One early theory surrounding the Jack the Ripper case was that the gruesome mutilations could only have been carried out by a surgeon or someone with anatomical knowledge. This suggestion was later dismissed by other doctors, who were perhaps keen to disassociate their profession from the crimes. Whatever the truth, there were other murders in 1888 that police suspected had been carried out by doctors. These three female victims all died following suspected ‘unlawful operations’, a term generally used by newspapers to refer to abortions. Before 1803 terminations were allowed if they took place before the baby began to move in the womb (known as the ‘quickening’), but by 1861 the punishment was life imprisonment. Doctors were prepared to carry out the procedure if the mother’s life was in danger, but otherwise the choice was either visiting a ‘back-street’ abortionist or taking the pills and miracle cures advertised in the newspapers. The ultimate risk of both options was death.128
On 14 February 1888, a twenty-seven-year-old chimneysweep’s widow called Elizabeth Gorman died at her home at No.4 Callow Street, Fulham Road, Chelsea. The post-mortem revealed that she had suffered internal injuries from an unlawful operation which could not have been self-inflicted. According to witnesses, Mrs Gorman had called a series of medical men to see her in the days before her death, but later claimed she was only suffering from a cold. Emma Young, a neighbour, said she recommended that Mrs Gorman cure her ‘violent chill’ by putting her feet in mustard and hot water and bought her some pills from a dispensary. The newspapers reported no details of what exactly her internal injuries were, but did note that she had been living with a man named Miller since her husband’s death a few months earlier. The jury were satisfied with the evidence enough to return a verdict of wilful murder against person or persons unknown. The inference is that one of the medical men had performed a botched abortion, but it appears that nobody was ever arrested or charged.129
A botched abortion was also responsible for the death of a twenty-one-year-old woman in Somerstown, north London. Emma Wakefield was ‘a good looking, well-conducted girl’ with a steady job as a shell-box maker at a factory in Charrington Street. She was engaged to her boyfriend of five years, Thomas Price, and was due to be married the following May. He too had good prospects, earning £1 a week at a local printing works. On 23 September 1888, she was staying with Mr Price at the home of his married sister at No.60 Aldenham Street. Shortly after going out for an hour and a half with finacé, she suddenly fell ill. The following day she went to see a doctor, but he diagnosed her as having a chest infection and recommended that she rest in bed. Emma’s condition gradually deteriorated and she died on Saturday 29 September. The post-mortem revealed the cause of death was blood poisoning following an abortion. ‘There were two internal abrasions which could not have been caused naturally,’ reported the Reynolds's Weekly Newspaper. ‘An instrument had been used.’
Who had carried out the operation? Thomas Price, his married sister and his mother denied all knowledge of any pregnancy. Emma Wakefield had not told the doctor of her condition and her mother had been away in the country at the time. But Mr Price did reveal a strange conversation that he had with his fiancée shortly before her death. ‘She said an angel was waiting to receive her, that she was leaving the world a prudent upright girl, that she was quitting this life without a fault upon her tongue and that she was cut down in the midst of her bloom,’ he told the inquest. At other times she sang hymns ‘oh so sweetly’ or launched into random outbursts, pointing at Mr Price’s mother and shouting: ‘Look at that woman in the corner, you liar, you liar! You deceived me. Go out of this room.’ She was clearly delirious as a result of her illness. Thomas’ mother claimed that Emma mentioned a ‘Mr Johnson’, the fifty-year-old married foreman of the factory where she worked. Mr Johnson had called to see her while she was ill and after he left she had rambled: ‘Stand up, Mr Johnson! Father, look at him! Mrs Price, get out of the way … Ah! I have got you!’
Police searched No.60 Aldenham Street but found nothing to indicate what had happened. It seemed likely that at least one of the witnesses was covering something up, but nothing else emerged to clear up the mystery and Emma’s father insisted that Mr Price ‘would not hurt a hair of her head’. The jury returned a verdict that Emma Wakefield had ‘died from the effects of blood poisoning following abortion, caused by the illegal use of instruments’, and they were of opinion that some person or persons at present unknown were guilty of causing her death.The coroner William Wynn Westcott added: ‘Your verdict is tantamount to one of wilful murder. I think perjury has been committed.’130
As in the Gorman case, no further action was taken. In the third case, however, there was a trial at the Old Bailey.
Eliza Schummacher was convinced that she was pregnant. She was a thirty-nine-year-old married dressmaker and already had two children. By 1888 she had lived apart from her husband, a gentleman’s servant, for several years, but nobody knew whether he was the father or if it was somebody else. Either way, she did not want to have the child and decided to seek help from a doctor. Eliza chose James Gloster, a thirty-four-year-old Irishman practising in Upper Phillimore Place, a row of grand late-Georgian terraced houses in Kensington. ‘She told me that she believed she was in the family way and asked if I could help her to get rid of it,’ Dr Gloster said, recalling the meeting in early June 1888. ‘I told her most certainly I could not, that no doctor could hear of such a thing.’ She went to another doctor in Soho instead, the Italian-speaking Louis Tarrico, from South America.
Three weeks later, Eliza was bedbound and in excruciating pain. Her local doctor Charles Crane visited her home at No.21 Moreton Place, Pimlico, and asked her what had happened. What she told him shocked him so much that he decided to write it down. Her statement, dictated on the afternoon of 27 June, a few hours before her death, appeared to implicate Dr Gloster:
I thought I was pregnant and I went to see Dr Gloster … he said as I had mentioned the subject for which I had gone to him he could not have anything to do with me. He said go to Dr Tarrico. I wanted him to write the address and he said no, no one can mistake a name like this. He told me to ask Dr Tarrico if he would examine me for something for the womb and if Dr Tarrico did so examine me then he Dr Gloster would take on the case. Then I went to Dr Tarrico and he passed an instrument – that was on the same day in the evening as I went to Dr Gloster that was last Tuesday four weeks. Dr Tarrico did not hurt me, he was gentle. I went to Dr Gloster next day and he passed an instrument into my body which hurt me very much. He came to see me here on the 11th June and he again passed an instrument which hurt me very much. I have been in pain ever since and unable to get up. He said if I was very bad I was to send for him. I did send for him, I was in great agony. I cursed him. He did not pass an instrument that day. He brought some medicine. He applied some cotton wool. I thought he had left the cotton wool inside me. I did not see him again. I have never been very well since and I do not think I am going to be so. I make this statement with the fear of death before my eyes.
Eliza Schummacher had never been pregnant – it was all in her mind. At the post-mortem, Dr Thomas Bond found that she did indeed still have a piece of cotton wool inside her – but in the pelvic cavity rather than the womb. The cavity was also full of pus. At first he could not explain how the cotton wool had got there, but on closer examination he found a slight scar which he was able to pass a probe through. Somehow it had been forced through the lining of the uterus by a pointed instrument, possibly a doctor’s speculum. ‘I have no doubt death was caused by peritonitis,’ reported Dr Bond. ‘I should think the wound was caused at least a week before death … it would have caused great pain.’
Both Gloster and Tarrico were arrested and charged with causing Eliza’s death. Gloster denied involvement, claiming he had sent the woman to another doctor, and reacted angrily to her allegations. ‘I don’t know what made her say that when she was dying. It must be in spite. You don’t know her. She is a drunken woman.’ He even denied that he mentioned the name of Dr Tarrico to Mrs Schummacher, whereas Tarrico told police that Dr Gloster had asked him to see ‘a friend and patient’ with congestion or ulceration of the womb. ‘He brought a lady upstairs to my front room. I examined her and said I do not know what it is, perhaps it might be congestion.’ Tarrico prescribed rhubarb pills and never saw her again.
On 3 July, the inquest jury returned a verdict of wilful murder against Dr Gloster alone and two weeks later Dr Tarrico was discharged by the magistrate. The problem for the prosecution was that there was no direct evidence that Dr Gloster had caused the fatal injury except for the statement of Eliza Schummacher, who of course could not testify in court. At Westminster Magistrates’ Court, Gloster’s barrister Charles Gill argued that the dying declaration was contradicted by other evidence, particularly on dates. ‘It was not likely that a man of the skill and even special ability of Dr Gloster would perform an operation for which there could be no necessity,’ said Mr Gill. ‘The fatal injury was either occasioned by the woman herself or by some unskilled person.’ Dr Gloster insisted that he had ordered Mrs Schummacher to leave when she told him what she wanted. The magistrate also heard the bizarre evidence of an American surgeon who claimed that a certain ‘Dr Robertson’ had confessed to taking part in the operation. But when cross-examined, the American admitted that he just wanted ‘to get the poor beggar off’. Gloster was committed for trial for murder at the Central Criminal Court.
On 25 September, James Gloster surrendered to bail at the Old Bailey and entered the dock. He struck reporters as ‘a fine gentlemanly-looking man’ as he entered a plea of ‘not guilty’ to the charge. The prosecution case was that Dr Gloster, unaware that Eliza was not pregnant, had performed an operation intending to cause a miscarriage but instead caused the fatal injury. There was evidence that Mrs Schummacher had been perfectly healthy after seeing Dr Tarrico on 8 June. Three days later, she had returned to Dr Gloster and was given a note reading ‘please change cheque for me’. As the prosecutor Harry Bodkin Poland observed, ‘It was strange that instead of the patient giving the doctor money, the doctor was giving the patient money.’ The operation was said to have taken place on 18 June, and the following day Mrs Schummacher fell ill. She sent a telegram to Dr Gloster asking him to come immediately, but he told her that she was just suffering from inflammation and that she should call her local doctor instead. A few days later, Mrs Schummacher’s sister asked Dr Gloster to visit Eliza again because she was complaining that her ‘inside feels like a burning hell’. Unmoved by her plight, he replied, ‘No I won’t come again. She has deceived me. She sent a telegram, open, with my name on in full. I would not go if you were to lay me down £500 this minute. I would not be seen again in the neighbourhood. My name is my name.’ Was this because he knew he had done wrong, and wanted to avoid being connected to the victim?
The prosecution lawyer Harry Bodkin Poland admitted that it was difficult to understand how a properly qualified doctor could make such a mistake. He came up with another theory: ‘Could it be that the person did not intend to procure a miscarriage, but in consequence of the deceased’s persisting that she was pregnant he examined her with an instrument and so injured her in this way?’ If so, then Dr Gloster was guilty not of murder but of manslaughter due to gross negligence. Or was it, as the defence contended, a case of a delusional woman making a false charge against the doctor?
The key evidence was the dying declaration, but the defence argued that it should be declared inadmissible. Dr Crane had admitted that the final part of the statement in which she had the ‘fear of death before my eyes’ was his own wording. He may even have encouraged her to believe she might survive. Did she really have ‘a settled and hopeless expectation of impending death’? All she said was that she did not think she would recover. The judge, Mr Justice Charles, after considering the case law, said that it was not enough that the person thought they would die the following day and concluded that Mrs Schummacher did not ‘ever entirely give herself up for good.’ The judge told the jury that they would not be hearing the statement of the deceased, and as a result the prosecution were dropping the case. The doctor was found not guilty.
James Gloster continued in practice in Upper Phillimore Place and went on to have a son and daughter with his wife Aphra. His name would be printed in the newspapers again in 1895, but not because of any alleged criminality. Instead he had ventured into business as a director of a company hoping to strike gold in Africa. In January 1895 shares were offered for subscription to back up their attempt to buy 140 claims ‘located on the best gold reefs in Matabeleland’. It was not entirely successful, as the £1 shares were selling for only 7s four years later. Still, when he died in September 1916, he left an estate worth £1,900.131
The dangers of illegal abortions highlighted just how desperate some women were to avoid having a child. Eliza Schummacher had told Dr Gloster that if she was unable to have a termination she would be ‘ruined’. This fear led some mothers to resort to drastic measures to rid themselves of their newborn babies. Infanticide was so prevalent in late nineteenth-century London that nearly half of the recorded homicide victims were children younger than three months old.132