Lusk Letter sent to George Lusk of the vigilante committee

[Ben]

Hi Christine,

I'm decidedly undecided when it comes to the question of Jack being responsible for the letter (or not), but on the author's literacy levels I tend to be swayed by the views of document examiner Thomas J. Mann whose experience led him to believe that a semi-literate author was a better bet than an educated person trying to disguise his hand.

On a tangential note, I believe the killer possessed inate intelligence without being educated.

Best regards,
Ben

[Christine]

Hi Ben.

Hi Christine,



What about a Jack who really couldn't spell or write neatly?

Regards,
Ben

Diana's post, #69, a few pages back, summarizes the spelling problems far better than I could. The poor handwriting is also inconsistent. Whoever wrote that letter had lessons in fancy handwriting, and his teacher would have made him write neatly. Of course he could have had a stroke or similar problem, but it all looks suspicious.

I can see an educated Jack sending it off saying "Hee hee, I'll make them think I'm stupid, and crazy enough to eat a woman's kidney when actually I'm smart and completely sane!"

[Dan Norder]

but wasnt there some indication that the kidney section showed Brights Disease onset..

We don't have the original doctor's notes from the examination of the kidney, so we don't know that. Major Smith later claimed a doctor who examined it said it had Bright's Disease, but Smith also claimed, for example, that the artery attached had been cut in a specific way to match the artery part left in the body, which we know was not true because the kidney's artery had actually been trimmed up.

We also know that Smith said a great many things that turned out to be false.

[Ben]

Hi Christine,

Maybe it was Jack who pretended he couldn't spell or write neatly

What about a Jack who really couldn't spell or write neatly?

Regards,
Ben

[Christine]

Well, it wouldn't just be deaths due to Bright's disease (which is actually now several different diseases, or, if you prefer, a symptom of several different diseases). It would include people who died for any reason who had Bright's disease. And I'm sure it was more common then, as pretty much all infections were more common. If it were truly that uncommon, then the kidney would have been traceable.

But the key point is that even if these medical students, or mortuary workers, or whatever they were, only saw once case a year, they probably didn't set out to find a kidney. They had a kidney, and they decided to use it. So while it is a weird coincidence, if you want to start talking about odds, you have to look at other possible coincidences that could lead to a "good" practical joke, like sending Lusk a heart, or a uterus, or some other strange thing I can't even think of, or even playing a non-Ripper joke on Lusk, or playing some sort of Ripper joke that didn't even involve Lusk.

Personally, I'm torn on the Lusk letter. It has "bad joke" written all over it, but it's so ghastly that I can't imagine anyone remotely normal doing such a thing. Maybe it was Jack who pretended he couldn't spell or write neatly. Of course my attitude may be colored by the fact that nowadays the kidney would be tested and the police would quickly know if it was Eddowes or not, and if it wasn't, the kidney would be traced and the hoaxer would be lucky if being expelled from medical school was the worse thing that happened. I don't think we can conclude much from the scarcity of diseased human kidneys though.

Well, I found some modern stats for Nephritis mortalities, which is what Brights Disease is called now, and in 2000 in the United States, 37,251 deaths were attributed to Nephritis, representing 1.5 % of the Total Deaths recorded.

Less common than Death by Influenza and Pneumonia, Diabetes, Heart aand Lung conditions, and slightly more than Septicimia, with 31, 224 attributed Deaths that year.

The source was the CDC/NCHS, National Vital Statistics System. The Census Bureau says that on April 1, 2000, the population of the United States was 281,421,906.

Now the population of London in 1881 was 3,816,483, but Ive yet to find the number of deaths recorded, or causes.

But even these preliminary findings of modern case fatalities indicates it is "uncommon" at 1.5 % of the total deaths. How uncommon in 1888,.... I dont know yet.

Cheers.

This is another example of weird coincidence and misleading statistics. It's most likely that some medical student was dissecting a woman, saw that she had Bright's disease and got the bright idea (pun intended) of sending it off to Lusk. I have no idea how often a medical student would see such a kidney, but of course if he hadn't seen one, he might have chosen a uterus or heart or just chosen to play some other sort of a prank.

There are a lot of weird coincidences throughout this series, why should the kidney be any different? Good point.

But, if lets say the average medical student of that period rarely if ever disected a freshly excised kidney with Brights Disease....a male or female student....then we have a coincidence that is not easily dismissable. Particularly with the fact that both sample and missing organs were Left.

Cheers Christine.

[Christine]

Since only Christine addressed the issue of Brights Disease, am I correct in assuming that the contention is there is no way to tell if this was a womans or mans short of weighing the sample, measuring its size, and then estimating what the complete kidney might have weighed? As Don mentioned, how do we know they estimated correctly, based on the sample size?

The issue isnt whether its male or female as much as it is whether it could have been Kates or not, IMHO. And that could be suggested by its condition. For example, as Chris said, someone was working with a Brights Disease kidney at approximately the same time as Kates was taken from her. Well, how common was Brights Disease at that time, did students regularly get fresh samples of Brights Disease kidneys to work with? Would it be a coincidence if such a sample did become available to students on almost the same date as Kates was taken?

The estimate of how long it had been out of a body was about two weeks prior to its arrival, so would it be rare to have two Brights Diseased left kidneys in the mix at the same time? How often did students get access to such organs?

Does anyone have a guess?

Best regards all.

This is another example of weird coincidence and misleading statistics. It's most likely that some medical student was dissecting a woman, saw that she had Bright's disease and got the bright idea (pun intended) of sending it off to Lusk. I have no idea how often a medical student would see such a kidney, but of course if he hadn't seen one, he might have chosen a uterus or heart or just chosen to play some other sort of a prank.

[Christine]

I don't know, Christine - but the very fact that there's such a large discrepancy in the sample (i.e. the maximum and minimum values for both male and female kidneys span some 60 grammes) suggests a pair of overlapping slopes than two distinct spikes, one for "male" and the other for "female".

If we were to focus on the two averages, the difference between them isn't much to write home about anyway. There's only an 11g difference between the male and female averages, which is nothing compared to a variation of 58.4g [plus and minus 29.2 around the average] within the female sample alone.

Probably, but this would depend on the size of the samples. A hypothetical bell curve is characterized by three numbers which come down to the average/center location, the height of the bell at the center and the spread of the bell.

The height is basically what percentage of people have an average weight kidney. In this case the weights are recorded to .1 gram, so the height represents what percentage of men have a kidney weight between 177.45 and 177.55 grams.

The spread represents how quickly people fall away from the average. For example, if 1% have an average weight, how many have .1g less or greater than average? (177.6 or 177.4 g) If the answer is .9%, then in a true bell curve, .9 * .9 = .81% will have 177.7 or 177.3 g kidneys.

But a typical range will depend on how many subjects you can look at. The more people you measure, the more outliers you'll find.

In any case, the real question we want to answer is "what are the odds that this was a female kidney?" And we can't, because we don't know the weight, we don't have data from the LVP, and the condition of the kidney made it impossible to even make a good guess.

But clearly there's a large range of overlap, so even a very small kidney is not definitive. Say the study looked at 100 male and 100 female kidneys, and the Lusk kidney was just barely smaller than the smallest male kidney. Ignoring the fact that a LVP kidney would have been smaller and the poor quality of the sample, we can still say that there was a chance of somewhat less than 1% (1 in 100) that this was a male kidney.

But even then it's misleading to say "it's 99% that this was a female" because the kidney itself was not really randomly selected. It either was Eddowes' kidney, or it was selected specifically to match Eddowes' kidney.

I found this reference supposedly from a pathology textbook published in 1901, ...

"The kidneys measure each from 10 to 12 cm in length, from 5 to 5.6 cm in width and 3.38 cm in thickness, the left being slightly larger than the right. The weight, according to Thoma[1], is: for the right kidney, 152 grams in men and 144 grams in women; for the left 164 grams in men and 148 grams in women. Baduel[2] gives the following weights and measures: for the right 110 to 120 grams, and for the left 120 to 130 grams in men, and 110 to 115 grams for the right and 115 to 120 grams for the left in women."

So we do have cause to consider other aspects of the sample and Kates missing kidney....as they were both Left, and Kates Left kidney would have had Brights Disease.

Best regards all.

Since only Christine addressed the issue of Brights Disease, am I correct in assuming that the contention is there is no way to tell if this was a womans or mans short of weighing the sample, measuring its size, and then estimating what the complete kidney might have weighed? As Don mentioned, how do we know they estimated correctly, based on the sample size?

The issue isnt whether its male or female as much as it is whether it could have been Kates or not, IMHO. And that could be suggested by its condition. For example, as Chris said, someone was working with a Brights Disease kidney at approximately the same time as Kates was taken from her. Well, how common was Brights Disease at that time, did students regularly get fresh samples of Brights Disease kidneys to work with? Would it be a coincidence if such a sample did become available to students on almost the same date as Kates was taken?

The estimate of how long it had been out of a body was about two weeks prior to its arrival, so would it be rare to have two Brights Diseased left kidneys in the mix at the same time? How often did students get access to such organs?

Does anyone have a guess?

Best regards all.

[Sam Flynn]

Very nice...I'm still trying to find the original article. I think it's safe to assume that the kidney weight graph does make a bell shape, but was it a skinny bell, or a fat bell?

I don't know, Christine - but the very fact that there's such a large discrepancy in the sample (i.e. the maximum and minimum values for both male and female kidneys span some 60 grammes) suggests a pair of overlapping slopes than two distinct spikes, one for "male" and the other for "female".

If we were to focus on the two averages, the difference between them isn't much to write home about anyway. There's only an 11g difference between the male and female averages, which is nothing compared to a variation of 58.4g [plus and minus 29.2 around the average] within the female sample alone.

[Supe]

AP,

I would hazard (little word play there) a guess that no branch of mathematics causes more misunderstandings than statistics, largely because so much of it is counter-intuitive. But perhaps if you drew for yourself a couple of rough bell curve graphs (sorry Tom W.--no pie charts here either) you would better grasp the amount of overlap between the weight of male and female kidneys.

Beyond that, though, you must consider another niggling little problem with the kidney part sent Lusk. We glibly talk of "arf a kidney" but just what proportion of the whole did it represent? And by what should have Openshaw (or anyone else) have multiplied the weight of the partial kidney to get a weight for the whole? Not having a precise answer could change the estimates by a goodly number of grams and further muddle the male or female kidney conundrum.

I am always surprised how some people expect the rudimentary forensic and pathologic knowledge of 1888 to give precise answers to questions (like time of death) that even today are often rendered as only rough guesses.

Don.

[Sam Flynn]

Sam
are you going for the 3 women with heavier brains then men or the 97?

I'm not talking about "heavier" anything, AP. I'm on about an overlap of two populations whose averages are only 10g apart, but within which there is a variation of 30g either side of those averages within both populations.

Refer to my earlier one and suggest that you imagine two "reds" (representing the averages) being located quite close to gether, with the "ambers" from both populations overlapping each other.

[Christine]

I'm not, AP. You're perhaps misinterpreting what an "exception" really means. Look at the following graph.


-|
-|o
-|o
-|oo
-|ooo
-|oooooo (150g)
-|ooooooo (155g)
-|ooooooooooo (160g)
-|ooooooooooooo (166g)
-|oooooooooooo (170g)
-|ooooooo (175g)
-|oooooo (180g)
-|ooo
-|oo
-|o
-|


The red column in the middle represents the average, but there are significant numbers of data points clustering either side of it, coloured amber, that span a wide range. However, these don't constitute "exceptions" at all. These are no more exceptions than a man of 5'7" would be considered "exceptional" if the average male height in a population were 5'9".

Very nice...I'm still trying to find the original article. I think it's safe to assume that the kidney weight graph does make a bell shape, but was it a skinny bell, or a fat bell?

The women's graph also makes a bell shape. The peak of the woman's graph is two lines higher than the man's graph (10g difference.)

The height of the two graphs is 60g - 65g (12 or 13 lines).

The two top lines (little kidneys 145 down to 137.2) are all female and the three bottom lines (195.6 to 210g) are all male.

If we knew the exact shape of the bells we could calculate the odds that a kidney of a given weight were male or female. But we don't know the weight, and these are modern weights anyhow.