The Old Bailey Online may not seem like the most obvious resource for researchers interested in the history of medicine. According to the project’s mission statement, it “…makes available a fully searchable, digitised collection of all surviving editions of the Old Bailey Proceedings from 1674 to 1913, and of the Ordinary of Newgate’s [prison chaplain] Accounts between 1676 and 1772. It allows access to over 197,000 trials and biographical details of approximately 2,500 men and women executed at Tyburn, free of charge for non-commercial use.” The website also provides access to digital images of pages from the Proceedings and Ordinary’s Accounts. There’s an additional resource for those particularly interested in the accounts from the Newgate chaplain at the London Lives: Ordinary’s Accounts site, a sister project to the Old Bailey Online.
The most obvious historical connections with the Old Bailey project are with legal and cultural history: the development and application of law, the history of crime and criminality, punishment and judgment, and so on.
However, a simple keyword search on terms like “medicine,” “poison,” “suicide” and other terms connected with the history of medicine reveals a treasure trove of information. The search for “medicine,” for example, yields almost 1,000 results, among them this case from 1686 for breaking the peace where the prisoner at the bar was found guilty of “…Feloniously making an Assault upon the Body of B. R. Gent. on the 17th of December last, 1685. by blowing Powder of Mercury into his Face, which caused his Right Eye to consume and wast, till the 5th. of April following, and then was totally consumed and lost.” From a keyword search on “poison” comes the 1724 trial of Lewis Hussar for murdering his wife by cutting her throat after an attempt to poison her with “Conserve of Roses” failed.
The archive also contains items like this page of advertisements from 1725 which includes ads for recently translated French comedy and “A Water that perfectly cures the Itch, or any itching Humour in a short time…” for sale for 1 shilling, sixpence the bottle. Other pages include advertisements from a “Professor of Physick; and Operator of known Integrity” and “Stoughton’s great Cordial Elixir: Now famous throughout Europe for the Stomach and Blood, as is defended in the Bais with it, prepar’d only by him,…”
With a little effort, the Old Bailey Online can produce nearly endless amounts of material of interest to the scholar of medicine!