The kidney removal of Catherine Eddowes.

[GBinOz]

Hi George,

The point I was trying to make, and apparently failed, was that butcher/slaughterers were eviscerating hour after hour, day after day, must have developed specific techniques for this, and we have no way of knowing what they were. There is no reason to suppose that they were not similar to surgical techniques developed later. Would a bucher have deviated around the navel - probably yes! How can we know how an experienced slaughterer might have removed a heart. For what it is worth, I am not convinced totally that Kelly was a victim of JtR.

We don't know just how skilled JtR was, nor do we know what his exact purpose was - was he just getting a thrill from cutting a body up, was he after a specific organ, or did he just take a trophy. We cannot know.

We may know these medical procedures to which you refer, but we have no knowledge whatever of slaughterers' evisceration techniques, but they must have existed.

Hi Doc,

I think that we have to acknowledge that a butcher's aim was to eviscerate a body to attain a carcass with the innards being separated for later processing for by products. I struggle to see how this relates to medical dissections. Why would a butcher commit to the time involved in carefully extracting the heart from the pericardium. The entire innards, including heart and, in the case of a female animal, the reproductive organs, as well as the bladder, would have ended up on the floor. There would have been no intricate procedure involved- that just wasn't economical.

For what it is worth, I am also not convinced totally that Kelly was a victim of JtR, but I am also not convinced that JtR was a single entity.

Cheers, George

[John Wheat]

Hi George,

The point I was trying to make, and apparently failed, was that butcher/slaughterers were eviscerating hour after hour, day after day, must have developed specific techniques for this, and we have no way of knowing what they were. There is no reason to suppose that they were not similar to surgical techniques developed later. Would a bucher have deviated around the navel - probably yes! How can we know how an experienced slaughterer might have removed a heart. For what it is worth, I am not convinced totally that Kelly was a victim of JtR.

We don't know just how skilled JtR was, nor do we know what his exact purpose was - was he just getting a thrill from cutting a body up, was he after a specific organ, or did he just take a trophy. We cannot know.

We may know these medical procedures to which you refer, but we have no knowledge whatever of slaughterers' evisceration techniques, but they must have existed.

Great post. I might add that a lot of serial killers begin by killing animals and it would be perfectly possible that Jack eviscerated the animals he'd killed so might have been experienced in evisceration before the C5. In short I don't think ruling any suspect in or out due to surgical skill and anatomical knowledge or supposed lack of it is a good idea.