Fabrice Brandli and Michel Porret (eds), Les Corps Meurtris: investigations judiciares et expertises médico-légales au XVIIIe siècle

Extract

This is not quite the book I expected it to be. What I expected, having read much of Michel Porret's previous work, was a monograph on eighteenth-century legal medicine. Instead, Les Corps Meurtris is a critical edition of a chronological sample of 377 medico-legal reports (December 1716 to August 1792) from Geneva and the surrounding countryside. The 239 cases, from which the 377 reports are taken (in some cases multiple medical reports were conducted), are each prefaced with a short synopsis of the case from which they are taken, but are otherwise presented in complete isolation from the rest of the trial documents. The synopses range from short descriptions of, for example, the discovery and retrieval of corpses from the river as in the case of report 161, Drowning, 12–13 September 1771 (PC 12227) where the editors indicate that a certain Hugues Oltramare had found the body of 10-year-old Suzanne Perlet in the Rhône, to paragraph-long summaries of more complicated trials such as the prosecution of Jean-Louis Adelard, 28 July–29 August 1749 (94 PC9602) for the murder of Nicolas Buis, who died as a result of his injuries, following a drunken brawl. This latter case includes two medico-legal reports, the first signed 3 August by Etienne Meschinet, the prison surgeon, and the second 7 August by two physicians and five surgeons including Meschinet. Little or no explanation of the methodology behind the seemingly arbitrary sampling is given. In total 10,242 cases were tried in this period within the Genevan jurisdiction, although, apart from with victims of drowning, it is unclear what proportion of this total number of cases included medico-legal evidence making it difficult to judge the representativeness and typicality of the 377 reports presented. For instance, we are told that drowning, suicide and assault (ranging from street fights to more serious injuries) represent 50 per cent of the sample cases and that 52 reports of drowning out of a possible 382 (1701–98) are presented in the anthology. But otherwise the sample is only analysed against itself rather than in terms of the overall total of surviving judicial documents.