Did he have anatomical knowledge?

[curious4]

Wounds and scars

Interesting Dave.

My wife is going in for a total hysterectomy in a few weeks, we'll see how the incision runs.

Here is a link which shows the midline incision avoiding the umbilicus.
http://www.atlasofpelvicsurgery.com/...hap5sec10.html

Hello Wickerman,

I do hope things go well for your wife. My daughter-in- law had a C-section a few years ago and to my astonishment had no wound at all. According to her, they used internal stitching to close. I was expecting her to have a scar but all you can see is a slightly darker line. Things have moved on a good deal since the LVP, thank goodness.

Best wishes,
Gwyneth

[Observer]

And, I'm sorry, you can't just hack your way through the abdominal contents to the left kidney. If you attempted to do that there would be so much blood and liquid faeces (I'm not talking about the sold faecal contamination caused by removing the descending colon) that it would become quite impossible within a few seconds.

Hi Prosector

Forgive my ignorance, (if it applies) but I was looking at the inquest statement by Dr Brown, and he stated

"The intestines were drawn out to a large extent and placed over the right shoulder -- they were smeared over with some feculent matter. A piece of about two feet was quite detached from the body and placed between the body and the left arm, apparently by design."

If the intestines had been detached from the body wouldn't there have been liquid faeces, and much blood in evidence anyway?

Regards

Observer

[Wickerman]

Thankyou Gwyneth, yes she is a little apprehensive. Ann already had heart surgery a couple of years ago so she may end up with one continuous 'zipper' now right down the middle.

[Observer]

And buttons. Every shirt I've ever owned had a button essentially on top of the navel. He may have skirted the button, thereby skirting the naval.

Hi Errata

Eddowes clothing had plenty of buttons attached, but were the major abdominal cuts performed on bare skin so to speak?

Regards

Observer

[Ben]

I'm a loss to explain a lot of the mass hysteria that this thread has generated. The "anatomical knowledge" debate has always divided students of the Jack the Ripper case, and there have always been experts coming down on one side of the fence or the other. Nick Warren, who believes the ripper used a hatchet on Mary Jane Jelly and that Jeremy Beadle may have hoaxed the Maybrick diary, believes the mutilations evinced anatomical knowledge, whereas the medically trained criminology expert, Richard Whittington-Egan, doesn't think so. Opinion is divided, and that will continue to be the case. I thought this was pretty well established, which is why I was so bemused to see a handful of posters who have been Casebooking longer than I have writing these rather dramatic "Gosh, the scales have fallen from my eyes and I am now a convert!" type of posts. Where have you been, guys? That's assuming that these posts are sincere and not, as I rather suspect in a few cases, written with the intention of antagonizing those who don't subscribe to the "surgical skill" argument and whose "suspects" are not surgically skilled.

The insurmountable problem for some here is that the preponderance of contemporary medical opinion indicates that the perpetrator had little to no anatomical knowledge, let alone surgical skill. The latter was reported by one doctor of one victim - the same doctor who believed Chapman and Eddowes were slain by different people. I refer, of course, to Dr. Phillips, who was one of three out of four doctors present at Eddowes' autopsy who did not believe the mutilations indicated any anatomical skill or knowledge. To summarise, Phillips believed the following:

1) Chapman's killer had surgical skill.

2) Chapman and Eddowes were killed by different people.

3) Eddowes killer was a crude mimic with no skill.

It is necessary, then, for those arguing in favour of "Jack" having surgical skill to cherry pick from Phillips opinions. It would mean discarding 2) and 3) - brushing them under the carpet as inconveniences. Rather difficult to justify championing Phillips as the best of the 1888 docs if you're going to dismiss his most crucial opinions, I would have thought. Better instead to contemplate the question: why, if Phillips was wrong in attributing Eddowes and Chapman to different killers (and wrong about the time of death in the cases of Chapman and Kelly, as most accept that he was) could he not have been equally wrong in attributing so much skill to Chapman's killer?

While we're on the subject, Prosector (and apologies for calling you Prosecutor earlier!), what are we to make of Phillips' fascinating claim that Chapman's pelvic organs were secured with "one sweep of the knife"? The womb, as you know, is attached to other bodily organs in two places, so how did he manage to cut both attachments with one sweep? And did this "one sweep" really intend to take two thirds of the bladder with him? (and remember, the conditions were considerably lighter than in Mitre Square at 1:40am). What are we to make of the killer's botched attempt to remove the head too?

Phillips is perhaps the only doctor associated with the ripper case who is demonstrably incorrect in certain key instances, and while Bond's reputation is impugned and the doctor himself tarred as an "unusual" character purely because he took his own life, it is his views on the number of victims attributed to the same killer that informs the judgment of most students of the case, and that includes those pushing for "surgical skill". For these theorists, it is necessary for Phillips to wear the white hat and Bond the black one, and yet when it comes to deciding which women were killed by Jack, they go with Bond, and reject Phillips. Interesting.

Bond was the highest profile doctor associated with the ripper case, and had his work published. His expertise was specifically sought (he was brought in from A Division), and not for any of the crap conspiracy theories I've heard in the past - i.e. that Anderson wanted support for a Kosminski theory he didn't even have yet - but because his judgment was particularly valued. He conducted Kelly's autopsy and examined the reports on the other victims, on the basis of which he concluded that the perpetrator had no anatomical knowledge, not even that of a butcher. The bizarre objection to this appears to be that Bond was working from reports, as opposed to conducting the autopsies himself in most cases, but unless the other doctors withheld information or were otherwise incompetent report-makers, this was just as sufficient. Indeed, working from written reports is precisely what Prosector has been doing on the basis of having seen none of the victims in the flesh. So we nullify that objection completely.

As I mentioned previously, four doctors attended the Eddowes autopsy and only one of them detected any anatomical knowledge. He was also the only one of the four to arrive at the conclusion that the killer had deliberately targeted specific organs. I notice some people have drastically misinterpreted Dr. Sequeira's evidence, but when he said he did not believe the killer had any "design" on any specific organ, he most assuredly meant that he believed the extracted organs were alighted upon as a result of fumbling around for something of interest. This is the interpretation favoured by ripper authorities Philip Sugden and Martin Fido, and it is the correct one. He was certainly not offering commentary on what the killer expected to with it thereafter, as that was not his area of expertise. And let's not pooh-pooh or infantalise Dr. Sequeira either. There is nothing to suggest he was any less competent than his more senior colleagues. He was the first doctor on the scene of the Mitre Square crime, and his assessment that the killer could have completed his inexpert mutilations in around three minutes is most compatible with the evidence of Lawende, who saw Eddowes and her presumed killer not ten minutes prior to the discovery of the former's body.

I have spoken to a number of medical expert friends of mine (and whose names I'm not going to provide on a public message board - people can believe me or not). They don't agree that the removal of the intestines is remotely difficult, but they fully agree that the act of grabbing and pulling would expose the location mesentry in order to cut it and thus remove the intestines from the abdominal cavity. Sinch. Once the intestines and uterus are out of the way, the kidneys, I am emphatically assured, are certainly not "impossible" to alight upon as a result of determined fumbling around. They are encases in fat, not concrete, and were located somewhere within the tiny frame of a small woman's abdominal cavity. He wasn't exactly bombarded with options of places to fumble around in. Forget surgery for a moment - simple mathematics and logic dictates that anything can be "found" in such a small area, and Drs. Phillips, Sequeira and Saunders evidently recognised as much when they surveyed Eddowes' injuries.

Remember that a lot of mutilating, eviserating serial killers engage in cannibalism as opposed to basic trophy-taking, and our killer may have been familiar with what a kidney looks like simply from eating offal - pigs kidneys and the like. The working class poor of the district would have been well used to it, with the "choicer" cuts of meat being beyond their price range.

While I don't accuse anyone here necessarily, I have in the past tended to view the adherence to the "surgical skill" theory as a form of titillation; a total refusal to accept that the most famous uncaught criminal in history might just be a working class, nondescript local. A preference for a surgically-skilled ripper, which involves ignoring the majority-endorsed medical opinion at the time, as well as a lot of cherry-picking of the type I've described in the forgoing, seems to me to be symptomatic of this.

All the best,
Ben

[The Good Michael]

Ben,

I agree that Philips could have been wrong about many things. Medical knowledge was limited enough and these murders were rare enough, that no one could have all the answers. We now know that Kelly's time of death can be debated even down to as late as 8-9 AM, and reasonably so, as an example.

There should be no argument that the murder of at least some of the victims had anatomical knowledge. That is completely different from surgical skill, but a little knowledge, a good blade, and some elbow grease, and we have an efficient killer. Efficiency comes from experience. Experience comes from either doing a lot of killing in this fashion, watching a lot of killing in this fashion, or being involved in an occupation that allows one to gain such knowledge. As I've said, many possibilities there, surgeon, feldscher, student, avid reader with issues, slaughterman, farmer, midwife...pretty endless, these possibilities.

Mike

[Hunter]

I presume animals have belly buttons (of course lol), would a hunter cut though it, or go round, I wonder. Of course there would be nothing to stop a hunter also having checked out the hospital dissecting rooms.

A hunter would cut down the middle as it would not be as pronounced as it is in humans. Plus, on female game/farm animals the mammary glands lay on each side and offer more resistance.

[curious4]

Innards and offal

I'm a loss to explain a lot of the mass hysteria that this thread has generated. The "anatomical knowledge" debate has always divided students of the Jack the Ripper case, and there have always been experts coming down on one side of the fence or the other. Nick Warren, who believes the ripper used a hatchet on Mary Jane Jelly and that Jeremy Beadle may have hoaxed the Maybrick diary, believes the mutilations evinced anatomical knowledge, whereas the medically trained criminology expert, Richard Whittington-Egan, doesn't think so. Opinion is divided, and that will continue to be the case. I thought this was pretty well established, which is why I was so bemused to see a handful of posters who have been Casebooking longer than I have writing these rather dramatic "Gosh, the scales have fallen from my eyes and I am now a convert!" type of posts. Where have you been, guys? That's assuming that these posts are sincere and not, as I rather suspect in a few cases, written with the intention of antagonizing those who don't subscribe to the "surgical skill" argument and whose "suspects" are not surgically skilled.

The insurmountable problem for some here is that the preponderance of contemporary medical opinion indicates that the perpetrator had little to no anatomical knowledge, let alone surgical skill. The latter was reported by one doctor of one victim - the same doctor who believed Chapman and Eddowes were slain by different people. I refer, of course, to Dr. Phillips, who was one of three out of four doctors present at Eddowes' autopsy who did not believe the mutilations indicated any anatomical skill or knowledge. To summarise, Phillips believed the following:

1) Chapman's killer had surgical skill.

2) Chapman and Eddowes were killed by different people.

3) Eddowes killer was a crude mimic with no skill.

It is necessary, then, for those arguing in favour of "Jack" having surgical skill to cherry pick from Phillips opinions. It would mean discarding 2) and 3) - brushing them under the carpet as inconveniences. Rather difficult to justify championing Phillips as the best of the 1888 docs if you're going to dismiss his most crucial opinions, I would have thought. Better instead to contemplate the question: why, if Phillips was wrong in attributing Eddowes and Chapman to different killers (and wrong about the time of death in the cases of Chapman and Kelly, as most accept that he was) could he not have been equally wrong in attributing so much skill to Chapman's killer?

While we're on the subject, Prosector (and apologies for calling you Prosecutor earlier!), what are we to make of Phillips' fascinating claim that Chapman's pelvic organs were secured with "one sweep of the knife"? The womb, as you know, is attached to other bodily organs in two places, so how did he manage to cut both attachments with one sweep? And did this "one sweep" really intend to take two thirds of the bladder with him? (and remember, the conditions were considerably lighter than in Mitre Square at 1:40am). What are we to make of the killer's botched attempt to remove the head too?

Phillips is perhaps the only doctor associated with the ripper case who is demonstrably incorrect in certain key instances, and while Bond's reputation is impugned and the doctor himself tarred as an "unusual" character purely because he took his own life, it is his views on the number of victims attributed to the same killer that informs the judgment of most students of the case, and that includes those pushing for "surgical skill". For these theorists, it is necessary for Phillips to wear the white hat and Bond the black one, and yet when it comes to deciding which women were killed by Jack, they go with Bond, and reject Phillips. Interesting.

Bond was the highest profile doctor associated with the ripper case, and had his work published. His expertise was specifically sought (he was brought in from A Division), and not for any of the crap conspiracy theories I've heard in the past - i.e. that Anderson wanted support for a Kosminski theory he didn't even have yet - but because his judgment was particularly valued. He conducted Kelly's autopsy and examined the reports on the other victims, on the basis of which he concluded that the perpetrator had no anatomical knowledge, not even that of a butcher. The bizarre objection to this appears to be that Bond was working from reports, as opposed to conducting the autopsies himself in most cases, but unless the other doctors withheld information or were otherwise incompetent report-makers, this was just as sufficient. Indeed, working from written reports is precisely what Prosector has been doing on the basis of having seen none of the victims in the flesh. So we nullify that objection completely.

As I mentioned previously, four doctors attended the Eddowes autopsy and only one of them detected any anatomical knowledge. He was also the only one of the four to arrive at the conclusion that the killer had deliberately targeted specific organs. I notice some people have drastically misinterpreted Dr. Sequeira's evidence, but when he said he did not believe the killer had any "design" on any specific organ, he most assuredly meant that he believed the extracted organs were alighted upon as a result of fumbling around for something of interest. This is the interpretation favoured by ripper authorities Philip Sugden and Martin Fido, and it is the correct one. He was certainly not offering commentary on what the killer expected to with it thereafter, as that was not his area of expertise. And let's not pooh-pooh or infantalise Dr. Sequeira either. There is nothing to suggest he was any less competent than his more senior colleagues. He was the first doctor on the scene of the Mitre Square crime, and his assessment that the killer could have completed his inexpert mutilations in around three minutes is most compatible with the evidence of Lawende, who saw Eddowes and her presumed killer not ten minutes prior to the discovery of the former's body.

I have spoken to a number of medical expert friends of mine (and whose names I'm not going to provide on a public message board - people can believe me or not). They don't agree that the removal of the intestines is remotely difficult, but they fully agree that the act of grabbing and pulling would expose the location mesentry in order to cut it and thus remove the intestines from the abdominal cavity. Sinch. Once the intestines and uterus are out of the way, the kidneys, I am emphatically assured, are certainly not "impossible" to alight upon as a result of determined fumbling around. They are encases in fat, not concrete, and were located somewhere within the tiny frame of a small woman's abdominal cavity. He wasn't exactly bombarded with options of places to fumble around in. Forget surgery for a moment - simple mathematics and logic dictates that anything can be "found" in such a small area, and Drs. Phillips, Sequeira and Saunders evidently recognised as much when they surveyed Eddowes' injuries.

Remember that a lot of mutilating, eviserating serial killers engage in cannibalism as opposed to basic trophy-taking, and our killer may have been familiar with what a kidney looks like simply from eating offal - pigs kidneys and the like. The working class poor of the district would have been well used to it, with the "choicer" cuts of meat being beyond their price range.

While I don't accuse anyone here necessarily, I have in the past tended to view the adherence to the "surgical skill" theory as a form of titillation; a total refusal to accept that the most famous uncaught criminal in history might just be a working class, nondescript local. A preference for a surgically-skilled ripper, which involves ignoring the majority-endorsed medical opinion at the time, as well as a lot of cherry-picking of the type I've described in the forgoing, seems to me to be symptomatic of this.

All the best,
Ben

Hello Ben,


Not just the working class poor. Kidneys were served to the posh - for breakfast, and Mrs Beeton has them as a supper dish as well.

Cheers,
C4

[Hunter]

Hi Ben,

To summarise, Phillips believed the following:
1) Chapman's killer had surgical skill.
2) Chapman and Eddowes were killed by different people.
3) Eddowes killer was a crude mimic with no skill.

Perhaps you could provide a quote from Mr. Phillips stating that he believed Eddowes and Chapman were killed by different people and that he thought Eddowes was a crude mimic with no skill.

...I notice some people have drastically misinterpreted Dr. Sequeira's evidence, but when he said he did not believe the killer had any "design" on any specific organ, he most assuredly meant that he believed the extracted organs were alighted upon as a result of fumbling around for something of interest...

Sequeira was responding to the controversy surrounding Wynne Baxter's anatomical specimen theory, just as Brown stated that Eddowes' uterus would be of no use as such. That's what the questioning by Mr. Crawford was about and what 'no design' meant. None of the medicos present suggested that the murderer was fumbling around for something of interest. If one killer was responsible for the murders involving organ extractions, it would be a remarkable coincidence that the same organ was extracted in all three cases for any other reason than that this specific organ was targeted for some reason.

I agree that Sequeira's testimony has been misinterpreted... and still is because Ripperologists haven't considered other circumstances happening at the time.

[Wickerman]

I see superficial criticisms continue to be employed in an attempt to cloud the issue.

What often is overlooked is the fact that Dr Phillips, only 5 days previous, had been asked to offer an opinion on a body at Gateshead which had clearly been identified as a crude imitation of the Whitechapel murderer's technique.
This no doubt was on his mind when suddenly faced with the murdered body of Catherine Eddowes.

[Hunter]

I have no doubt that was on Phillips' mind, Jon, and his long time assistant reiterated that concern to an East London Observer reporter as late as 1910. At the time, he had no inclination of someone who could possibly kill repetitively and not for the usual motives. They were all treading new ground here.

The Kelly murder, I believe, altered a lot of opinions. Even Percy Clark still had a photo of Kelly's mutilated body to reference to the reporter. And even Clark stated that the murders evidenced no medical skill. This was Phillips' right hand man.

Still, we do not know which murders Phillips attributed to the same hand. He obviously didn't think all were, but he never specified which ones, despite assumptions made by others.

As far as Phillips' opinion on the Eddowes murder, I suggest looking at Swanson's Nov. 6 report.

[Errata]

Hi Errata

Eddowes clothing had plenty of buttons attached, but were the major abdominal cuts performed on bare skin so to speak?

Regards

Observer

To be frank, I don't know. Theres no mention of her tops being cut through. Which certainly lends itself to the idea that he didn't do that. But the skirt cuts are ridiculously long, and against the grain, so he's working to make these ten inch cuts. And her abdominal incision is a fright. I mean it looks like she got mauled by dogs, and I don't know how that happens on bare skin. And theres this random cut from the hip down through the labia, which looks like a skip. So if it's a skip, that means he had to hit something his knife skipped off of, and if not buttons I don't know what. And victorian fashions are very fitted, so even a third hand bodice five sizes too large is not going to be pushed up on the ribs, so then he's unbuttoning everything which seems kind of insane. So with the whole list of things that are cut put out in her inquest, the assumption is that's a complete list, but it kind of reads like a list of cuts that that weren't related to the actual mutilation. Like, those are the cuts that did not translate onto the flesh. And theres no mention of popped buttons, despite the mention of shoe buttons, and you'd think a guy trying to open this clothing in a hurry would pop some buttons.

So I don't know. it's one of those thing that reads kind of odd so I wonder if I'm reading it in the right context.

[Cogidubnus]

Were not a number of buttons found in the clotted blood that had pooled beneath the body? I seem to recall that from Dr Brown's testimony...

All the best

Dave

[curious4]

Buttons

I think they were boot buttons, weren't they?

Gwyneth/C4

[Cogidubnus]

I think they were boot buttons, weren't they?

Hi Gwynneth

In Dr Brown's testimony it just says buttons I think...but I seem to recall that she was wearing mens lace-up boots and they don't generally have buttons...

Much of the clothing was cut in front too so if there were buttons in the way they probably got sprayed about!

All the best

Dave