Medical Jurisprudence from the Judicial Standpoint
London, Stevens and Sons, Limited, 1913.
Octavo, viii, 331 pages (the publisher's advertisements, found at the rear of some copies, were evidently never bound in here).
Blind-ruled maroon cloth a little bumped, rubbed and sunned; a few marks internally; a very good copy.
A presentation copy, inscribed and signed by the author on the front free endpaper 'To Professor A. Watson, with the author's kind regards, 18th March 1914'. The recipient is Professor Archibald Watson (1849-1940), 'erratic, histrionic genius', and sometime professor of anatomy and operative surgery at the University of Adelaide. Later provenance of Edward Angas Johnson (1873-1951), with his ownership signature and annotations on the front free endpaper, and numerous pencilled emphases in coloured pencils in the text. Johnson was sometime City Health Officer of Adelaide, and is mentioned in accounts of the controversial autopsies that led to William Ramsay Smith's suspension from his position as City Coroner following charges of mutilating human bodies. Tipped-in on page 91 is a plate (from another publication) relating to the Streaky Bay murders. William Ramsay Smith (1859-1937), physician, anthropologist, coroner, plagiarist and trafficker in human remains: 'In August 1903 he was suspended from his coronial duties following charges of misusing human bodies. The government set up another board of inquiry.... Smith was cleared and his painstaking research commended; but, while remaining coroner and head of the health department, he had to relinquish his hospital and other duties because of possible conflict of interests. Perhaps uniquely for Australian coroners, Smith made medical statements from the bench which were pedagogical, informed, incisive and objective. He wrote "A Manual for Coroners" (1904), long regarded as a standard text' ('Australian Dictionary of Biography', giving a somewhat sanitised account of his career). His suitability to comment on medical jurisprudence is thrown into new light when we consider that 'his main interest lay in postmortem research for "medical purposes", and Smith used his positions to illicitly dissect and remove human remains. Witnesses described how Smith would practise with a .303 rifle on corpses at the mortuary of Adelaide Hospital. Outside, it was not unusual to see the head of an Aboriginal in a kerosene tin, waiting to be sent to DJ Cunningham, professor of anatomy at Edinburgh, where Smith donated the majority of remains - including organs, skin, tongues and male genitalia - over at least a 15-year period' (Claire Scobie, 'The Observer Magazine', 2009).
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