Poison and the Victorian Imagination

'I am innocent of poisoning Cook by strychnine'. With these words the doctor William Palmer went to the scaffold, convicted of having perpetrated the very crime he denied to the last. His twelve-day trial in May 1856, described by Law Times as 'the longest, greatest, gravest and most important criminal trial of the nineteenth century', ended just as it had begun - with a question hanging over the central contention against him. The case enthralled contemporary observers, and by its close most had become convinced of Palmer's utter villainy: a gambler, a forger, an adulterer, and a serial poisoner who perverted his standing as a licensed medical practitioner to further his murderous ends, Palmer's fate provoked little in the way of sympathy. He had been convicted of murdering his friend and gambling associate John Parsons Cook along 'scientific' lines, secretly employing carefully calibrated, minute doses of strychnine to poison without a trace. Yet his scaffold declaration provoked widespread concern. His enigmatic statement, neither directly denying his guilt as a poisoner nor ratifying the precise grounds upon which his conviction rested, struck at the heart of the case against him, for though strychnine was named as the poison that had killed Cook, none was detected in his body. Palmer's words reverberated in the medical and lay press: in death as in life, he tapped a deep vein of anxiety running through Victorian society.