Fisherman's entire thesis seems to run as follows:
1. Within an hour of death, the rectal (core) temperature of a human corpse can only drop by about one degree from the normal (warm) 37 degrees centigrade due to the laws of physics.
2. If the rectal core temperature is warm then the body must feel warm at the surface when examined by a medic.
3. As Chapman's body did not feel warm but cold at the surface when examined by Dr Phillips. she cannot only have been dead an hour.
The flaw in this thesis should be obvious but, in case not, here is an excerpt from Bernard Knight's paper entitled 'The Evolution of Methods for Estimating the Time of Death from Body Temperature" published in Forensic Science International vol 36, 1988, which destroys points 2 and 3. Knight is commenting here on an 1880 paper by J. Wilkie Burman (who took surface measurements of a small number of dead bodies with a thermometer at regular intervals):
'His graphs showed no plateaux and, in fact, he notes that the body cools more rapidly soon after death, especially when the initial body temperature is high. This is presumably because surface measurements do not reflect the initial retention of heat in the core, as detected by rectal readings.'
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