There are several provisional passages in the work-in-progress that advance this or that hypothesis in regard to what really happened in room 1219. The most controversial—and the most likely—is developed and is expressed best below. But it might only see the “director’s cut” in this form. Returning to an earlier blog post about the real room 1219 on Labor Day 1921, we can see where Virginia Rappe likely suffered a hard landing and object, surely much harder and far more injurious than the Coke bottle in Kenneth Anger’s fable.

Surprisingly, there were applicable cases involving women of Rappe’s age and alleged condition in nineteenth-century medical literature—and in the literature of medical jurisprudence. These cases seemed relevant to the prosecution. If Arbuckle’s lawyers had been apprised, avoiding any mention of such cases and the dots a juror might connect were paramount.

• Alfred Swaine Taylor, “Accidental Ruptures of the Bladder,” The Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence, (London: Churchill, 1865), i:676.
• “Rupture of the Female Bladder—Death,” New Orleans Journal of Medicine 22 (1869): 359–59.
• “A Mirror of Hospital Practice, British and Foreign [. . .] St. Bartholomew’s Hospital [. . .] Rupture of the Female Bladder [. . .],” Lancet, February 25, 1893, 413–14.

One didn’t need Google Books a century ago. They were special cases, rare and worthy of special interest during what was the Golden Age of Spontaneous Bladder Ruptures.

Finding the above short list and citing it in court shouldn’t have been so hard. Such literature would have been accessible to urologists, perhaps even on the office shelves. But no urologists took the stand. The photograph of 1219 that was a big clue for us may not have been shown to the jury. Nevertheless, we had to go there even if the prosecutors didn’t.

This passage prefaces the second trial testimony of Dr. George Franklin Shiels, whom we discussed in our previous post.

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When the prosecution put their heads together at the beginning of January, they had much precedent to go on. The hung jury—a jury Matthew Brady saw as tainted—only meant waiting for a fair, open-minded jury and staying on course. The devil was now in the details and that could prove to be a problem for winning this case. Despite more nuanced and pointed examinations intended to trip up the most effect witnesses for the defense, the press wasn’t taking notice. Reporters were fewer in number and had less column inches to fill. They could put their feet up on the desk sooner and it was galling how often they summarized the work of Milton U’Ren and Leo Friedman with a stock phrase with so and so’s testimony was more or less “the same as the first trial.”

What should have grabbed the attention of the newspapermen and -women were the medical experts for both sides. But it wasn’t happening. Not one physician had ventured into room 1219, where the prosecutors believed Rappe had suffered such a rare and fatal injury. Why hadn’t Friedman led these men there. He could well see why his opposite, Nat Schmulowitz, had to lead them away. He had to keep Arbuckle apart from Rappe. Friedman had to put them together, indeed, had to press them together in some way that was the “fatal embrace” no matter the pathos or bathos of this scene to a juror. A well-read urologist or pathologist could have plied Friedman with cases of spontaneous bladder ruptures not unlike Rappe’s in Arbuckle’s bedroom.

The case of Julia G. had been printed in dozens of medical journals in 1869 like some cause célèbre in the medical world. At twenty-six, this married woman, the mother of six children, was admitted into a Dublin hospital. She claimed she had retired to bed under the influence of drink. She woke to pass water, but failed to do so, and as she returned to her bed, she fell over the footboard and fainted. All Friedman had to do was show that photograph of the brass beds in room 1219 and weather a storm of objections from Schmulowitz. Julia G. had been autopsied. Her bladder had been torn at the fundus. There were other grisly details and maybe her tumble—these were Victorian physicians—was due to the act of conceiving her seventh child.

The Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence, a classic in print since 1865, asked a very relevant question: “Can the bladder be ruptured by an accidental fall, and if so, by what kind of fall?” The answer began with a Mr. Syme, who showed “that this accident may readily occur” in 1836. A woman, aged twenty-six, fell forward over the edge of a tub, and fainted immediately.” She lived for less than a week. And like Rappe, her peritoneum being “extensively inflamed.” Friedman could show that photograph to Dr. Shiels or just point to the diagram of room 1219. Shiels had to know this book. Had he kept his promise to produce a bibliography to the court, it might have been listed right there.

Rappe had a precedent for the violence done to her as well, in an 1893 issue of the Lancet. A woman aged thirty-four, while intoxicated, was “kicked in the abdomen and roughly used” on the evening of August 2, 1892. Her symptoms, her fatal peritonitis, and her autopsy resembled Rappe’s. Had Friedman known of this case—he just needed a finger running through various bound indexes in a good medical library, like Stanford’s, a finger belonging to, say, Dr. Ophuls—then questions could be posed never asked at the first trial. The only thing holding the young prosecutor back were sensibilities and stomach of the jury to see the belly or the knee or the foot or the fist applied to Miss Rappe’s person.