All true believers shall break their eggs at the convenient end: and which is the convenient end, seems, in my humble opinion, to be left to every man's conscience, or at least in the power of the chief magistrate to determine.

Three adult patients, two of whom were brothers and the third their uncle, were brought to my dispensary. They said that they had taken together some home-made sattu (flour of fried wheat and gram made into paste with sugar) in the morning, and since then were feeling very dizzy. They had come to the dispensary within one hour after their breakfast of sattu. Although no foul play was suspected,...

On the 8th April 1903, the Magistrate of Gaya, Mr. F. W. Duke, kindly sent for my examination a Hindu male infant .six weeks old, which had been brought to him as a curiosity. The child had what appeared to be a tail. I made the following note at the time : The spine is apparently perfectly normal. Over the base of the sacrum is a brawny swelling, from the lower portion of which emerges a perfe...

"At a Christening at Beddington Surrey," said the Gentleman's Magazine of Sunday 4 December 1748, "the nurse was so intoxicated, that after she had undress'd the child, instead of laying it in the cradle, she put it behind a large fire, which burnt it to death in a few minutes.-She was examined before a Magistrate, and said she was quite stupid and senseless, so that she took the child for a lo...

It is twelfth-century Japan, and a nobleman has been killed. A magistrate is charged with establishing the identity of the killer and delineating the sequence of events leading up to the murder. Several witnesses are called to testify – the victim’s wife, the accused (a notorious bandit), a woodsman as well as the victim himself (through a spirit medium). Each witness provides a singular accoun...

When the magistrate (“public” crucifixions) has to execute an individual by crucifixion the law mentions pitch and wax, which were used to torture the victims with fire. In classical Latin texts, incidentally, the individual to be crucified never carried a crux (vertical beam or entire cross) but only the patibulum (horizontal piece). When a criminal carried the patibulum, the crux (vertical be...