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The Gelsenium Speculation
1/ God rest the poor soul of Elizabeth Stride, the woman remembered infamously as the third canonical victim of the Whitechapel murderer known as Leather Apron For all of her human faults and trespasses against the residence of Whitechapel, one cannot rightly believe that she should perish so gruesomely .
By all accounts, Elizabeth Stride is strolling with a man along Berner Street on the evening of September 30th, 1888. The nature or purpose of the outing is questionable since casual prostitution is listed amongst Elizabeth’s many professions. Popular belief will have it that she, along with the four other canonical victims, will be murdered for this very reason; however, prostitution is a varied industry. Is Elizabeth Stride hooking(social) or escorting(common) this man? The coroner reports the contents of her stomach to be a sparse dinner of potatoes and cheese with some farinaceous powder but no alcohol or ales. Her actions are not bawdy or uproarious. She’s not behaving in a manner that would draw the attention of the PC tonight, earning herself another in a list of trips to the magistrate for public intoxication. The constable’s left to the precision of stamping thru his 30 minute beat. Is the expectation of gifts commonplace for Elizabeth? Regardless, someone has entertained her with small gifts; someone has purchased her a grouping of flowers for her lapel, a packet of sweetmeats, a dinner of cheese and potatoes (possibly?), grapes. And, to everyone residing the night on Berner Street, they seem to be an amicable couple.
{Then, at :30 after the hour (“like clockwork!”), all of the residents of the houses lining Duftfield Yard bring their lanterns out with the purpose of illuminating the four corners. All of the neighbors of Berner Street file into the Education Club, and jostle against the club members for prime locations against the window panes overlooking the yard. Between :30 and :45 past the hour (“like clockwork!”), Long Lizzie receives her final escort… into Duftfield Yard.}
And, the gates are closed.
• [PC Lamb] also had the gates closed and was assisted by Edward Spooner. They were able to close the gates without them touching Stride’s body.
{She is unaware that her death has been fated to be a study in murder. She doesn’t see all the faces pressed against the windows or hear the discussion amongst the apartment dwellers. She can’t because}
… in her final moments, Elizabeth Stride has been poisoned with gelsenium!
Elizabeth has not purposely poisoned herself; she poisoned herself when she ate the cachous that were poisoned for her especially. Were they purchased along with the grapes at Matthew Packer’s grape and candy shop? Eitherway, the coroner will find farinaceous powder in her stomach (Cachous?) as will Catherine Eddowes’ examiner:
• [CE]Dr. Frederick Gordon:”I removed the contents of the stomach… from the cut end partially digested farinaceous food escaped.”
Poisoning by Gelsemium---The drug is a powerful spinal depressant; its most marked action being on the anterior cornus of grey matter in the spinal cord. The drug kills by its action on the respiratory centre of the medulla oblongata. Shortly after the administration of even a moderate dose, the respiration is slowed and is ultimately arrested, this being the cause of death.
Poisonous doses of Gelsemium produce a sensation of languor, relaxation and muscular weakness, which may be followed by paralysis if the dose is sufficiently large. The face becomes anxious, the temperature subnormal, the skin cold and clammy and the pulse rapid and feeble. Dropping of the upper eyelid and lower jaw, internal squint, double vision and dilatation of the pupil are prominent symptoms. The respiration becomes slow and feeble, shallow and irregular, and death occurs from centric respiratory failure, the heart stopping almost simultaneously. Consciousness is usually preserved until late in the poisoning, but may be lost soon after the ingestion of a fatal dose. The effects usually begin in half an hour, but sometimes almost immediately. Death has occurred at periods varying from 1 to 7 1/2 hours.
The treatment of Gelsemium poisoning consists in the prompt evacuation of the stomach by an emetic… and equally important, artificial respiration, aided by the early administration, subcutaneously, of ammonia, strychnine, atropine or digitalis. An allied species, G. elegans (Benth.) of Upper Burma, is used in China as a criminal poison, its effects are very rapid.
GOOGLE: gelsenium poisoning * gelsenium therapy * gelsenium alkaloids * Arthur Conan Doyle gelsenium
The strength of the poison will ensure that Elizabeth has no pulse in her body (just like the other women). Her blood will spill less when he cuts through her. She is dying as she lay with one pitiful exception; the filth is actually strangling her to hasten the death. Leather Apron cuts off her neckerchief and…
(There is applause from inside of the IWEC who make social with song. Leather Apron stands before the ovation and informs his audience that, unfortunately, he must depart because he has another engagement beginning (“like clockwork”) at :30 after the hour… much like the performance of Mary Ann Nichols and Annie Chapman before this girl. He is escorted to Commercial Street heading in the direction of London City. The gratified neighbors return to their prior existences like characters out of a Hawthorne story, awaiting the clockwork stamp of the policeman stamping his methodical beat.)
2/ a/ Gelsenium was inspired when Arthur Conan Doyle was added to my possible suspects (the deerstalker hat & bowler). Gelsenium Sempervirens (“Yellow Jasmine”) is famous in the decades surrounding 1888. The plant’s effect and nature have been profesionally discussed in French and British medical journals, Dr. Roberts Bartholow* writes Gelsenium Therapy in 1878, and M. Holmes will publish Du Gelsenium Sempervirens in Annuaire de Therapeutique, 1877 p.41 [FRENCH]. Arther Conan Doyle publishes his experimentation with gelsemium in 1879. The Indians knew of [gelsenium], and called [it] “bebo-sito (“the glass coffin”) because the poisoned person remained fully conscious with open eyes and laid stiff and motionless (Dr. Martin Schiegel, hpathy.com). More recently Alexander Perepilichnyy was suspected to have been poisoned by gelsenium elegans. Searching the alkaline properties of gelsenium, there is mention of it containing a bluish-tinted alkaloid(?) as well as producing clots; I remember reading a mention of a bluish serum fluid by one of the coroners or doctors or constables on the casebook website as well as clotting in the heart.
b/ Arthur Conan Doyle described his experience with gelsemium:
After taking 9mL, Conan Doyle “suffered from severe frontal headache, with diarrhoea and general lassitude”. After 12mL – the highest dose he managed – he reported “the diarrhea was so persistent and prostrating that I must stop at {12mL]. I felt great depression and a severe frontal headache. The pulse was still normal, but weak.”
I mention this point because:
[CE] Dr. Frederick Gordon Brown: The intestines were drawn out to a large extent… they were smeared over with some feculent matter… about 2 feet of the colon was cut away. The sigmoid flexure was invaginated into the rectum very tightly.
c/ With gelsenium, the method could be reversed. A sadistic ----- like Leather Apron would be jollified cutting her face and abdomen first or second, not her neck. She is in the “glass coffin”, prostrate on the ground. Her final awareness, if any remains, would be her face being mutilated, her ear being sliced, and her abdomen being butchered. Then, finally, “mercifully”, her throat is cut.
With gelsemium, Leather Apron can carry and position a body… if the dosage is adequate.
d/ Now, in rough comparison, the women die as though they JUST succumbed to being murdered. We are expected to rationalize their deaths stupidly, it seems, because they are women… as though they died with their arms at their sides. Consistently missing from the Post Mortem report for the canonical five is: broken fingers or nails, scratching, or any signs of fatal abuse prior to her mutilation. Their manner of clothing is neat and proper AND NOT the disheveled mess any detective would expect to encounter if it was explained that this woman had a knife-slashing murderer on top of her; however, in retrospect, forest/trees. Still, any of these women could have ------ Leather Apron! Something be said about their temperment, “Tim, this is lovely, ain’t it.”
So that leaves us open to many stupid possibilities and few rational probabilities. Of the rational: 1) Leather Apron needs to be more than one person; and/or 2) poison.
I followed poison because:
[ES]Israel Schwartz: “the woman screamed three times, but not loudly.”
[ES] Post Mortem. “The heart was small, the left ventricle firmly contracted, and the right slightly so.. the right ventricle was full of dark clots.”
[ES] Dr. Frederic Blackwell: “The neck and chest were quite warm, as were also the legs, and the face was slightly warm. The hands were cold… The appearance of the face was quite placid. The mouth was slightly open.”
[MAN] Dr. R. R. Llewellyn. “there was a wine glass and a half of blood in the gutter at her side” but “she had been killed where she lay”.
[LA}The “Dear Boss” letter. “{Chapman’s blood] went thick like glue and I cant use it”
e/ Confirmation of Gelsemiun Poisoning by Targeted Analysis of Toxic Gelsemium Alkaloids in Urine (Chi-Kong Lai and Yan-Wo Chan, Princes Margaret Hospital, China)
{CE) Dr. Frederick Gordon Brown: The gall bladder contained bile.
3/ Pleurisy, also called pleuritis, is a painful inflammation of the tissue that line the lungs and chest cavity. It can make breathing extremely painful. Pleurisy is also a word that appears many times on this website. At the time of the murders, gelsenium was a treatment for pleuritis and pneumonia. This is important because Dr. Thomas Bond reports on the Whitehall Torso Mystery that: “at some point the woman suffered from severe pleurisy… she did not die of suffocation or drowning.” Does a connection between gelsenium dosing and “severe pleurisy” exist?
4/ I am ignorant of how gelsemium was hyded or hawked in the East End. I wouldn’t begin to know how it would be obtained, or what privilege would be needed in order to obtain it. Was it a causal ward remedy? A barracks prescription? Peddled snake oil? That generation’s cabinet painkiller? Less social than cocaine, maybe, more common than morphine… was it street pharmed? In short, how did it fit into Whitechapel society? Since so many of the speculations gear towards the conspiratorial, it’s hard to gauge whether or not Leather Apron could have been a dope pusher. With syphilis and psychology driving the motivation, its hard to determine if any part of these acts could have been dark-alley politics.
5/ I am not absolutely certain how Elizabeth Stride was woodbined. I imagine that it was injested. Many of the victims had food in their stomach (ie. fish and chips, meat and potatoes) at the time of their autopsy. However, alternative methods of poisoning (eg. topical treatment, sniffed like cocaine, “Mickey Finned”, injected into the neck, smoked from a clay pipe) cannot be dismissed. Knowing the physical properties of the drug would help. Googling ‘gelsenium poisoning symptoms’ delivers sites that expand on the affect of treatments placed directly to the eyes. I did not read anywhere of the reported affect when placed on the skin. In Dr. Frederick Gordon Brown’s post mortem report on Elizabeth Stride, he writes, “the hands and arms were bronzed.” Is this an affect of gelsenium on the skin?
{Or, like Arthur Conan Doyle, could there be a distinct probability that Leather Apron is a Hyde user of gelsenium too? Reports of Leather Apron describe him as having blotchy skin and sandy-colored/no eyelashes. Ada Wilson describes her assailant as a man with a surnburnt face. Are these the affects of gelsenium abuse?
• [Wikipedia] All parts of this plant contain toxic strychnine-related alkaloids… The sap may cause skin irritation in sensitive individuals.
{OR the blotchy skin may be the result of the occupational hazard of hop picking. Wikipedia lists dermatitis (eczema) sometimes resulting from harvesting hops, and some workers “suffer some type of skin lesions on the face, hands, and legs.” [An online article on a pagan ritual associated with hop picking at the turn of the century offers a small expanse on the seasonal trek to Kent. Should you read the article, maybe you will come to the same wry sense of wonder after you read how many considered hop picking to be a “holiday” of sorts… “and the pickers sang songs and even sent friends postcards”.}
1/ God rest the poor soul of Elizabeth Stride, the woman remembered infamously as the third canonical victim of the Whitechapel murderer known as Leather Apron For all of her human faults and trespasses against the residence of Whitechapel, one cannot rightly believe that she should perish so gruesomely .
By all accounts, Elizabeth Stride is strolling with a man along Berner Street on the evening of September 30th, 1888. The nature or purpose of the outing is questionable since casual prostitution is listed amongst Elizabeth’s many professions. Popular belief will have it that she, along with the four other canonical victims, will be murdered for this very reason; however, prostitution is a varied industry. Is Elizabeth Stride hooking(social) or escorting(common) this man? The coroner reports the contents of her stomach to be a sparse dinner of potatoes and cheese with some farinaceous powder but no alcohol or ales. Her actions are not bawdy or uproarious. She’s not behaving in a manner that would draw the attention of the PC tonight, earning herself another in a list of trips to the magistrate for public intoxication. The constable’s left to the precision of stamping thru his 30 minute beat. Is the expectation of gifts commonplace for Elizabeth? Regardless, someone has entertained her with small gifts; someone has purchased her a grouping of flowers for her lapel, a packet of sweetmeats, a dinner of cheese and potatoes (possibly?), grapes. And, to everyone residing the night on Berner Street, they seem to be an amicable couple.
{Then, at :30 after the hour (“like clockwork!”), all of the residents of the houses lining Duftfield Yard bring their lanterns out with the purpose of illuminating the four corners. All of the neighbors of Berner Street file into the Education Club, and jostle against the club members for prime locations against the window panes overlooking the yard. Between :30 and :45 past the hour (“like clockwork!”), Long Lizzie receives her final escort… into Duftfield Yard.}
And, the gates are closed.
• [PC Lamb] also had the gates closed and was assisted by Edward Spooner. They were able to close the gates without them touching Stride’s body.
{She is unaware that her death has been fated to be a study in murder. She doesn’t see all the faces pressed against the windows or hear the discussion amongst the apartment dwellers. She can’t because}
… in her final moments, Elizabeth Stride has been poisoned with gelsenium!
Elizabeth has not purposely poisoned herself; she poisoned herself when she ate the cachous that were poisoned for her especially. Were they purchased along with the grapes at Matthew Packer’s grape and candy shop? Eitherway, the coroner will find farinaceous powder in her stomach (Cachous?) as will Catherine Eddowes’ examiner:
• [CE]Dr. Frederick Gordon:”I removed the contents of the stomach… from the cut end partially digested farinaceous food escaped.”
Poisoning by Gelsemium---The drug is a powerful spinal depressant; its most marked action being on the anterior cornus of grey matter in the spinal cord. The drug kills by its action on the respiratory centre of the medulla oblongata. Shortly after the administration of even a moderate dose, the respiration is slowed and is ultimately arrested, this being the cause of death.
Poisonous doses of Gelsemium produce a sensation of languor, relaxation and muscular weakness, which may be followed by paralysis if the dose is sufficiently large. The face becomes anxious, the temperature subnormal, the skin cold and clammy and the pulse rapid and feeble. Dropping of the upper eyelid and lower jaw, internal squint, double vision and dilatation of the pupil are prominent symptoms. The respiration becomes slow and feeble, shallow and irregular, and death occurs from centric respiratory failure, the heart stopping almost simultaneously. Consciousness is usually preserved until late in the poisoning, but may be lost soon after the ingestion of a fatal dose. The effects usually begin in half an hour, but sometimes almost immediately. Death has occurred at periods varying from 1 to 7 1/2 hours.
The treatment of Gelsemium poisoning consists in the prompt evacuation of the stomach by an emetic… and equally important, artificial respiration, aided by the early administration, subcutaneously, of ammonia, strychnine, atropine or digitalis. An allied species, G. elegans (Benth.) of Upper Burma, is used in China as a criminal poison, its effects are very rapid.
GOOGLE: gelsenium poisoning * gelsenium therapy * gelsenium alkaloids * Arthur Conan Doyle gelsenium
The strength of the poison will ensure that Elizabeth has no pulse in her body (just like the other women). Her blood will spill less when he cuts through her. She is dying as she lay with one pitiful exception; the filth is actually strangling her to hasten the death. Leather Apron cuts off her neckerchief and…
(There is applause from inside of the IWEC who make social with song. Leather Apron stands before the ovation and informs his audience that, unfortunately, he must depart because he has another engagement beginning (“like clockwork”) at :30 after the hour… much like the performance of Mary Ann Nichols and Annie Chapman before this girl. He is escorted to Commercial Street heading in the direction of London City. The gratified neighbors return to their prior existences like characters out of a Hawthorne story, awaiting the clockwork stamp of the policeman stamping his methodical beat.)
2/ a/ Gelsenium was inspired when Arthur Conan Doyle was added to my possible suspects (the deerstalker hat & bowler). Gelsenium Sempervirens (“Yellow Jasmine”) is famous in the decades surrounding 1888. The plant’s effect and nature have been profesionally discussed in French and British medical journals, Dr. Roberts Bartholow* writes Gelsenium Therapy in 1878, and M. Holmes will publish Du Gelsenium Sempervirens in Annuaire de Therapeutique, 1877 p.41 [FRENCH]. Arther Conan Doyle publishes his experimentation with gelsemium in 1879. The Indians knew of [gelsenium], and called [it] “bebo-sito (“the glass coffin”) because the poisoned person remained fully conscious with open eyes and laid stiff and motionless (Dr. Martin Schiegel, hpathy.com). More recently Alexander Perepilichnyy was suspected to have been poisoned by gelsenium elegans. Searching the alkaline properties of gelsenium, there is mention of it containing a bluish-tinted alkaloid(?) as well as producing clots; I remember reading a mention of a bluish serum fluid by one of the coroners or doctors or constables on the casebook website as well as clotting in the heart.
b/ Arthur Conan Doyle described his experience with gelsemium:
After taking 9mL, Conan Doyle “suffered from severe frontal headache, with diarrhoea and general lassitude”. After 12mL – the highest dose he managed – he reported “the diarrhea was so persistent and prostrating that I must stop at {12mL]. I felt great depression and a severe frontal headache. The pulse was still normal, but weak.”
I mention this point because:
[CE] Dr. Frederick Gordon Brown: The intestines were drawn out to a large extent… they were smeared over with some feculent matter… about 2 feet of the colon was cut away. The sigmoid flexure was invaginated into the rectum very tightly.
c/ With gelsenium, the method could be reversed. A sadistic ----- like Leather Apron would be jollified cutting her face and abdomen first or second, not her neck. She is in the “glass coffin”, prostrate on the ground. Her final awareness, if any remains, would be her face being mutilated, her ear being sliced, and her abdomen being butchered. Then, finally, “mercifully”, her throat is cut.
With gelsemium, Leather Apron can carry and position a body… if the dosage is adequate.
d/ Now, in rough comparison, the women die as though they JUST succumbed to being murdered. We are expected to rationalize their deaths stupidly, it seems, because they are women… as though they died with their arms at their sides. Consistently missing from the Post Mortem report for the canonical five is: broken fingers or nails, scratching, or any signs of fatal abuse prior to her mutilation. Their manner of clothing is neat and proper AND NOT the disheveled mess any detective would expect to encounter if it was explained that this woman had a knife-slashing murderer on top of her; however, in retrospect, forest/trees. Still, any of these women could have ------ Leather Apron! Something be said about their temperment, “Tim, this is lovely, ain’t it.”
So that leaves us open to many stupid possibilities and few rational probabilities. Of the rational: 1) Leather Apron needs to be more than one person; and/or 2) poison.
I followed poison because:
[ES]Israel Schwartz: “the woman screamed three times, but not loudly.”
[ES] Post Mortem. “The heart was small, the left ventricle firmly contracted, and the right slightly so.. the right ventricle was full of dark clots.”
[ES] Dr. Frederic Blackwell: “The neck and chest were quite warm, as were also the legs, and the face was slightly warm. The hands were cold… The appearance of the face was quite placid. The mouth was slightly open.”
[MAN] Dr. R. R. Llewellyn. “there was a wine glass and a half of blood in the gutter at her side” but “she had been killed where she lay”.
[LA}The “Dear Boss” letter. “{Chapman’s blood] went thick like glue and I cant use it”
e/ Confirmation of Gelsemiun Poisoning by Targeted Analysis of Toxic Gelsemium Alkaloids in Urine (Chi-Kong Lai and Yan-Wo Chan, Princes Margaret Hospital, China)
{CE) Dr. Frederick Gordon Brown: The gall bladder contained bile.
3/ Pleurisy, also called pleuritis, is a painful inflammation of the tissue that line the lungs and chest cavity. It can make breathing extremely painful. Pleurisy is also a word that appears many times on this website. At the time of the murders, gelsenium was a treatment for pleuritis and pneumonia. This is important because Dr. Thomas Bond reports on the Whitehall Torso Mystery that: “at some point the woman suffered from severe pleurisy… she did not die of suffocation or drowning.” Does a connection between gelsenium dosing and “severe pleurisy” exist?
4/ I am ignorant of how gelsemium was hyded or hawked in the East End. I wouldn’t begin to know how it would be obtained, or what privilege would be needed in order to obtain it. Was it a causal ward remedy? A barracks prescription? Peddled snake oil? That generation’s cabinet painkiller? Less social than cocaine, maybe, more common than morphine… was it street pharmed? In short, how did it fit into Whitechapel society? Since so many of the speculations gear towards the conspiratorial, it’s hard to gauge whether or not Leather Apron could have been a dope pusher. With syphilis and psychology driving the motivation, its hard to determine if any part of these acts could have been dark-alley politics.
5/ I am not absolutely certain how Elizabeth Stride was woodbined. I imagine that it was injested. Many of the victims had food in their stomach (ie. fish and chips, meat and potatoes) at the time of their autopsy. However, alternative methods of poisoning (eg. topical treatment, sniffed like cocaine, “Mickey Finned”, injected into the neck, smoked from a clay pipe) cannot be dismissed. Knowing the physical properties of the drug would help. Googling ‘gelsenium poisoning symptoms’ delivers sites that expand on the affect of treatments placed directly to the eyes. I did not read anywhere of the reported affect when placed on the skin. In Dr. Frederick Gordon Brown’s post mortem report on Elizabeth Stride, he writes, “the hands and arms were bronzed.” Is this an affect of gelsenium on the skin?
{Or, like Arthur Conan Doyle, could there be a distinct probability that Leather Apron is a Hyde user of gelsenium too? Reports of Leather Apron describe him as having blotchy skin and sandy-colored/no eyelashes. Ada Wilson describes her assailant as a man with a surnburnt face. Are these the affects of gelsenium abuse?
• [Wikipedia] All parts of this plant contain toxic strychnine-related alkaloids… The sap may cause skin irritation in sensitive individuals.
{OR the blotchy skin may be the result of the occupational hazard of hop picking. Wikipedia lists dermatitis (eczema) sometimes resulting from harvesting hops, and some workers “suffer some type of skin lesions on the face, hands, and legs.” [An online article on a pagan ritual associated with hop picking at the turn of the century offers a small expanse on the seasonal trek to Kent. Should you read the article, maybe you will come to the same wry sense of wonder after you read how many considered hop picking to be a “holiday” of sorts… “and the pickers sang songs and even sent friends postcards”.}
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