I mentioned John Horwood because his skin became a book cover.
I left out the more troubling question:
What if the book preserved the wrong murderer?
Before Horwood became a binding, there was Eliza Balsum.
She was seventeen. Horwood had been infatuated with her. She rejected him. Contemporary accounts accused him of harassing and threatening her. In January 1821, he threw a stone that struck her in the temple.
That was an act of violence.
It may not have been the act that killed her.
Eliza did not collapse and die where she stood. She survived for weeks. She reportedly walked repeatedly from Hanham to the Bristol Royal Infirmary for treatment, a journey of several miles in each direction.
Surgeon Richard Smith eventually admitted her to the hospital. For a time, she appeared to improve. Then she developed a fever and signs of infection.
Smith opened her skull.
The procedure was trepanning: cutting into the skull in an attempt to reach the injury beneath it. This was before modern antisepsis and before physicians understood infection as we do now.
Eliza died four days later, on February 17, 1821.
Smith maintained that the original wound caused the fatal abscess. Later medical examination raised a different possibility: that contamination, dressings, or the operation itself may have caused or worsened the infection that killed her.
I cannot prove that Richard Smith killed Eliza Balsum.
Neither, apparently, could anyone prove that he did not.
What can be established is that she survived the stone for weeks, entered his care alive, underwent an operation, and died four days later.
Smith then identified Horwood to the authorities and testified against him.
Horwood’s trial took place on April 11. He was convicted. Two days later, three days after his eighteenth birthday, he was hanged.
The prosecution included something called a phrenological report.
Phrenology claimed that character could be read through the shape of the skull. Its practitioners mapped human tendencies onto raised portions of the head and treated anatomy as biography.
The examination attributed several dominant qualities to Horwood:
Combativeness.
Self-esteem.
Hope.
It did not find the supposed bump of murder that phrenologists claimed murderers possessed.
They hanged him anyway.
Then Smith received Horwood’s body.
He publicly dissected it. He retained the skeleton. He gathered the medical reports, testimony, trial papers, accounts of the execution, and records of the dissection into a single volume.
Smith did not write the Horwood Book in the usual sense.
He assembled it.
Then he commissioned its binding in Horwood’s skin.
Perhaps Horwood murdered Eliza with a stone.
Perhaps Smith killed her with an operation.
Perhaps the stone began what infection and nineteenth-century medicine finished.
History accepted Smith’s answer because Smith was the physician, Smith was the witness, Smith was the anatomist, and Smith preserved the record.
The man who may have killed her was allowed to explain how she died.
The man he accused became the cover of his explanation.
They searched Horwood’s skull for murder.
Whose skull should they have examined more carefully?