"Her stomach was ripped open"

[smezenen]

Its possible that Catherine was a larger woman earlier in life and lost weight at some point. My wife dropped quite a few pounds (a little over 100) in the year after her lapband surgery. she had to have a tummy tuck to get rid of all the baggy skin left over.

[Errata]

What would have happened to her organs after they had been removed from the body and examined at the post mortem? Would they have been replaced or kept for study purposes? Don't know what the practice was in those days.

Best wishes,
Steve.

Well, now that's a good question. And the answer is, I don't know. And I'm not sure there is a way to know. Organs were typically kept if they were perfect specimens, or a perfect representation of some disease or wound. She had the crap cut out of her. I would think most of her organs would be unsuitable as specimens. Maybe her heart would be relatively undamaged.

The other thing is, I'm not exactly sure what her autopsy consisted of. Today we remove the sternum to access the chest cavity. I don't know if they did that back then, or if they would bother with someone who had such an obvious cause of death.

All things being equal they should have stuffed everything back in and sewed her up. While this would account for a weird lumpy shape of the abdomen when she was stood upright, it should not have created quite such a sag. Hmm.

[Steven Russell]

What would have happened to her organs after they had been removed from the body and examined at the post mortem? Would they have been replaced or kept for study purposes? Don't know what the practice was in those days.

Best wishes,
Steve.

[Errata]

So, I have been staring at the drawings and photos of Catherine Eddowes probably a good deal more than is healthy, and I thought I noticed something odd.

It appears as though in the sketches that her abdomen was wide open, almost like a dissected frog. In the photos of her in the mortuary, the wound also appears to be open, exposing viscera. In the photos done post mortem (or post post mortem) Despite the vast amount of stitching used there appears to be a great deal of excess flesh in the abdomen. Some sort of distortion there.

To the best of my knowledge, when flesh is cut it retains it's tone. Which is to say we aren't stuffed to bursting with organs. A cut down the abdomen should not in fact reveal any of the innards. To achieve that effect in dissections we make Y or I incisions, fold back the skin, and pin it. Clearly not available to the Ripper. So how on earth is her abdomen parting like that? There's no mention of broken ribs or pelvis that might distort the body, creating a gap in unsupported flesh.

Is it possible he literally ripped her open? Made an incision and then ripped the flesh apart, separating it from any supportive structures? It would mean freeing the skin from the ribcage and the upper pelvis structure. It would mean detaching the skin from the diaphragm and the subcutaneous musculature. Or separating the muscles from their supportive structure. And it would have to happen from about an inch below the breasts to the top of the pubic bone.

Which sounds daft, but to be blunt, not enough was taken from her to account for the extra skin of her stomach after autopsy. And not only do missing organs not account for the gap in the unstitched wound, but I think you would have to actually add mass into the cavity to cause that gap...

Or am I missing something obvious?