A different way of viewing the 'medical knowledge' question?

[FrankO]

Thanks Frank,

I love reading those Victorian extracts, just the tone of the writing is a joy - always some dark-humour in it, and such a zest for - well - life.

Couldn’t have worded it any better, Paul.

I'm suggesting some extensive conditioning and deadening, to the sheer horror of evisceration. I used to be fascinated that my dear old Dad could do this - amazed in fact. He explained it as no different from a car mechanic being able to strip a car down - and he was the kindest and most gentle of men. But he'd done thousands.

There has to be a huge barrier, to first doing this. Not enough just to have seen the odd exhibit or cat-meat stall/chopping up.

Not that I’m suggesting he would only have seen the odd exhibit or whatever. I just mentioned that as an example of what I think he did to nurture his morbid interest. In fact, I think it was his interest in the subject that got him to find out stuff, to read about anatomy, maybe attend one of those public dissections in an anatomy theatre (if they still existed then), possibly even attend and undertake a dissection as a student. Anatomy, anatomical museums and dissections were still rather ‘big’ in the nineteenth century until the last of the public anatomy museums was closed down in the 1870s. What I find striking is that those ‘anatomical Venuses’ are quite similar to how Mary Jane Kelly was found, so I do think there’s a very real possibility that these Venuses or wax models and the general interest in anatomical exploration of the era played some part.

As to the question of whether the Ripper needed conditioning and deadening, it’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem, isn’t it? Which came first? The morbid curiousity or the conditioning & deadening? As you may have guessed, I think that his (morbid) curiosity was first piqued for whatever reason, then he nurtured it with whatever means he could find, maybe he’d practised on animals or found work where he could satisfy his dark need to some extent and then, finally, he acted out his fantasy. I don’t think he would have needed much conditioning or deadening, but I sure don’t dismiss it out of hand. And it's just how I see it.

Cheers,
Frank

[erobitha]

Couldn’t have worded it any better, Paul.


Not that I’m suggesting he would only have seen the odd exhibit or whatever. I just mentioned that as an example of what I think he did to nurture his morbid interest. In fact, I think it was his interest in the subject that got him to find out stuff, to read about anatomy, maybe attend one of those public dissections in an anatomy theatre (if they still existed then), possibly even attend and undertake a dissection as a student. Anatomy, anatomical museums and dissections were still rather ‘big’ in the nineteenth century until the last of the public anatomy museums was closed down in the 1870s. What I find striking is that those ‘anatomical Venuses’ are quite similar to how Mary Jane Kelly was found, so I do think there’s a very real possibility that these Venuses or wax models and the general interest in anatomical exploration of the era played some part.

As to the question of whether the Ripper needed conditioning and deadening, it’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem, isn’t it? Which came first? The morbid curiousity or the conditioning & deadening? As you may have guessed, I think that his (morbid) curiosity was first piqued for whatever reason, then he nurtured it with whatever means he could find, maybe he’d practised on animals or found work where he could satisfy his dark need to some extent and then, finally, he acted out his fantasy. I don’t think he would have needed much conditioning or deadening, but I sure don’t dismiss it out of hand. And it's just how I see it.

Cheers,
Frank

I think this is the most likely scenario.

[FrankO]

I think this is the most likely scenario.

Thanks Erobitha, and I saw it wasn't Herlock Sholmes who posted a picture of an 'Anatomical Venus', but you (on the thread with the same name).

[Paul Sutton]

Couldn’t have worded it any better, Paul.


Not that I’m suggesting he would only have seen the odd exhibit or whatever. I just mentioned that as an example of what I think he did to nurture his morbid interest. In fact, I think it was his interest in the subject that got him to find out stuff, to read about anatomy, maybe attend one of those public dissections in an anatomy theatre (if they still existed then), possibly even attend and undertake a dissection as a student. Anatomy, anatomical museums and dissections were still rather ‘big’ in the nineteenth century until the last of the public anatomy museums was closed down in the 1870s. What I find striking is that those ‘anatomical Venuses’ are quite similar to how Mary Jane Kelly was found, so I do think there’s a very real possibility that these Venuses or wax models and the general interest in anatomical exploration of the era played some part.

As to the question of whether the Ripper needed conditioning and deadening, it’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem, isn’t it? Which came first? The morbid curiousity or the conditioning & deadening? As you may have guessed, I think that his (morbid) curiosity was first piqued for whatever reason, then he nurtured it with whatever means he could find, maybe he’d practised on animals or found work where he could satisfy his dark need to some extent and then, finally, he acted out his fantasy. I don’t think he would have needed much conditioning or deadening, but I sure don’t dismiss it out of hand. And it's just how I see it.

Cheers,
Frank

Good points. Mine would be, what were his means for nurturing this rare and bizarre fixation, beyond spectating?

It's again why Thompson is of relevance. His poetry is full of horrific references to evisceration and his practical experience wasn't short of it!

We also have to remember - almost arguing against the medical insider line - that Victorians were less squeamish and far more used to death as being an everyday thing. The last public execution in London was 1868, so most adults in 1888 could have seen one. And there was no RSPCA, so any sod could practise on animals.

[FrankO]

Good points. Mine would be, what were his means for nurturing this rare and bizarre fixation, beyond spectating?

The things I mentioned earlier, possibly undertake a dissection as a student and/or practise on animals.

It's again why Thompson is of relevance. His poetry is full of horrific references to evisceration and his practical experience wasn't short of it!

He is! I had him confused with Francis Tumblety, so I looked into him and he really seems the type of bloke I would look for, even age-wise.

We also have to remember - almost arguing against the medical insider line - that Victorians were less squeamish and far more used to death as being an everyday thing. The last public execution in London was 1868, so most adults in 1888 could have seen one. And there was no RSPCA, so any sod could practise on animals.

Quite right!

[Paul Sutton]

The things I mentioned earlier, possibly undertake a dissection as a student and/or practise on animals.


He is! I had him confused with Francis Tumblety, so I looked into him and he really seems the type of bloke I would look for, even age-wise.


Quite right!

Frank - we've got him! But seriously, I think only a couple here would even consider Thompson as viable. Yet he seems very much so. The evidence, in the Francis Thompson book, is very thin, true. But who isn't that the case for?

[A P Tomlinson]

Aha! So, you're not just suggesting that Jack the Ripper quite possibly had a type of job that would lower the threshold for immersing himself in someone else’s viscera, but you're specifying his job as someone who had, at least, watched someone performing post-mortems - is that correct?

I don't know if I would go that far, but I do think it likely that he, in one form or another, informed himself of such activity. I think, for instance, that he would have seen the wax models of women with their abdomen opened up, models that were on display in "museums" like the one below (taken from the Daily Telegraph of 29 November).

"Another establishment, bearing some distant relation to one of the plastic arts, is situate at a street corner nearly opposite the democratic picture-shop, within a vigorous stone's-throw of the London Hospital. It is no exaggeration to say that the most remarkable waxworks of this or any other age are now on view in a western section of the Whitechapel-road. This amazing exhibition occupies the ground floor and cellarage of a frowsy two-storeyed house, the upper floor of which appears to be unoccupied. An no wonder, for who would willingly live under the same roof with the ghastly dolls that tenant the lower part of this sordid messuage? A penny is the fee for admission to the display, the attractions of which are incessantly proclaimed urbi et orbi by the stentorian voices of two curiously ill-favoured male attendants, while a slatternly, unkempt girl, as grimy as the most approved Old Master, sits at the receipt of custom hard by the entrance. When we visited them, the showrooms were thronged with blowzy, bonnetless women and unshaven, unwashed men, affording to more than one of the senses conclusive evidence that they had recently been somewhat assiduously engaged in "sampling" the wares of a neighbouring gin shop. Squeezed in here and there among these miscellaneous adults, and eagerly striving to catch a glimpse of the hideous effigies lining either wall of the long, low room, dimly lighted by slender and tremulous jets of gas, were a few pallid, precocious children, whose language was no less "painful and frequent and free" than that of their elders. The show itself, however, despite its many repulsive characteristics, could not possibly lower their moral tone; and yet it is unquestionably a "penny dreadful" of the most blood-curdling description, mainly consisting of long rows of vilely executed waxen figures and plaster busts, propped up, some upright, some askew, against either wall of the showroom, rigged out in the refuse of a Petticoat-lane old clothes shop, and professing (according to the halfpenny catalogue) to be striking likenesses of all the most notorious homicides of modern times. From Palmer to Pranzini the collection claims to be complete, and its serried ranks, whatever their artistic shortcomings may be - and in this respect we believe them to be unrivalled - unquestionably teem with the strangest of surprises, a few of which are ineffably comical. For instance, there is a deeply-pitted, broken-nosed, plaster-of-paris head, surmounted by a faded green hat and issuing from a threadbare double-breasted jacket. It looks like a slovenly cast of some mutilated classical bust dressed up in modern "slops" by way of a mild joke, the contrast between its lifeless whiteness and shabby-genteel "get-up" being wildly ludicrous. In the catalogue, however, this outrageous anachronism is set down as the correct effigy of Eliza Webster, who, as an artless critic in our immediate vicinity suggested, while contemplating her astounding lineaments, "must a' been a rum 'un to look at" when alive, if she ever bore the least resemblance to her "portrait-model." The chief attraction of the show, as might have been expected, considering its locality, is a blood-boltered display of revolting figures, purporting to represent the victims of the Whitechapel murders, laid out on the floor, side by side, at the farther end of a darksome cellar, connected with the ground-floor room by a rickety corkscrew staircase. These horrible objects are like nothing that ever lived or died. They can only be compared to the visionary offspring of an uncommonly severe nightmare - unearthly combinations of hideous waxen masks and shapeless bundles of rags. One of them is tightly swathed in a cerement of bright blue glazed calico, scored and blotched with dabs of red ochre, indicative of the unknown assassin's butcherly handiwork. The others are somewhat less grotesquely arrayed in dark wrappers profusely stained with mimic gore. At the other end of the cellar, close to a flaring gaslight, are cooped up two melancholy freaks of Nature - a grey hen and a common or garden duck, each afflicted with an extra pair of legs. These, the only living things in the whole appalling collection of horrors, manifest a violent and resentful reluctance to display their deformities, which is in odd contrast to the glassy indifference to public curiosity characterising their wax and plaster neighbours. They evidently yearn for privacy; when dragged from retirement by any of their four legs, in order to be minutely inspected, they struggle strenuously, and give utterance to indignant protests. Such is one of the cheap entertainments provided by contemporary enterprise for the inhabitants of Whitechapel. It is open from an early hour of the forenoon until late at night, and is visited by many hundreds of men, women, and children of the poorer classes daily. To what extent it may influence the East-enders deleteriously, by fostering a morbid interest in crime and criminals, can of course only be a matter of conjecture; but it seems a pity that such a debasing exhibition should constitute one of the principal amusements available to the population of a poverty-stricken neighbourhood."

I think poster Herlock Sholmes posted a picture once of one of those models with their abdomen cut open, very similar to how Mary Jane Kelly was found.

All the best,
Frank

I would have paid a penny JUST to see a four-legged duck.

"These horrible objects are like nothing that ever lived or died. They can only be compared to the visionary offspring of an uncommonly severe nightmare..."
Is now in my top ten Victorian quotes connected to The Whitechapel Murders.
Maybe Top Five.

[FrankO]

Frank - we've got him! But seriously, I think only a couple here would even consider Thompson as viable. Yet he seems very much so. The evidence, in the Francis Thompson book, is very thin, true. But who isn't that the case for?

I haven't read the book, Paul, and I don't know if the evidence presented in it or elsewhere is true, but I'd still be looking for the type he's described to have been: an ex medical student with a lot of dissections on his name, who had a thing for cutting into the female body, who knew the area well and (had) lived there, possibly with a drinking or drug habit, under, say, 35 years. And for now, Francis Thompson fits the bill.

Cheers,
Frank

[Paul Sutton]

I haven't read the book, Paul, and I don't know if the evidence presented in it or elsewhere is true, but I'd still be looking for the type he's described to have been: an ex medical student with a lot of dissections on his name, who had a thing for cutting into the female body, who knew the area well and (had) lived there, possibly with a drinking or drug habit, under, say, 35 years. And for now, Francis Thompson fits the bill.

Cheers,
Frank

He definitely needs moving from the 'absurd suspect' to the 'of interest' column. He was a laudanum addict - a heavy one - who effectively went into monastic retreat in early December 1888. There is no evidence of him in Whitechapel, other than vague stuff about a Catholic shelter he may have been in for MJK atrocity. But he lived for years on the streets, in the sort of fringe areas around The City.