In a few weeks, we plan to spend five days visit the San Francisco Public Library to conduct our first on-site inspection of the transcripts for the three Arbuckle trials as reported in our blog entry of September 17. Since that posting, we have made further “core samples” using the testimony of Dr. George Franklin Shiels. He was a lecturer in medical jurisprudence and advised physicians on how to conduct themselves as medical experts on the stand as well as expect a fee commensurate with what they charged their patients. Dr. Shiels also lectured on the surgery of combat wounds based on his experience in the Spanish–American and Philippine–American wars—and he was hardly limited by these specializations.

During the early 1900s, general surgeons like Shiels could call themselves gynecologists, as he did, without a specific degree. He also felt he could speak as a urologist and a pathologist. He was a consulting alienist (i.e., psychologist) at the 1907 trial of Harry K. Thaw for the murder of the famous New York City architect Stanford White (reenacted in the film Ragtime with Norman Mailer, in a cameo performance, taking the bullet atop Madison Square Gardens in 1906). As such, Shiels saved Thaw from the electric chair by overcoming Thaw family’s reluctance to go along with the insanity plea by calling White’s murder a case of dementia Americana.

Dr. Shiels’ testimony at the three Arbuckle trials for the defense was considered persuasive by the press if not the jurors. He came up with the “toy balloon” hypothesis to explain away the fragility of Virginia Rappe’s bladder, such that a cough, a sneeze, and the like might cause it to “pop”—as he put it—spontaneously.

What we wanted to see was the difference between the reportage in 1921 and ’22 and the testimony. The former suggested that Dr. Shiels cited medical journals and textbooks to validate this hypothesis. To our surprise, however, neither was he prepared to cite the literature, nor was he up to speed on relevant testimony. He relied on his eminence and was caught on his cursory knowledge of Rappe’s mild cystitis at the second trial. At the third, he described the symptoms that she suffered in room 1219 not unlike Bladder Pain Syndrome (PBS) today and so mischaracterized a woman going into shock from a dire internal injury.

The testimony also revealed something else that reporters didn’t report, given the sensibilities of their readers a century ago. Dr. Shiels made special mention of Rappe possibly bearing down to urinate. Under cross-examination, Assistant District Attorney Leo Friedman took great interest in the “bearing down.” But Arbuckle’s lawyer, Nat Schmulowitz, managed to interrupt this line of testimony—perhaps because it strayed too close to what the comedian was doing outside of the bathroom door when he allegedly found Rappe on floor of room 1219’s bathroom. That is, to keep the jurors from asking themselves what happened before. Was he listening to Rappe? Asking her to hurry up? Making a joke of her predicament? (You have to realize that the defense lawyers took great pains to distance their client from the victim. It’s something we think about a great day. Previous Arbuckle narratives don’t really appreciate that Rappe and Arbuckle had paired off during the Labor Day party.)

Ultimately, what we saw in Dr. Shiels’ testimony supports our contention that the prosecutors and there performance in court took second place to Arbuckle’s lawyers. Oftentimes, the prosecution’s efforts weren’t even being reported or disparaged. Friedman, however, was quite careful and nuanced as we expected him in tress-testing the assertions made by Dr. Shiels. We were only disappointed in that Friedman didn’t go harder on Shiels. Perhaps he feared embarrassing a witness who was seen as pillar of the medical community.

In one case, Dr. Shiels claimed that he had contributed to the pioneering text, Urology, the Diseases of the Urinary Tract in Men and Women (1912) by Ramon Guiteras. Shiels not only wasn’t acknowledged by Guiteras, Shiels took the stand as if he hadn’t cracked the book. “I don’t remember just what Guiteras’ classification was, but I am pretty well certain that he did not believe very much in spontaneous rupture of the bladder,” he testified on the fly. “I have had conversations with him on the subject.” In reality, the late Dr. Guiteras would have made a better expert. In regard to spontaneous rupture, he wrote on p. 20 of Urology that a “rupture of this type depends primarily on a disease of the bladder wall [. . .] especially if in such cases a great effort is made by the bladder or abdominal wall to force out the contained urine.”