From 1877 to 1892, over the course of fifteen years, Dr. Thomas Neill Cream murdered seven women - all prostitutes or patients seeking abortions - in England and North America. His favorite weapon was strychnine. The popular press called the killings the incomprehensible crimes of a madman. According to Angus McLaren, though, these murders - the first well-documented serial murders in the English-speaking world - were hardly incomprehensible. They in fact provide a distorted reflection of the doctor's culture and times. A Prescription for Murder opens with McLaren's vividly detailed story of the killings. Beginning with a powerful evocation of Victorian London, McLaren moves through Cream's past, his murders, the detective work, and the reactions of other prostitutes, to Cream's arrest, trial, and execution. Using press reports and police dossiers, McLaren investigates the links between crime and respectability and in the process reveals a remarkable range of Victorian sexual tensions and fears. He demonstrates how changing attitudes toward abortion and prostitution, the shifting boundaries between what is public and what is private, and mounting uneasiness over new demands made by workers and women all helped to create the cultural milieu that made Cream's murders possible. McLaren shows that Cream's actions were not entirely those of a pathological outlaw. They magnified the repression that society at large had already begun to apply to the new classes of independent and rebellious women. In exposing the sexual tensions of the late nineteenth century, McLaren explores how the roles of both murderer and victim were created, and raises the disturbing question of how similar tensions might contribute to the onslaught of serial killing in today's society.
|
