Final Experiment

"When a doctor does go wrong," Sherlock Holmes once observed, "he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and knowledge."

But Sir Bernard ("Spils") Spilsbury, who became known as Britain's modern Sherlock Holmes, showed what a doctor can do when he uses his nerve and knowledge to catch criminals. For nearly four decades, connoisseurs of real-life British murders could be sure that the case was really top-drawer when it included the appearance on the witness stand of tall (6 ft. 2 in.) Sir Bernard and his quiet acknowledgment: "I am the senior pathologist of the Home Office."

Whatever he said after that was usually bad news for the prisoner in the dock. His words carried weight: he held degrees from Oxford and St. Mary's Hospital, London, was the author of The Medical Investigation of Crimes of Violence, a fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine, lecturer on such subjects as morbid anatomy and forensic medicine at London's University College Hospital and St. Bartholomew's.

Sir Bernard's nerve was famous. While still at Oxford, he inhaled carbon monoxide to test its effect on the body and made notes of his sensations (he found them unpleasant). Once he climbed down a manhole in London's Redcross Street to check on gas that had caused a workman's death. When he accidentally swallowed a culture of meningitis germs in a hospital laboratory, he reported: "I just carried on."

Fame first came to Sir Bernard through the infamous Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen. In 1910, Dr. Crippen poisoned his wife, buried her in quicklime in the basement and ran off with his typist. Before Scotland Yard was sure that a murder had been committed, Spils and his microscope identified something found in the basement as a bit of human skin with an appendectomy scar. Ships at sea were alerted and Dr. Crippen, despite his disguise, was nabbed in the St. Lawrence before his ship landed.

The Brides-in-the-Bath murder case posed the question: Can a man drown his wife without external signs of violence? Sir Bernard upended a nurse in a tub and the water struck her nose with such force that she became unconscious. He revived the nurse and the husband was hanged. That was one of 110 murderers Sir Bernard helped convict.

One day last week Sir Bernard, 70, ill with coronary thrombosis and arthritis, locked himself into his little laboratory in University College, London. He tore up some documents and opened the petcock of a single Bunsen burner. It was enough for his final experiment. At week's end in St. Pancras court, where Sir Bernard had often given expert medical testimony, Coroner W. Bentley Purchase returned "with reluctance" a verdict of suicide.

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