The Crown's Medical Witnesses

It is of course very difficult to determine the kind of impression the Crown's medical witnesses made in the courtroom. Nevertheless, the transcript of the second trial does indicate that the substance of their testimony was often extremely unconvincing. For example, at one stage under cross-examination, Dr Gilmour admitted that 'there is no evidence that she was in a coma throughout Saturday, at any stage of the day at all', then almost immediately contradicted himself by reiterating the general proposition that a persona cannot 'relapse' 'from coma back into coma' [our emphasis] without another dose of veronal. When alerted by O'Leary to this contradiction, he maintained that his proposition was that a person will recover from merely an 'overdose', even though this weakened the principle or theory by making it extend to rather minor cases of poisoning.²⁰ At one point Dr Gunson agreed with O'Leary that his 'opinions' were 'sweeping', and then went on to make the astounding admission that these opinions were 'impossible to check'.²¹ And Dr Ludbrook told the court that if the 'theory' about the impossibility of relapsing into a coma page 61

A.… is wrong, it is no use to prove a murder.

Q. If it is shown that there are exceptions to it, I suggest to you it is no use to prove a murder.

A. Not necessarily, because I do not think you can get two cases in which all the circumstance are exactly the same.

Q. Then what is the good of the theory?

A. It is not a theory, it is an opinion based on evidence placed before us.²²

Of course such imprecision is only to be expected during oral testimony given under considerable pressure. However, on at least one occasion Dr Gilmour was simply wrong. For example, he told the court 'that in taking the quantities recovered from the organs, one takes into consonance the fact that veronal is more or less equally distributed throughout the body'.²³ According to the relevant medical authority, Witthaus's Manual of Toxicology, however, 'the distribution in the different organs and tissues is uneven under all circumstances, and the quantity in one part is no indication of that in any other'.²⁴ Not only had the Defence's medical witness gone to some trouble to explain Dr Gilmour's basic error, but the judge had even read the relevant passage out in court.