Spilsbury, Sir Bernard.

i) 15 notebooks labelled 'Post-Mortem Records' containing detailed autograph notes of post-mortem examinations, recording date, time, and location of autopsy, personal details of the subject, and the results of internal and external examination, each volume containing c.50-60 post-mortems, many with incomplete index cards, typed case histories, or hand-written memoranda loosely inserted, each volume numbered and dated as follows: 26 August to 7 December 1941 (volumes XVIII-XXII for 1941), 12 June to 17 August 1944 (volume VI), 4 December 1944 to 23 November 1945 (volume X/I-VII), 13 February to 9 May 1947 (volume I), 27 August to [12 November] 1947 (volume III), c.3500 pages, 8vo, all but the final two volumes in uniform green boards, all but two volumes having suffered at least some fire damage to bindings, with loss to some spines, smoke staining, and occasionally damage to boards, but not affecting text 



ii) 3 other notebooks: notebook labelled 'Experimental Methods', mostly detailing decalcification experiments, in two hands (one being Spilsbury's), 31 pages, plus blanks, 6 additional leaves loosely inserted, 8vo, 1920s; notebook labelled 'Thymus Cases', autograph summary notes on 90 post-mortems conducted between 1907 and 1918, 28 pages, plus blanks, 4to; 'The Longfellow Birthday Book', 18 autograph entries, mostly family members



iii) Loose papers on forensic pathology: c.185 pages in Spilsbury's autograph, case reports (two with exhibit photographs), including his controversial 1936 report for "Rex v Linford Derrick" (3 pages), several reports on unusual cases such as a 1931 self-asphyxiation in a Cambridge College (6 pages), memoranda and notes on forms of death and related issues, drafts of lectures mostly on types of wounds and methods of violent and unnatural death (e.g. 'Death from Throttling', 13 pages); c.15 typescript lectures and draft articles by Spilsbury, some with corrections, including 'The Application of Physiological Principles to Medico-Legal Problems' (three copies) and 'Death in the Bathroom' (20 pages); notes on lecture exhibits (a bowler hat, skulls, and a shrunken head); memoranda and reports, typed and handwritten (not in Spilsbury's autograph), on subjects including unsolved murders, deaths caused by masochistic sexual practices, leather made from human skin, the effects of various poisons, and deaths from Tuberculosis among employees of a factory; c.13 letters received by Spilsbury either asking his opinion on cases or providing information (notably from chemical manufacturers on poisons), one enclosing two photographs of a cast of the mummified head of the 4th Earl of Bothwell; off-prints of articles, and newspaper cuttings, with a small number of later items relating to the collection; all housed in five folders, chiefly 1920s-40s, some leaves brittle with loss at edges, some fire damage with loss of text to a few pages, dust staining



iv) 31 printed books, pamphlets, journals, and off-prints from Spilsbury's library, on topics relating to forensic pathology, some with authorial inscriptions to Spilsbury, some with ownership inscriptions by Spilsbury

An important cache of papers of the father of forensic pathology. Sir Bernard Spilsbury (1877-1947) was the original figure of the infallible pathologist now so familiar in crime fiction, although he is now accused of being primarily responsible for a number of miscarriages of justice.

The 15 post-mortem notebooks record hundreds of deaths in the London area in the 1940s, giving meticulous clinical detail of causes of death and its effects on the body. Alongside natural deaths are murders, suicides, infanticides, the side-effects of illegal abortions, and other violent and occasionally inexplicable cases, from post-mortems on 24 April 1945 on Claire Tratsart and her father John Baptiste, both of whom had been shot by Claire's brother John while the family were having tea at Lyon's Corner House on Oxford Street (including a diagram of how the family were seated around the table), to Joseph Jan Van Hove, who was hanged at Pentonville Prison for spying on 12 July 1944. The most notorious case handled by Spilsbury in this period (on 22 November 1941) was the murder of two little girls (aged 8 and 6), who had been kidnapped then stabbed by a stranger, Harold Hill, in woods in rural Buckinghamshire. The presence of loosely inserted partially completed index cards shows that Spilsbury never worked these cases up into his card files (a cabinet of his case file index cards was sold in these rooms on 17 July 2008, lot 21, for £14,000). The notebooks contain almost the last work of Spilsbury's career: they end just over a month before he gassed himself in his laboratory.