A Manual for Coroners. Being a Guide to Coronial Inquiries and Inquests in South Australia and throughout Australasia and in England

Adelaide, Hussey & Gillingham, 1904. Octavo, x, 153 pages. Purple cloth embossed with a snakeskin pattern; covers sunned about the spine and slightly worn at the extremities; numerous newspaper clippings mounted and tipped in throughout (see below), obscuring printed text in places (including the title leaf); extensive tanning from the acidic newsprint; hinges cracked but holding; front free endpaper nearly detached; a few institutional stamps (the Justices' Association); a decent copy nevertheless. Provenance: with the bookplate and ownership signature of Edward Angas Johnson (1873-1951), sometime City Health Officer of Adelaide, who is mentioned in accounts of the controversial autopsies that led to William Ramsay Smith's suspension from his position as City Coroner following charges of mutilating human bodies. In addition to numerous ink annotations, Johnson has filled this volume with approximately 40 articles clipped from newspapers (some of them lengthy). Most date from the 1920s and they relate to coronial cases involving Dr Smith and to controversy surrounding coronial processes and powers in South Australia. William Ramsay Smith (1859-1937), physician, anthropologist, coroner, plagiarist and trafficker in human remains: 'In August 1903 he was suspended from his coronial duties following charges of misusing human bodies. The government set up another board of inquiry. Smith was cleared and his painstaking research commended; but, while remaining coroner and head of the health department, he had to relinquish his hospital and other duties because of possible conflict of interests. Perhaps uniquely for Australian coroners, Smith made medical statements from the bench which were pedagogical, informed, incisive and objective. He wrote "A Manual for Coroners" (1904), long regarded as a standard text' ('Australian Dictionary of Biography', giving a somewhat sanitised account of his career). Ramsay Smith's 'main interest lay in postmortem research for "medical purposes", and [he] used his positions to illicitly dissect and remove human remains. Witnesses described how Smith would practise with a .303 rifle on corpses at the mortuary of Adelaide Hospital. Outside, it was not unusual to see the head of an Aboriginal in a kerosene tin, waiting to be sent to DJ Cunningham, professor of anatomy at Edinburgh, where Smith donated the majority of remains - including organs, skin, tongues and male genitalia - over at least a 15-year period' (Claire Scobie, 'The Observer Magazine', 2009).…