Medical Malpractice
"Let me lay and die"
A couple of days ago, I went to London to talk about public health and policing in history with my delightful crime/histmed colleagues at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. I spoke about the police as the first real emergency service, but also about how inquests can highlight police failure from their earliest inception. It was a great day and hopefully something cool will come out of it.
Henry Yeomans gave a paper on poisoning that raised the curious legal conundrum of gross negligence manslaughter. This week’s story is also about gross negligence, and it is HORRIBLE. A couple of weeks ago, I spoke to Folksworth Ladies Circle about inquests in the Hundred of Norman Cross, a rather rural district with a handful of inquests per year. The district inquests were done by the OTHER coroner of Peterborough, the one I don’t usually look at, William Daniel Gaches. While I was researching the wider Gaches family, I found a this story. It that took my breath away.
This is the story of Jane Lovett, and it is not for the faint of heart.
Trigger warning for death in childbirth and obstetric details.
If you can’t afford to subscribe, get in touch. If you don’t want to give Substack money, an abbreviated version of this story is available on my bluesky profile.
