The job of a divisional surgeon was to attend to the troops. Free medical care was a benefit of working for the Metropolitan Police, and a police surgeon was to be available when needed to examine prisoners, or to go to the local jail to determine if a citizen was drunk, ill, or suffering from an excess of “animal spirits,” which I presume refers to excitement or hysteria. In the late 1880s, the divisional surgeon also responded to death scenes for a fee of one pound one shilling per case; he was paid two pounds two shillings if he performed the autopsy. But by no means was he expected to be well acquainted with the microscope, the nuances of injuries and poisonings, and what the body can reveal after death.
Most likely, Dr. Llewellyn was a local doctor the police felt comfortable calling upon, and it is possible that he had located in Whitechapel for humanitarian reasons. He was a Fellow of the British Gynecological Society, and would have been accustomed to being called upon at all hours of the night. When the police rapped on his door on the cool, overcast early morning of August 31st, he probably got to the scene as quickly as possible. He wasn’t trained to do much more than determine that the victim was really dead and offer the police an educated guess as to when death had occurred.
Unless the body was turning green around the abdomen, which would indicate the beginning stages of decomposition, it was traditional in the early days of death investigation to wait at least twenty-four hours before performing the postmortem, on the remote chance that the person might still be alive and “come to” as he or she was being cut open. For centuries, the fear prevailed that one might be mistaken for dead and buried alive. Bizarre stories of people suddenly trying to sit up inside their coffins were in circulation, prompting some who were sufficiently concerned about such a fright to have their grave rigged with a bell attached to a string that ran through the earth to the coffin. Some stories may have been veiled references to cases of necrophilia. In one instance, a woman in her coffin wasn’t really dead when a man had sex with her. She was paralyzed, it turned out, but conscious enough to consent to the weakness of the flesh.
Police reports of Mary Ann Nichols’s murder leave little doubt that Dr. Llewellyn did not seem particularly interested in a victim’s clothing, especially the filthy rags of a prostitute. Clothing was not a source of evidence but identification. Perhaps someone recognized a victim by what he or she was wearing. People did not carry around forms of identification in the late 1800s, unless it was a passport or visa. But that would have been rare. Neither one was required for British citizens to travel to the Continent. A body was unidentified when it was collected off the street and came to the mortuary unless he or she was known by the locals or the police.
I have often wondered how many poor souls went to their graves unidentified or misnamed. It would not have been a difficult task to murder someone and conceal the victim’s identity, or to fake one’s own death. During the investigations of the Ripper murders, no attempt was made to distinguish human blood from that of birds or fish or mammals. Unless the blood was on the body or near it, or on a weapon at the scene, the police could not say that the blood was related to the crime or came from a horse or a sheep or a cow. In the 1880s, the streets of Whitechapel near slaughterhouses were putrid with blood and entrails, and men walked about with blood on their clothing and hands.
Dr. Llewellyn misinterpreted just about every detail in Mary Ann Nichols’s murder. But he probably did the best he could with his limited training and what was available at the time. It might be interesting to imagine how the murder of Mary Ann Nichols would be investigated today. I’ll place the scene in Virginia – not because it is where I once worked and have continued to be mentored, but because it has one of the best statewide medical examiner systems in America.