During the golden age of British murder, not only the murderers and their advocates, but the forensic pathologists whose evidence was vital in convicting or acquitting them, were celebrities or at least household names, even – or especially – for readers of the popular press. Luminaries such as Glaister and Sydney Smith published popular books (The Power of Poison, Mostly Murder), but the most successful of the genre was undoubtedly Keith Simpson’s Forty Years of Murder. Published in 1978, when the author was 71, it was a worldwide best-seller.

Simpson (1907 – 1985) begins the book by asking rhetorically why he chose pathology, and on the last page he provides an answer, perhaps more compelling now than ever before: ‘My patients,’ he writes, ‘never complain.’ He allows himself the frankness – or is it the insensitivity? – of another age, though the book was written only a third of a century ago:

When I have seen strangled girls who had deliberately taken the occupational risks of prostitution, drunken sots who had toppled downstairs to their death, or the adolescent victims of the lure of drug addiction, I have often said without the  slightest emotional disturbance, ‘Better out of this world…’

Who would dare admit to such sentiments today? His division of the victims of sex crimes into prostitutes and nice girls would not find much favour, either, even supposing it were possible: though Simpson is at pains to point out that his moral opinion of the victim or the suspect never affected his judgment on a technical matter. I believe him.

His sense of humour is of the macabre kind, as perhaps one might expect of a member of his fraternity. Here, for example, is his advice to those who unexpectedly find a body at their feet or in their house:

There is no question, if you find yourself standing over the body of your mother-in-law clutching a claret bottle and she’s lying there bleeding at your feet, you must at least call for help.

What is not quite clear from this passage is whether it is you or your mother-in-law who is clutching the bottle of claret, but I suppose that is an inessential detail.

His dryness belongs to another age. Describing how Haigh, the acid-bath murderer, disposed of the body of Mrs Durand-Deacon after shooting her, he says:

Then, removing her Persian lamb coat and jewellery, he had put her fully clothed body into a 40-gallon steel tank, and gone to the café across the road for a poached egg on toast and a cup of tea.

If he’d gone for champagne, we wouldn’t smile. But a poached egg on toast…

Simpson tells the astonishing story of the matron of a private nursing home who, in 1950, suffocated an elderly patient who had pushed her beyond endurance by her contrariness. She was found guilty of manslaughter, and given only a short sentence because of the provocation she had endured (she was normally of exemplary character and conduct). It was Simpson who had done the post-mortem on the deceased and given evidence in court about cause of death.

Twenty years later he took his mother, now aged 90 and no longer able to live independently, to a nursing home. The matron of the nursing home was the one against whom he testified in 1950.

‘I do hope,’ he said to her, ‘that my old mother won’t be any trouble to you.’

As Professor Simpson writes later in the book: ‘Every doctor, for all his professional detachment, still has his feelings.’ We express them differently now.

Copyright 2013 Anthony Daniels

Foreword by Steve

As some readers may have noticed, the British Medical Journal ended Dalrymple’s “Between the Lines” column this past December. It’s a shame, because these were very enjoyable little columns that combined both of Dalrymple’s parallel careers. We remarked more than once how impressive was his intellect that he was able to write, once per week for at least (by our count) five years and on top of all of his other responsibilities as a doctor and a writer, a column on the subject of medicine in literature.

Fortunately for us, he not only wrote so many of these columns, but he wrote them well in advance. When the column ended, he had a large backlog of unpublished pieces, and he has asked us to publish them on Skeptical Doctor. We will run one per week, on Wednesdays, just as they were published at the BMJ. This gives us over a year’s worth of such pieces. Enjoy.

Somerset Maugham, the great doctor-author, once said that he would rather read a railway timetable than nothing at all, and I am of that ilk. One of the few lessons that life has taught me is never to go anywhere without a book, for then delay cannot irritate, and indeed (if it is a good book) can delight. A life of frustration is thereby transformed into a life of pleasure.

But no one ever keeps entirely to his principles, and recently I found myself walking in a provincial city without a book. Worse still, I had no notebook with me when suddenly I was struck by an idea for an article. My memory not being what it once was (or what I think it once was), I felt the need to write down my idea at once. I went into a stationer’s and bought an exercise book.

In my childhood such books had on their covers information about how many drachmas made a grain and how many rods and poles made a perch (or was it the other way round?). But now that we have the metric system – so dull by comparison – to blunt our brains, we need different information, a different stimulus, from the covers of our exercise books. The one I bought taught ‘Active reading and listening skills for your studies, work and life.’ There was enough in it to read and keep me occupied if the bus came late; by thus purchasing it, I had killed two birds with one stone. Not bad for £2.99!

One learns a lot from casually-encountered sources, I find. For example, ‘Active reading’ involves, among other things, understanding what is written; one’s notes should always be appropriate. But now that so much of doctors’ time is taken up by meetings, it was the section on ‘Active listening’ that I found most illuminating.

When you are at a committee meeting and some boring fool is droning on, proposing something absurd because some bigger boring fool higher up the ladder has told him to propose it, ‘smile and use other facial expressions’ (not grimaces, of course), and ‘nod occasionally’ (but not from sleep). You ‘should encourage the speaker to continue with small verbal comments such as “Yes” and “uh-uh,”’ and you should ‘Note your posture and make sure it’s open and inviting.’

In the world of active listening skills, there is no one who is ill-intentioned or needs no encouragement to continue speaking. That is why you must remember that ‘Active listening is a model for respect and understanding.’ At no time must you ever be distracted by the thought that the speaker is a time-serving apparatchik who would sell his mother for a team-building away-day (with or without a vegetarian option for lunch), let alone promotion to the post of Director of Co-ordination. ‘Responding appropriately’ is one of the five keys to ‘Active listening’ and never includes anything as vigorous as disagreement, let alone scorn: for appropriate is now as weaselly a word as ‘valid,’ as (for example) in ‘My opinion is as valid as yours.’

Am I imagining it, or are we living in a world of increasingly inescapable exhortatory platitude, from which an awareness of the tragic dimension of life has been expunged by ‘active reading and listening skills’? If you doubt it, I can only advise the following, with regard to this article:

Once you have read appropriate sections, run through the key information in your mind several times. Isolate the core facts or essential processes…

And then scream.

Copyright 2013 Anthony Daniels