Medical Detectives

by Robin Odell

  Sydney Smith retired in 1953, relinquishing his chair as Regius Professor, a post he had held for twenty-five years. He was appointed Emeritus Professor and Rector of the University. Glowing with the warmth of the tributes paid them by the University, he and his wife, Kitty, set off for a long visit to New Zealand. They returned to Edinburgh in 1955 and were welcomed with a dinner and reception provided by the Students’ Council. To be honoured by his students was as important to him as the accolades received from academic colleagues. Keith Simpson, in a generous appreciation of Smith, wrote, ‘His sage advice was sought by young aspirants the world over … . ’.

  In 1959, Sir Sydney published his memoirs in a book entitled Mostly Murder which he dedicated to Kitty, ‘a good companion for half a century’. Lord Cameron, in his preface, remarked on Smith’s journey through life which had been, ‘full of interest, crowned with honour and the love of friends’. The author himself was more matter-of-fact; informing his readers that his book was, ‘a plain, unvarnished tale without embellishment or emotion’. He hoped that readers would find in it ‘… something of interest in another man’s work’. From the man who had edited Taylor’s Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence for thirty years, this was indeed a modest ambition.

  Smith’s ‘good companion’, Kitty, died in 1960 and he soldiered on, continuing to publish new editions of Mostly Murder. When he died in 1969, it was remarked that he would be remembered for his writing as much as any of his achievements. He was known affectionately as ‘The Patriarch’, respected head of the family of forensic pathologists. In the first edition of his book, Forensic Medicine, published in 1925, he wrote, ‘A knowledge of medicine and a stock of common sense are not in themselves sufficient.’ He emphasised that the medical jurist must have special knowledge. This was not mere preaching but an ideal which he practised throughout his career. His willingness to embrace new methods and to combine his knowledge with that of others to ensure the best possible outcome, were the hallmarks of a professional career which spanned half a century.

  Smith’s signal contribution to his profession was acknowledged in numerous tributes after his death. Francis Camps, describing him as, ‘A burly, cheerful man’, spoke of his charm and natural abilities as an ‘academic politician’. These were gifts admired by his peers in a profession not particularly noted for its generosity of spirit. Further editions of Mostly Murder continued to appear after Sir Sydney’s death and the 1982 edition was reviewed in the Medical News Guide published in Bombay. ‘This book should be read by everyone who has something to do with forensic medicine,’ wrote the reviewer. There was perhaps no finer tribute to a man whose forensic genius had made him an internationally respected figure.

  Notes

  1 Annie Hearn’s sister who lived in Doncaster.

  2 Cecil Powell claimed the reward and immediately turned it over to Annie Hearn’s solicitor to help pay for her defence.

  Chapter Three

  THE PROFESSOR

  John Glaister

  AS A YOUNG MAN John Glaister had a leaning towards light entertainment and thought briefly about a career on the stage. While he possessed a natural talent for impersonation or what he liked to call mimicry, the weight of history and family tradition was against him. His father, Dr John Glaister, ‘Old John’, as he would be called to differentiate him from his progeny of the same name, was a Glasgow general practitioner, destined to become Professor of Forensic Medicine at the city’s university.

  ‘Young John’ was born in May 1892, the final addition to the Glaisters’ family of two boys and four girls. His boyhood memories were of a Victorian father who he described as, ‘both a popular and kenspeckle figure’, the latter being a Scots word meaning ‘conspicuous’ and perhaps translated into the modern idiom as ‘high profile’. With his duties as a busy medical practitioner, making his calls in style using a horse-drawn carriage, and lecturing on public health and other matters at St Mungo’s College, ‘Old John’ often did not see his children for days on end.

  The family lived in a large house attended by servants. The children were driven to school by the coachman and, in due course, the youngest Glaister found himself at Glasgow High School and compelled to learn Latin which, in common with most of his contemporaries, he loathed. Some of his strongest boyhood memories were of long columns of soldiers waiting patiently at Glasgow docks to board troopships bound for South Africa and the Boer War.

  At the turn of the century, ‘Old John’ was appointed to the Regius Chair of Forensic Medicine at Glasgow University. The new position meant a change of address and the Glaister family moved into a large house in Woodside Place. University life entailed more regular working hours and his children saw more of their father. There were still unsocial hours to be worked though and when a medical report was required ‘Old John’ clattered away on his typewriter until late at night. He spurned the idea of taking on a secretary with the same force that he rejected the installation of a telephone. When the family were enjoying the pleasures of their country house in Dumfriesshire, a telegraph boy had to be despatched from nearby Thornhill with a message summoning the professor if his forensic skills were needed urgently at some crime scene.

  In his autobiography, ‘Young John’ recalled the moment he was called to his father’s study to give an account of his progress at school. He knew his reports told a depressing story and his father advocated greater concentration. When asked what he intended to do when he left school, the seventeen-year-old lad ventured to suggest that he might go to London to study at the Academy of Dramatic Art. ‘Forget it’, was his father’s unequivocal reply. He advised a university course, suggesting first medicine and then the law. Father and son agreed that the best way to dispel the poor school results was to employ a private tutor. William Love prepared John Glaister for entry at Glasgow University within a few months and the pupil later paid his tutor a generous compliment when he said, ‘he taught me to learn how to learn’.

  His years as a medical student merged with the onset of the First World War. They were enjoyable years after he had surmounted the curiosity of his fellow undergraduates who were bemused by the prospects of ‘Young John’ being lectured to by ‘Old John’. When they realised that he was treated in exactly the same way as themselves, their curiosity was satisfied. Glaister had his share of memorable experiences as every prospective doctor does and he recalled a number of them in his memoirs. There were some amusing interludes and none more so than working among the poor who lived in Glasgow’s slum tenements. He was called out one night with a fellow student to attend an expectant mother and was guided by a lighted candle to the woman’s bedside in a dingy, one-roomed apartment. While they looked after their patient, they also had to contend with marauding bed bugs which crept over the bedding and dropped from the ceiling. Their attention was as much taken up by keeping the blood-sucking bugs at bay as it was looking after the patient and new uses were found for the ether which they carried in their medical bags – Cimex lectularius proved vulnerable to its anaesthetic powers.

  Like most young men of his generation, when the war came Glaister wanted to join up immediately. His family and university teachers prevailed on him to finish his studies and he reluctantly deferred to their wishes. Nevertheless, he and a fellow student volunteered their services to help at the military hospital which was set up at Glasgow’s Hyde Park Locomotive Works. He helped to treat many of the war’s lesser casualties – soldiers with trench foot and heart disorders. ‘Young John’ passed his final examinations in March 1916 and, within weeks, had been commissioned as a doctor in the Royal Army Medical Corps.

  After a couple of home postings he was informed that he was to be sent to Egypt. He said hurried farewells to his parents and to his fiancée, Isobel, known to all her intimates as ‘Muff’, before setting out on an overland route to Alexandria via Taranto in Italy. Captain Glaister was posted to Gaza as a regimental medical officer, where he joined a field ambulance unit with little to d
o but kill time by playing gramophone records and debating the reason for their posting. The purpose became all too apparent one evening when a soldier reported sighting an approaching camel train. ‘We rushed out,’ said Glaister, ‘and the entire stretch of skyline seemed filled by the length of the plodding convoy coming towards us.’

  There were a hundred or more camels each carrying two wounded soldiers slung in nets on their backs. ‘It was a sight’, wrote Glaister, ‘to make even the most hardened medical orderly wince.’ The men were Turkish prisoners, many of them seriously wounded at Beersheba and kept confined for days in caves before being sent by convoy to receive medical treatment. The doctors and medical orderlies worked long into the night dealing with badly infected wounds necessitating an endless series of amputations. Once the surgery was completed, it became apparent that typhus was rampant among the survivors. The fever was spread by the lice with which the men were infested and strict hygiene was enforced within an isolation area patrolled by armed guards. It was a nightmarish episode, and when it was finished, only eleven out of the original 200 casualties survived.

  This would have been a harrowing experience for any young man but doubly depressing for one who was a newly qualified doctor. ‘All I wanted,’ wrote Glaister, ‘was to be given the home leave due to me.’ He returned to Scotland and he and Muff were married in Glasgow Cathedral on 25 May 1918. In due course, he was again posted to the Middle East to serve in a military hospital at Ludd in Egypt. One of his first tasks was to set up an emergency unit to deal with an outbreak of bacillary dysentery among Turkish prisoners. He contracted the disease himself and was reduced to a low ebb, losing a great deal of weight and picking up influenza while in the base hospital in Cairo. He was sent home on a hospital ship eventually arriving in a poor condition at University College Hospital, Birmingham, where he was meant to convalesce. One of the doctors there was a friend of his father’s and he pulled a few strings to allow ‘Young John’ to go home to Glasgow. ‘When I did reach home,’ he wrote later, ‘I was still skeleton thin and anaemic, so that my young bride walked past me on the station platform.’

  When he was finally demobilised in August 1919, ‘Young John’ settled down to the life of a married man and contemplated the direction of his future career. He knew that he was destined to take up medico-legal work and had already obtained a post as part-time lecturer at Glasgow University. But, first, he would gain experience in general practice. He and Muff moved into rented accommodation in the city’s North Kelvinside district and he ‘put up his plate’. After a slow start, he acquired some 300 patients on his panel and began to acquire work from the Ministry of Pensions. He also started to build up the medico-legal side of his portfolio, working, as he liked to describe it, as ‘a back-room boy’ in his father’s forensic team.

  It was not long before he decided to give up general practice and devote his attention to medical jurisprudence. Things had been progressing sufficiently well to allow the couple to move with their two young daughters to a house in Fitzroy Place. When ‘Young John’ was appointed lecturer in medical jurisprudence by the City of Glasgow Police, his future direction seemed assured. But he had set himself a severe schedule, carrying out research leading to a doctorate of medicine and also studying to become a barrister. For good measure, he was also planning a thesis which he hoped would earn him a doctorate of science.

  The laboratory aspects of forensic work had captured his interest and it was in the realms of the ‘backroom’ that he first made his mark. In 1901, a young German military doctor, Paul Uhlenhuth, working in the University of Greifswald, announced that he had found a way of differentiating between human and animal blood. Researchers had long been seeking a way of overcoming this barrier to crime investigation and Uhlenhuth’s precipitin test promised to be that breakthrough. What Glaister proposed to do was to eliminate doubt from the testing procedure due to incidental factors like temperature, the age of the bloodstain and the biological sera used in the test. He believed that only by putting the reliability of the precipitin test beyond doubt would British courts accept it as satisfactory. Here was the work of the true professional. Uhlenhuth had achieved the glory and all Glaister wanted was to turn the discovery into a reliable tool for the forensic investigator.

  His other chosen field of backroom laboratory work was one in which he rightly received plaudits in due course as an innovator. This was his classification of mammalian hair, a task which had a Holmesian ring to it and one which represented another landmark for forensic investigators. Hairs were often found at a crime scene and the problem was to identify them as of human or animal origin in order to eliminate fruitless lines of investigation. Glaister wanted to create a standard reference table so that the origin of any hair sample could be identified. This work involved collecting reference samples from all manner of sources, including zoos, museums and taxidermists, and the task took several years to complete.

  Both of his major pieces of research involved the minutiae of crime investigation. Forensic pioneers such as Dr Edmond Locard at the University of Lyon had shown the potential for solving crimes by examining trace evidence at the crime scene on both victim and suspect. The fact that even the slightest contact results in a transfer of such mundane materials as distinctive hairs and fibres, while violent contact may involve biological traces such as blood, saliva or semen, opened up a whole vista for forensic scientists. The methods for examining trace evidence have grown ever more sophisticated with the use of advanced chemical analysis. When Glaister was telling his students about the ‘key of interchange’, as he called the concept of trace evidence, he might have dreamed of identifying body fluids as unerringly as fingerprints. But it was to take well over half a century before the first murder conviction would be secured by means of genetic fingerprinting.

  Glaister, father and son, frequently answered calls from the police together. ‘Young John’ had a happy apprenticeship and readily deferred to his father’s experience. But, all the while, he was building up his own expertise and, in the year that he helped his father on the Merrett case, he was awarded his doctorate of medicine and was also called to the Bar at the Inner Temple. His work on the precipitin test was to have slightly ironic consequences for the father and son relationship when they both appeared as prosecution witnesses in a case tried at Edinburgh’s High Court of Justiciary. The defence challenged the reliability of blood tests and asked ‘Old John’ why he had been so critical of them in a textbook he had written. Glaister senior answered that he had changed his views in light of recent advances and said that future references in his textbook would be amended. ‘Young John’ was unaware of this when his turn came to give evidence. As the author of the new research in blood testing, he was closely questioned by the defence. He was astute enough to realise that counsel was leading him on to say that he was an expert in this particular field, with the implication that Glaister senior knew little about these new advances and was merely relying on his son’s knowledge. Sensing the trap, ‘Young John’ replied by saying that, although he carried out all the tests, the results were checked and corroborated by his father.

  The Merrett case, tried in Edinburgh in 1927, brought together both the established and the emerging forensic talent of the time. The Glasgow team comprised Professor John Glaister and his son, who would be his successor in due course, and the Edinburgh pair were Professor Harvey Littlejohn and Sydney Smith, his eventual successor. Sir Bernard Spilsbury, of course, was one of the major participants and the full story has been told in Chapter One. The Glaisters’ interpretation of the evidence, favouring murder rather than suicide, was shown by subsequent events to have been the more correct, although it was not accepted as such at the time.

  Later that year, ‘Young John’ completed his thesis on mammalian hair and he was awarded a doctorate of science. He thus completed an intensive period of study which set him up as a highly qualified forensic practitioner and one thing was sure – there would be no shortage of op
portunities to exercise his skills. Such an opportunity occurred in 1928 when, following Harvey Littlejohn’s death, Sydney Smith succeeded him in the chair at Edinburgh. This left a vacancy in Egypt when Smith gave up his eleven-year tenure of office and ‘Young John’ was invited to apply for the Chair of Forensic Medicine at the University of Cairo. Smith told him he would see almost as many medico-legal cases in a week in Egypt as he would see in an average year in Britain. Glaister was attracted by the proposition, not least because he believed that forensic medicine should be put on an international footing. In November 1928, John Glaister, with his wife and two daughters, sailed from Liverpool for Port Said.

  With an average of 150 post-mortem examinations a month, the new professor soon realised the correctness of Sydney Smith’s prediction. ‘Shooting and stabbing were two favourite methods of murder in Cairo,’ he wrote, and, ‘There was nothing unusual in finding half a dozen overnight murders requiring attention when I arrived for work after breakfast’. Egypt’s ancient traditions enabled him to write a footnote in the medical textbooks regarding the precipitin test. Professor Douglas Derry, Head of the Anatomy Department and a keen Egyptologist, invited John Glaister to accompany him on a number of ‘digs’. The opportunity arose to be present at the unwrapping of a mummy from the Twelfth Dynasty. He took tissue samples from various organs and subjected them to the precipitin test, achieving positive results with material dating back between 3 and 4,000 years. The point was made that the test was reliable even when used on very old samples.