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Chris Scott
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Chris
Post Number: 1322
Registered: 4-2003
| | Posted on Monday, August 16, 2004 - 6:53 am: |       |
I have posted various very short mentions in the press reports regarding the opinions of the gynaecologist, Lawson Tait, and his theories. I have finally found a fuller version of his ideas in an interview he did:
Ogden Standard Examiner
16 October 1889
WHO IS THE RIPPER?
A Curious Theory about the Famous London Murderer
Lawson Tait, the eminent women's surgeon, having read the suggestion published in our columns that Jack the Ripper might be a woman, said the Pall Mall Gazette, had yesterday a chat with one of our representatives. He said:
"No serious suggestion in connection with this matter that one can make may be wisely discarded or made light of. The police have discovered nothing, and are evidently at their wits' end. They must begin afresh.
"I have taken a great interest in these tragedies from the very commencement. Now, looking at the subject as a surgeon, the first conclusion is that the whole of the murders, not only in Whitechapel but in Battersea and Chelsea, are the work of one and the same individual. They must be grouped together. Secondly, the crimes are the work of a lunatic. The absolute motivelessness of the whole business shows this.
"Again, the operator must have been a person accustomed to use a sharp knife upon meat. The work was done by no surgeon. A surgeon cuts in a niggling kind of way. The murderer in these cases has worked in a free, slashing manner. The criminal must have been a butcher, and a London butcher. The cuts are made in a manner peculiar to the London butcher. They would have been made quite differently if the operator had hailed from Dublin or Edinburgh.
"I have said the criminal was mad. He or she is a undoubtedly a person suffering from epileptic furor. The fits last for only a short time. May not police be floored at the outset by the important question of sex? The male epileptic has his fits irregularly. In the case of a woman this is not so. This is something to go upon. Granted that an epileptic be the criminal, on coming out of his or her fit the offender would have no recollection of the murder and cutting up, and would resume his or her everyday life in no way perturbed by what had happened. Nothing is more likely than that Jack the Ripper is some big, strong woman engaged at a slaughter house in cleaning up, now and then actually cutting up the meat.
"Again, in a number of instances, the woman when found were hardly dead. The bodies were warm. The murderers could not be far away. That fact that the police were so close upon the criminal goes to prove to a wonderful degree that the operator was a woman. On the discovery of one of the murders the police promptly made a circuit around the neighbourhood. Nobody was arrested, or rather, no man was arrested. They did not look for a woman."
"How could a woman so cleverly have committed the deed?"
"It must be clearly understood that whoever was the criminal would be thoroughly splashed with blood. It would impossible to hack and hew a warm body in Ripper fashion without getting all over blood. A man who thus besmeared himself could not possibly get clear away time after time. The thing would be perfectly easy for a woman. See here."
Here Lawson Tait picked up a Liberty chair back and placed it round him like an apron. "Conceive the murder done and the woman all splashed. All she has to do is to roll up her skirt to her waist, leaving her petticoat, and fold up her shawl that is over her shoulders and tucked in at her middle. Then she might pass through the crowd with the very slightest fear of detection.
"Then as to washing the bloodied garments. What would a man do? Plunge them into hot water. Result, the blood coagulates, won't come off and stains the clothes. And where is he to get the hot water, or how is he to pour away bloody water undetected? A woman is always at the wash tub, and she would put the clothes in cold water, when, with a little soap and rubbing, they would become clean, practically unstained, and she would be unsuspected.
"An important point is to be noted in connection with what has been termed the fiendish disembowelling of the bodies, and with reference to the particular place at which the incisions have been begun. It is no wild slashing, done without method by a novice with a knife. Having cut the victim's throat from behind, the operator simply by an act of unconscious cerebration goes to her work in the regular butcher fashion. Having slit the calf's neck, the next thing to be done is to make an incision at the bottom of the abdomen, and lay aside the various organs in the very fashion reported at the inquests as having been done. The resemblance between the Ripper's work and that of a butcher is complete.
"On at least one of the occasions when the police came upon the scene there were to be noticed several women in the crowd that quickly gathered. Had those bystanders been searched there is all the chance that the criminal would have been captured."
"What advice do you, then, give to the police?" our representative asked.
"Let them visit all the slaughter houses in the district, inquire as to male or female regular assistants or occasional helps - there are not so many slaughter houses, and they are all licensed and under the health authorities - and find out what facilities there are for entrance into the houses after the work of the day is done.
"If this were carefully done at once the police would catch the criminal in a week. The police need to go in a brand new road."
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Christopher T George
Chief Inspector
Username: Chrisg
Post Number: 844
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Monday, August 16, 2004 - 11:41 am: | |
Hi, Chris
Thanks for this valuable find that provides more on Dr. Lawson Tait's views on the case.
As a matter of information, though of a negative nature, since my search has not so far garnered for us anything useful, let me mention some investigating in which I have been engaged.
I presently work for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in Washington, D.C. The historical section of the College's Resource Center (library to us paeons!) owns a good number of the British and American obstetrical and gynecological journals back to 1888-1889, and I have been going through different issues in case there is anything on the case by Lawson Tait, Howard Kelly, or other eminent obstetrician-gynecologists of the day, whom I had hoped might have either written a letter to the editor or presented a paper at a conference giving their opinions of the crimes.
Unfortunately, I must report that to date such a motherload has eluded me in my search of the medical literature of the contemporary ob-gyn titles. Nonetheless, I thought it worthwhile to take this moment record this as an area in which I have been researching, if so far, alas, unproductively. 
Best regards
Chris George
Christopher T. George
North American Editor
Ripperologist
http://www.ripperologist.info
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Andrew Spallek
Chief Inspector
Username: Aspallek
Post Number: 564
Registered: 5-2003
| | Posted on Monday, August 16, 2004 - 11:58 am: | |
Interesting article. I just wonder how in the world a London butcher's cuts would differ so markedly from those of butcher from Edinburgh or Dublin! And how would a doctor be so familiar with this information?
Andy S. |
Christopher T George
Chief Inspector
Username: Chrisg
Post Number: 845
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Monday, August 16, 2004 - 12:29 pm: | |
P.S. I should add that Dr. Howard A. Kelly did profess some views on the case that we know about, and they can be found in the press section, in a letter to the editor of The Medical News published October 13, 1888 and signed, HOWARD A. KELLY, Assoc. Prof. Obst., Univ of Penna. Hopefully additional material giving more on Dr. Kelly's ideas about the case might be found just as it has for Dr. Tait.
Chris
Christopher T. George
North American Editor
Ripperologist
http://www.ripperologist.info
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