presented of one man lying dead in the house from the
effect of poison, of another receiving day after day the fatal dose
with the knowledge of the attending physician, yet no antidote given,
no warning word put forth, no saving of the evidences of guilt! It
would seem as though silence at a trial would best become gentlemen
with such a record, yet they were the only experts who asserted that
strychnia was the sole possible cause for the attack of the 24th of
June, and tartar emetic of the subsequent attacks.

The experts for the defence asserted that the convulsion of Saturday
could not have been caused by strychnia or other known poison; that
although the symptoms of the later attacks resembled those of tartar
emetic poisoning, they were not identical with those usually produced
by that drug; and that it was exceedingly improbable that these
attacks were due to the poison named, because obvious natural causes
for them existed.[24]

The impropriety and total insufficiency of our methods of criminal
prosecutions were very strongly shown by this trial. One member of
the jury could barely write his name, and not more than one or two
of them were in the lowest sense of the term educated; no record of
the testimony was kept by the court, and none, except in the very
beginning, by the jury, who must therefore have been guided chiefly
by impressions, lawyers' speeches or newspaper records; the feeling
amongst the populace, with whom the jurymen freely mingled, was so
bitter that one of the experts was barred out of his lodgings at
ten o'clock at night, openly because he was for the defence of Mrs.
Wharton; the newspaper which circulated most largely in the place
misrepresented the testimony, and devoted its columns to scurrilous
attacks upon the integrity and professional ability of the medical
witnesses for the defence. Yet under these influences, mazed and
confused by the subtleties and partial statements of the lawyers,
these twelve honest but ignorant men were called upon to decide
between physicians offering precisely opposite opinions. It is well
when this so-called administration of justice ends as a monstrous
farce and not as a tragedy.

The conduct of the Wharton-Van Ness trial would have been far
different if the expert testimony had been what it ought to have
been. If the excretions of Mr. Van Ness had been put in the hands of
a properly-qualified chemist, by finding the metal antimony or by
proving its absenc