Suspicious infant deaths: the statute of 1624 and medical evidence at coroners' inquests

Abstract

The investigation of sudden death in England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was constrained by the equivocal status of the coroner and his inquest, and by the lack of provision for the regular admission of medical evidence in both pre-trial and trial procedures. When the office of coroner was established at the end of the twelfth century, coroners were required to act as keepers of the Crown pleas and to collect the revenue due to the Crown in connection with those pleas. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, changes in the local and central administration of justice, including the rise of the justices of the peace, combined to divest the coroners of much of their authority. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the coroners' loss of authority was accompanied in many cases by a lack of care and diligence in performing their remaining duties. In the seventeenth century, Sir Matthew Hale noted that most coroners' inquisitions were inadequate, and in 1761 Edward Umfreville, one of the coroners for Middlesex, was prompted by the disrepute into which the office had fallen to publish his own private notes in an attempt to encourage ‘a general uniform Practice’ amongst coroners. From a medico-legal perspective, one of the most significant features of the decline of the coroner's office is the fact that the coroner's jurisdiction to take inquisitions touching the death of a person subito mortuis, super visum corporis was restricted by the belief that only sudden deaths with manifest evidence of violence warranted inquiry.