Life Among the Dead

THE SCALPEL OF SCOTLAND YARD (503 pp.)--Douglas G. Browne and E. V. Tullett--Dutton ($5).

Scotland Yard detectives were convinced that the body in the seaside bungalow was Emily Kaye's. The trouble was going to be in proving it. Four large pieces of her body were lying in a trunk. Thirty-seven smaller pieces were in a hatbox. The rest of her had been reduced to splinters and bone dust.

Sir Bernard Spilsbury, Home Office pathologist, was called upon to reconstruct the body. He spent a full day collecting the pieces, and worked all night making a rough assembly. Then he did a routine day's work, after which he spent a second night finishing the reconstruction of Emily Kaye. The resulting "masterpiece" helped to send her murderer to the gallows--where Sir Bernard, quiet and efficient as ever, was on hand to perform the official post-mortem and confirm that death had resulted from dislocation of the murderer's spine "between the fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae."

25,000 Post-Mortems. By the time Spilsbury died in 1947, at 70, he had performed the stupendous total of 25,000 postmortems. "To the man in the street he stood for pathology as Hobbs stood for cricket or Dempsey for boxing or Capablanca for chess." When he gave a lecture, sensitive listeners swooned away, but hardier souls became his disciples forever. "To watch Sir Bernard . . . demonstrating on ... a kidney," said a nostalgic old student, "was--I should imagine--like watching Turner paint."

Most of The Scalpel of Scotland Yard is about the trials at which Spilsbury gave evidence, including such famous shockers as the Crippen Case and the Brides in the Baths.* The rest of it is a polite autopsy on Spilsbury himself, an attempted reconstruction of a life that was devoted almost exclusively to death.

At Oxford, he was noted only as "a nice, very ordinary individual" who, for some reason, chose to nickname himself "Buggins." At St. Mary's medical school in London, he was distinguished by his passion for microscope work and his distaste for personal familiarities ("Don't touch me, please!" he told would-be backslappers).

He grew into a tall, slim man with tight-set lips. He wore a carnation in his buttonhole and a high choker collar under his laboratory apron. He showed no great interest in food, drink or money, but he smoked 50 cigarettes a day. His small sense of humor was strictly professional. "His family still possesses [a human] thighbone .. . tied with ribbon and given as a Christmas present to the dog."

He had all the attributes of "a born detective," plus an unshakeable moral code. He kept a careful record of the names of doctors under whose "care," he thought, too many young women died; the resulting lists became a standing terror to British abortionists. To murderers, he became a more fearsome feature of the courtroom than the grimmest of judges. Foolish defense attorneys cross-examined him in the hope of breaking down his air of absolute rectitude and exactitude, but wiser ones let him have his say, and thanked God when he was done. Judges fell over themselves to praise him as "the perfect witness."

"Do you remember Dr. Spilsbury?" Judge Darling asked the jury in an arsenic case. "Do you remember how he stood, and the way in which he gave evidence? . . . Did you ever see a witness who more thoroughly satisfied you that he was absolutely impartial, absolutely fair, absolutely indifferent as to whether his evidence told for the one side or the other?"

Most juries agreed so warmly with the judges on such points that in one case, when the defense called in eight doctors to refute Spilsbury, the jury refused to be swayed by them. At last people began to protest. Spilsbury's pronouncements, a lawyer complained, were becoming "invested with the force of dogma, and it was blasphemy to hint that he might conceivably be wrong."

An Open Burner. During World War II, Spilsbury became virtually an "isolated" man, a "living legend." In 1940 he was shaken up by a stroke, stunned by his son Peter's death. Students and young doctors spoke of his kindness and tact, but his work among the dead had taken him so far away from the living that he had few close friends. He lived alone in a hotel, where other residents tried occasionally to consult him about their ailments. He used to answer that "when they were dead he would cut them up and tell them what was the matter."

By war's end, people noticed that there was something the matter with Spilsbury himself. The "infallible" brain was cracking, the sure hands fumbling. The "perfect witness" gave evidence of nervous symptoms, including a crazy fear of losing his job and finding himself penniless. A second stroke and the loss of another son pushed him over the edge.

It had always been his custom to order his post-mortem forms in batches of 500. Toward the end of 1947, he ordered only 100. When he had used most of them, he wrote to a colleague in Switzerland saying that he refused to "linger on to become a burden to others." The week before Christmas, he filled out the last of the forms and put it in the mailbox. He informed his garage staff that he would not be seeing them over the New Year, and gave them their Christmas presents. That night he was found dead in his laboratory, beside an open Bunsen burner.

"Dr. R. H. D. Short, who performed the postmortem, gave as the primary cause of death coronary thrombosis; the secondary cause was carbon monoxide poisoning."

* George Joseph Smith drowned three successive brides in their tubs, having been willed the estate of the first and having insured the other two; Spilsbury proved that they could not have died from fits or faints while bathing. Dr. Crippen poisoned his wife, carved up her remains and buried them in the cellar. Spilsbury identified her by a bit of abdominal skin with the scar of an old operation on it.

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