Politics, scissors, paper

William P. Darnes represented Scott county in the Missouri House four times between 1848 and 1860. Is he the same William P. Darnes who, in 1840, beat a St. Louis newspaper owner with a small iron cane, fracturing his skull? I don't know.

The newspaperman died and Darnes was charged. His defense team pressed the issue of the treatment the victim had received after he was beaten. Did the medical procedure kill him? Six medical experts testified and were evenly divided on the question.

To enlighten the jury in this confliction of testimony produced by the medical examination, the lawyers took the matter in hand, and read portions of the productions of the great lights of the medical profession; discoursed learnedly of what constituted the symptoms of compression, the locality of the dura mater and the pia mater, and the danger of spicula remaining in the brain. The medical authorities were placed upon a Procrustean bed, there lopped and here stretched, to suit the views of counsel, until, after the stretches of meaning and mutilations, the authors themselves would not have known their productions.

After a tedious trial of two weeks, the case was given to the jury, who returned a verdict of guilty of manslaughter in the fourth degree, and the accused was fined $500. It was a time when the press stood ready to assail any character, it mattered not how unexceptionable, and any one who had the courage to oppose its political opinions, was certain to receive the poisonous shafts of ridicule or abuse. On this account the jury rendered a lighter verdict than they would have done had not these causes existed.

(from a history of Saint Louis published in 1860, my emphasis added.)

An odd, sad business, right down to the historians' treatment of the issue.