduced around 1880 and were exchanged for aseptic ones in 1890 (mortality after operation changed from 10,2% in 1878 to only 2,24% in 1895).
The book also relates about the difference of class that went to a hospital. The gentry stayed at home to be treated there. The hospitals were made to isolate poor sick people from the empoverished crowded area where they lived. Only from the end of the century the better classes let themselves be hospitalised, due to its beginning specialisation.
This history is about Flanders' healthcare, but can be generalised, to my belief, certainly for an area such as Whitechapel.
So IF JtR had cut himself, while digging into dangerous areas in a victims body, and IF he had used an antiseptic, he most probably could do nothing against it (The use of medical antiseptics was very young indeed). Cauterization in itself could be dangerous too: a wound caused by burning can fester in itself.
To the problem of investigating death certificates or hospital records. If we investigate hospital records on either cured or dead patients (doesn't even matter on what sort of injury, taking into acount that another accident may have befell him), we will likely be looking at names of working class man.
If we are looking for a suspect from a better millieu (even living in the neighbourhood of Whitchapel) he probably would have been helped in his home. In this case only death certificates can help, IF indeed he died of a SUPPOSED wound OR accident.
Cheers,
Jill (do they still use this greeting form?)
Sunday, 18 July 1999 - 12:38 pm
Thank you for contributing your expert medical opinion. I spoke in the Casebook chat room to Stewart Evans early yesterday morning and he personally doubted that Jack could have contracted septicemia from fecal matter. I am glad that you have confirmed that such a scenario could have happened, although of course we cannot thus far be sure that it did.
As I noted earlier, "Taber's Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary" 9th edition (Philadelphia: F. A. Davis Company, 1963), p. S-27, states that septicemia can be occur "from an infected wound even of a trivial character."
In other words, an open wound of any size would have been sufficient to allow entry of bacteria from the victims' feces.
As others have mentioned, Jack need not have cut himself. He could have incurred a small open wound during the attack on Kelly. Since some of the wounds on Mary Jane Kelly's hands seem to be defense wounds, she might have scratched him during his attack. Jack may thus indeed have needed to cauterize his wound, causing him to build up the fire in order to heat up something to use to cauterize the wound.
Chris George
Sunday, 18 July 1999 - 01:16 pm
I shudder. When I raised my children I used cloth diapers with pins. If I had pricked myself while changing a dirty diaper . . . It's a wonder it didn't happen to more mommies.
Dr. Villon, not to be indelicate, but could Jack have used the birth canal to guide him to the uterus?
Here's another problem. Is it going to cost mucho denaro to search all those records? I mean is there a fee for looking?
Sunday, 18 July 1999 - 02:11 pm
The diet for patients in hospitals, before the 19th century, existed of beer (with a very low degree of alcohol)instead of water. For the same reason, as I stated in my post of July 15, 4:09 a.m., that the better class drank wine. They gave patients in hospitals beer, because it was cheaper. The wine was only used for medical purposes, such as folklore antiseptic.
Now where did I read some refilled bottles of beer, with gruesome matter, were found in the neighbourhood of the room MJK (If any thruth is in it)?
Jill (Nighty night)
Sunday, 18 July 1999 - 04:53 pm
Sunday, 18 July 1999 - 04:59 pm
Sunday, 18 July 1999 - 05:30 pm
John Sanders (b.1862) was a medical student and son of an Indian Army surgeon.
Early in 1881 was in an Asylum, in 1887 he was recorded as having 'attacks of violence'.
Though it was not made clear whether he was detained in an Asylum throught the critical period of the murders.
He is said to have lived with his mother at 20 Abercorn Place.
A report by Abberline who had been making enquiries into the whereabouts of a John Sanders of 20 Aberdeen Place (?) an insane medical student. were foiled by the story told them by the woman who said her son had gone abroad.
The Police were on the hunt for 3 insane medical students during the period of the murders, two were evidently traced, but one eluded the Police.
Regards, Jon.
Sunday, 18 July 1999 - 08:42 pm
Wolf.