gs, and partly for the
purpose of their making experiments on animals. Asked why he had not
given this second reason before, he said that as Auguste was not a
medical man it would have been damaging to his reputation to divulge the
fact of his wishing to make unauthorised experiments on animals. "Why
go to Paris for the poison?" asked the judge, "there was a chemist a few
yards from the hotel. And when in Paris, why go to two chemists?" To all
these questions Castaing's answers were such as to lead the President
to express a doubt as to whether they were likely to convince the jury.
Castaing was obliged to admit that he had allowed, if not ordered, the
evacuations of the sick man to be thrown away. He stated that he had
thrown away the morphia and antimony, which he had bought in Paris,
in the closets of the hotel, because, owing to the concatenation of
circumstances, he thought that he would be suspected of murder. In reply
to a question from one of the jury, Castaing said that he had mixed
the acetate of morphia and tartar emetic together before reaching Saint
Cloud, but why he had done so he could not explain.

The medical evidence at the trial was favourable to the accused. Orfila,
the famous chemist of that day, said that, though the symptoms in
Auguste Ballet's case might be attributed to poisoning by acetate of
morphia or some other vegetable poison, at the same time they could
be equally well attributed to sudden illness of a natural kind. The
liquids, taken from the stomach of Ballet, had yielded on analysis no
trace of poison of any sort. The convulsive symptoms present in Ballet's
case were undoubtedly a characteristic result of a severe dose of
acetate of morphia.(14) Castaing said that he had mixed the acetate of
morphia and tartar emetic together, but in any case no trace of either
poison was found in Auguste's body, and his illness might, from all
appearances, have been occasioned by natural causes. Some attempt was
made by the prosecution to prove that the apoplexy to which Hippolyte
Ballet had finally succumbed, might be attributed to a vegetable poison;
one of the doctors expressed an opinion favourable to that conclusion
"as a man but not as a physician." But the evidence did not go further.

(14) It was asserted some years later by one medical authority in
Palmer's case that it might have been morphia and not strychnine that
had caused the tetanic symptoms which preceded Cook's death.

To