Doctor Jack?

[John Wheat]

Hi John,

While I don't agree with your selection of suspect, I don't believe that I have suggested that you are an "idiot or whatever". Please correct me if I am mistaken. In case you are wondering, I am not one of the two thumbs down that you have so far received for your post.

Cheers, George

Hi George

No I know you haven't ever suggested I am an idiot. I was talking about other posters. One of which doesn't post anymore.

Cheers John

[Scott Nelson]

Dr. James Cockburn Gloster OB/GYN

Newland Francis Forrester Smith

[Richard Patterson]

Francis Thompson deserves special attention here because of his very specific medical schooling. At Owens College, Manchester, he wasn’t just taught routine anatomy; he was trained under the Virchow system of autopsy . That method emphasized the systematic removal of organs one by one, often with just a single dissecting knife.

When you look at the Whitechapel murders, three of the five canonical victims had internal organs removed in the dark, under intense time pressure, with one blade. To the senior doctors of the day—Bond, Phillips, Brown, etc.—these cuts looked strange, even senseless, because they hadn’t been trained in Virchow. But to someone drilled in that exact technique, like Thompson, the organ selections and incisions line up. Virchow himself wrote that deviations and adaptations were expected depending on circumstances—precisely what we see in the Ripper’s work.

Add to that Thompson’s six years of medical study, his known possession of a dissecting scalpel (he admitted shaving with it in early 1889), and his destitution in Whitechapel during the murders, and he becomes the only suspect with both the training and the toolset to replicate what the Ripper demonstrably did.

In short: the organ removals that puzzled contemporary doctors make sense when viewed through the Virchow lens—the very technique Francis Thompson was trained in.

[Fiver]

Add to that Thompson’s six years of medical study, his known possession of a dissecting scalpel (he admitted shaving with it in early 1889), and his destitution in Whitechapel during the murders, and he becomes the only suspect with both the training and the toolset to replicate what the Ripper demonstrably did.

Thompson carried a scalpel, which is clearly not the weapon used by the Ripper.

[Richard Patterson]

Thompson carried a scalpel, which is clearly not the weapon used by the Ripper.

That objection doesn’t hold up. Thompson himself admitted in January 1889 that he’d been shaving with his old dissecting scalpel — meaning he was still carrying it through the autumn of 1888.

And while “scalpel” today makes people picture a tiny delicate blade, Victorian dissection scalpels were often larger, stouter knives, designed for cutting through tissue in the anatomy room. Surgeons and pathologists of the time used them for post-mortems, not just neat incisions.

The Ripper didn’t need a butcher’s cleaver — he needed exactly what Thompson had: a sharp dissection knife, small enough to conceal, strong enough to open the abdomen, and precise enough to remove a kidney in minutes by lantern light.

So rather than disqualifying him, the scalpel is one of the most damning pieces of evidence tying Thompson’s biography directly to the crimes.

[Fiver]

And while “scalpel” today makes people picture a tiny delicate blade, Victorian dissection scalpels were often larger, stouter knives, designed for cutting through tissue in the anatomy room. Surgeons and pathologists of the time used them for post-mortems, not just neat incisions.

[Coroner Wynne Baxter] Would it have been such an instrument as a medical man uses for post-mortem examinations?
[George Bagster Phillips, divisional-surgeon of police] - The ordinary post-mortem case perhaps does not contain such a weapon.

[GBinOz]

[Coroner Wynne Baxter] Would it have been such an instrument as a medical man uses for post-mortem examinations?
[George Bagster Phillips, divisional-surgeon of police] - The ordinary post-mortem case perhaps does not contain such a weapon.

The Liston amputation knife in not normally contained within an ordinary post-mortem case.