Druitt a doctor?

[Jonathan H]

Oh, you mean us, here, Down Under, where the libel laws--and suppression laws-- were once the envy of North Korea.

South Australia (my state) and Queensland can still be very draconian.

To be fair, things are much improved since 'Ulysses', 'Lady Chatterly's Lover' and 'Power Without Glory' were banned.

On the other hand the recent p.c. laws where a person from a group only has to feel offended to cause censorship to descend was a return to the bad old days, and thankfully the new federal government is trying to have them purged.

[GUT]

G'Day Jonathan

What I'm trying to find out however is if such laws existed in England and considering Australia initially adopted all the laws of England it may well have and if so when was it repealed in England? And that I simply cannot at the moment find.

[Jonathan H]

All of the primary and secondary sources affirm that the dead could not be libelled at the time of the Ripper murders, which if you do not believe Druitt was the murderer, lasted from 1888 to 1891.

Druitt's death is at the wrong time to be 'Jack' unless you exclude other 'Jack' murders.

[GUT]

G'Day Jonathan

I still cannot find if a similar law ever did exist in England.

[GUT]

Again Jonathan

If Macnaghten, or anyone else who may have known, had come out with the full story the first question would surely have been how do you know?

"Because" says Mac "He told Rev X and the good Rev told Y who told me".

How quickly might Rev X rushed off to Court?

[Jonathan H]

The so-called 'North Country Vicar' forced Macnaghten's hand, in my opinion, to get in first (via Griffiths) with the Drowned Doctor to trump the Sometime Surgeon (days later Sims, the second arm of the pincer, was even more brutal).

I think that the likeliest person to be this unidentified and even fictionalized figure is the Reverend Charles Druitt, Montague's cousin.

Nobody would have gone to the libel court over Druitt being the killer but rather over themselves being accused of harbouring the maniac.

[GUT]

G'Day Jonathan

Nobody would have gone to the libel court over Druitt being the killer but rather over themselves being accused of harbouring the maniac.

Just the point I was about to make, if Mac had not twisted his story, he would have needed to be very careful because if he had named Montague John Druitt a 31 year old Barrister, and "I know because his family told me" he would have ran a real risk of a claim for libel for implying that the family knew and did nothing about it.

[Jonathan H]

Instead the family became 'friends' in Griffiths and Sims, with the latter only letting it slip in an interview with the 'Express' in 1904, and Macnaghten implying that the killer lived with family during the murders.

It is a measure of Macnaghten's formidable memory (or he kept private files) that the very first regional press account in 1889 of the recovery of Druitt's body mistakenly asserted that 'friends' of the deceased had been contacted at Bournemouth.

[Mondegreen]

The first time such an operation is recorded, makes you wonder if even an experienced surgeon could do what Jack did in a rush and in the dark. Though all surgery was done as quickly as possible because of lack of effective anesthetic experience.

I don't doubt that people have been removing hearts during autopsies for a few centuries but many heart surgeries were too complex to be successful until relatively recently.

What I'm trying to say is that I don't think that a successful surgery is very similar to what Jack did.

During a surgery, there are many factors to be taken into account, like anaesthesia and blood loss. Even today, those factors are still important, and there's still a risk for some surgeries that the patient may die or be incapacitated.

Jack's case, the way I see it, was more similar to something like an autopsy. In an autopsy, the person on the table is already dead so the end goal is not for them to survive, it's to determine what happened. If an organ is removed during an autopsy, there's no need for highly special techniques to ensure the safety of the patient as there would be during a surgery. In Jack's case, his victims were dead or dying so I doubt he had to take into account the factors that that surgeon had to take into account when saving his patient's life (or if he did, he took them into account in the opposite way).

I think that a skilled surgeon could have done what Jack did (I don't know about the dark, though), probably even some decades before. A skilled surgeon doing what that surgeon did and keeping his patient alive and healthy is a whole different matter, though.