Ripper Confidential by Tom Wescott (2017)

[John G]

Slitting your wrist is a common practice of attempted suicide. it could also explain her seventeen day stay - suicide watch

That's what I was thinking Darryl. It also strikes me that targeting the wrists would be a very odd way of attempting to murder someone.

[Darryl Kenyon]

Do you think it may have been a suicide attempt?

Slitting your wrist is a common practice of attempted suicide. it could also explain her seventeen day stay - suicide watch

[Darryl Kenyon]

Its around a five to ten minute walk to the London Hospital from Brady St so if Margaret Millous was admitted in the early hours of Aug 31 say at the latest 3.45 am the latest Polly was killed, it is still, at the least a 20 hr gap from her going in the hospital to her being registered. If she went straight to the emergency room and had an operation to stop the bleeding how long would that take ? I am assuming here that she had stitches and bandages, obviously i am no expert on Victorian hospital practices, and we don't know how severe the wound was, but would it have taken that long ? and then she would have been registered after treatment.
If the night porter did not register her, is it not a fair assumption the day shift clerk/porter would have had the job of registering all patients brought in during the night ?
Could the attack have not been a domestic incident which made the poor lady reluctant to say who attacked her, thus starting the rumours that it was the killer of Polly ?

[John G]

All possible - but until we have confirmation of the practices used, we are left with the fact that Millous was supposedly admitted on September 1:st. That is why I would like for Tom to tell us exactly what he knows about these matters, and where his knowledge emanates from. Until further notice, Millous seems to me much like a woman who may have cut herself in the wrist the day after the Bucks Row murder, but I am perfectly willing to have that suggestion dispelled by added information.

Do you think it may have been a suicide attempt?

[Fisherman]

It's a complicated business!

I think maybe there was a distinction between being admitted (physically) and Admitted (bureaucratically, i.e. involving treatment with or without being kept in). There doesn't seem to be a tremendous number of admissions on the snippet posted, yet there must surely have been the usual array of hypochondriacs, malingerers wanting a bed for the night, practical jokers etc. in addition to genuine cases. Go to a modern day NHS walk-in centre and it's chock-full. So maybe the snippet is the tidied-up version. As to how long it would take someone to be 'Admitted' after being 'admitted,' I guess it would depend on circs - Saturday night was probably one to avoid. I guess it could also be that someone was admitted at 11PM and Admitted at 1AM next day.

All possible - but until we have confirmation of the practices used, we are left with the fact that Millous was supposedly admitted on September 1:st. That is why I would like for Tom to tell us exactly what he knows about these matters, and where his knowledge emanates from. Until further notice, Millous seems to me much like a woman who may have cut herself in the wrist the day after the Bucks Row murder, but I am perfectly willing to have that suggestion dispelled by added information.

[Robert]

It's a complicated business!

I think maybe there was a distinction between being admitted (physically) and Admitted (bureaucratically, i.e. involving treatment with or without being kept in). There doesn't seem to be a tremendous number of admissions on the snippet posted, yet there must surely have been the usual array of hypochondriacs, malingerers wanting a bed for the night, practical jokers etc. in addition to genuine cases. Go to a modern day NHS walk-in centre and it's chock-full. So maybe the snippet is the tidied-up version. As to how long it would take someone to be 'Admitted' after being 'admitted,' I guess it would depend on circs - Saturday night was probably one to avoid. I guess it could also be that someone was admitted at 11PM and Admitted at 1AM next day.

[Elamarna]

Tom has not 'misread a document, nor does Tom generally heed a command to 'explain himself', but I will make a rare exception in this case.

1) Tom doesn't have any psychic insight into Millous's wound. That much is obvious from the book. I know that her radial artery in her arm was injured, which is very severe, and she spent a long time in hospital. But clearly her injury wasn't so severe that she bled out dead on the street. Blood loss, however, must have been unavoidable (as that's what an arterial wound means.)

2) The archivist who provides these records had these as people being admitted on August 31st. I suspect, as the entry has Millous's injury noted, that at the time the entry was made she'd already received care from a doctor who had afterwards provided the necessary information to the registrar who created the document in question. Alternatively, Millous was quite well-informed and stood bleeding at the front desk, providing her name, address, particulars, and her diagnoses of radial arterial damage.

Beyond the above, I have no further information. She may have been admitted on Sept. 1st, or Oct. 1st, but I trusted the archivist to whom I paid my monies.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

Thanks Tom

That is a good response as to your reasoning.


Steve

[Fisherman]

2) The archivist who provides these records had these as people being admitted on August 31st. I suspect, as the entry has Millous's injury noted, that at the time the entry was made she'd already received care from a doctor who had afterwards provided the necessary information to the registrar who created the document in question.
Tom Wescott

Tom, if you knew that there was an admission record stating that Millous was admitted (not registered as having been treated) on September 1, I take it you must have asked the archivist why he or she claimed that the true admission date was another one than the one clearly on record? Surely, the underlying process that resulted in such an anomaly as the one you are suggesting would have been of the utmost interest to clarify and document for parallel cases? Is there any such clarification and documentation to be had, or did you simply accept the archivistīs claim although it was seemingly in conflict with the written records?
You make the suggestion that Millous was admitted on August the 31:st, treated, and then the details of the treatment were passed on to a registrar who got it on the 1:st of September and went on to sign Millous as having been admitted on that day instead of more than 24 hours earlier. In order for this suggestion to work, it takes confirmation that this was common practice.
My question is whether the archivist (or anybody else) confirmed this to you and described the procedure, or whether it is a suggestion of your own.

[drstrange169]

Hello Gary,

>>So patients were 'admitted' by porters as they entered the hospital.<<

Yes, although, after reading your description of these particular lists, it does seem like they must have been compiled later, perhaps from the porter admissions and the doctors' reports. Sort of like Swanson's reports to the home office.

[Tom_Wescott]

Tom,

The radial artery extends to the wrist and the hand, so what you thought you knew, and what you based your complicated imagining of the Brady Street attack on, needs to be tweaked for the next edition.

Assuming you bother, of course, because it now seems you are no longer insisting that MM sustained her injury shortly before Polly Nichols was killed, which is what we reasonable people have been suggesting all along.


MrBarnett

I know where the radial artery is, Mr. Barnett. I say in the book she would have received a defensive wound injury, hence the bloody hand. I do very much still say that Margaret Millous received her injury slightly before Polly Nichols. Why would I say differently now? Because you don't like it?

As for your idea of 'reasonable people', I can count them on the radial arteries of about 3 or 4 fingers. My kind of 'reasonable people', however, believe that whatever this is all about for you, it's not very healthy for you, and you should perhaps take some time away from the computer and enjoy some funny movies.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

[MrBarnett]

Tom has not 'misread a document, nor does Tom generally heed a command to 'explain himself', but I will make a rare exception in this case.

1) Tom doesn't have any psychic insight into Millous's wound. That much is obvious from the book. I know that her radial artery in her arm was injured, which is very severe, and she spent a long time in hospital. But clearly her injury wasn't so severe that she bled out dead on the street. Blood loss, however, must have been unavoidable (as that's what an arterial wound means.)

2) The archivist who provides these records had these as people being admitted on August 31st. I suspect, as the entry has Millous's injury noted, that at the time the entry was made she'd already received care from a doctor who had afterwards provided the necessary information to the registrar who created the document in question. Alternatively, Millous was quite well-informed and stood bleeding at the front desk, providing her name, address, particulars, and her diagnoses of radial arterial damage.

Beyond the above, I have no further information. She may have been admitted on Sept. 1st, or Oct. 1st, but I trusted the archivist to whom I paid my monies.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott

Tom,

The radial artery extends to the wrist and the hand, so what you thought you knew, and what you based your complicated imagining of the Brady Street attack on, needs to be tweaked for the next edition.

Assuming you bother, of course, because it now seems you are no longer insisting that MM sustained her injury shortly before Polly Nichols was killed, which is what we reasonable people have been suggesting all along.


MrBarnett

[MrBarnett]

Leaving aside the unresolved, and almost certainly unresolvable (that's my point), question of when MM entered the LH, I'd like to know what evidence Tom has to support this claim in his book:

The hospital registries are tragically filled with failed suicide attempts, either obvious or self-confessed, and they're duly marked as 'suicide' but Millous's was not.

I've been unable to find any attempted suicides noted in the LH admission records in September, 1888. There is a single patient who was apparently admitted because she was suicidal, but her injuries do not suggest she had attempted suicide.

[MrBarnett]

I hope everyone can see the point I'm making about the order of the patient categories. Take 1/9 as an example:

Patients 1029 -1031 are 'without tickets'

Patients 1032 - 1034 are 'accidents'

Patients 1035 (and 1036 not shown) are 'with tickets'


Within each group the numbers are consecutive and this pattern is repeated on other days I have looked at. It follows that the book must have been written up the following day and that the entries are not in chronological order.

It's not rocket science. I know Tom is geographically challenged, but I'm surprised he can't see (or refuses to see) the point I am making here.

[Brenda]

.

In the U.S., if you go into the emergency room, you go through triage and testing, and if you are in bad enough shape, then you are "admitted". So you could quite possibly come into the hospital on one date and be admitted the next. I have no idea how UK hospitals operate (no pun intended there), but I guess the question would be are you considered "admitted" as soon as you walk in the door or when you are actually placed in a bed and room?

[Tom_Wescott]

Tom has not 'misread a document, nor does Tom generally heed a command to 'explain himself', but I will make a rare exception in this case.

1) Tom doesn't have any psychic insight into Millous's wound. That much is obvious from the book. I know that her radial artery in her arm was injured, which is very severe, and she spent a long time in hospital. But clearly her injury wasn't so severe that she bled out dead on the street. Blood loss, however, must have been unavoidable (as that's what an arterial wound means.)

2) The archivist who provides these records had these as people being admitted on August 31st. I suspect, as the entry has Millous's injury noted, that at the time the entry was made she'd already received care from a doctor who had afterwards provided the necessary information to the registrar who created the document in question. Alternatively, Millous was quite well-informed and stood bleeding at the front desk, providing her name, address, particulars, and her diagnoses of radial arterial damage.

Beyond the above, I have no further information. She may have been admitted on Sept. 1st, or Oct. 1st, but I trusted the archivist to whom I paid my monies.

Yours truly,

Tom Wescott