Medico-Legal Evidence Relating to the Detection of Human Blood Presenting the Alterations Characteristic of Malarial Fever on the Clothing of a Man Accused of the Murder…

A murder, a pioneering method of blood analysis

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19th century pamphlet on medical forensics relating to the 1876 murder of storekeeper Narcisse Arrieux by an African-American near Donaldsonville, Louisiana.

By pioneering methods of blood analysis, Dr. Joseph Jones of New Orleans was able to decisively testify against accused murderer Wilson Childers, “a powerful negro man, who was known to have been at the store of Narcisse Arreiux [sic]...” (p5)

Jones’ pamphlet, reprinted from the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal, includes the post-mortem report of Arrieux’s wounds given at the coroner’s inquest, Jones’ chemical and microscopical report on blood stains, and Jones’ testimony from the 1878 murder trial.

Apparently, the victim Arrieux was found in a pool of blood, having been bludgeoned rather violently. Dr. Jones, through the use of forensic analysis, concluded that the blood was human, and that the deceased was afflicted with malaria. He then found similar malaria infected blood on the clothing of the accused African-American man, which ultimately led to the accused’s conviction and execution.

The concluding section of Jones’ pamphlet notes that “[t]he judgment of the jury rested to a great degree upon the presence of blood on the clothing of the accused Wilson Childers” (p18), blood that Jones ably associated with the victim.

Joseph Jones (1833–1896) was born in Georgia, the son of Charles Colcock Jones (1804–1863), planter, clergyman, and noted missionary to African-American slaves. Jospeh Jones graduated form Princeton in 1853 and received his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1856.

According to ANB: “Between 1856 and 1861 [Jones] taught chemistry at the Savannah Medical College, natural sciences at the University of Georgia, and medical chemistry and pharmacy at the Medical College of Georgia. Jones’s reputation as a leading student of health conditions in the nineteenth-century South was launched during these years. ... The Civil War interrupted Jones’s budding scientific career. After six month’s service with a local militia unit, he accepted a Confederate surgeon’s commission. But Jones was a most unusual medical officer. Viewing the hostilities as an immense laboratory from which to learn valuable medical lessons, he prevailed upon Surgeon General Samuel P. Moore to allow him to investigate health conditions in the Confederacy’s principal armies, hospitals, and prisons. He presented his findings to Moore in masterful reports; those on gangrene and Andersonville Prison are the best known. Jones returned to the Medical College of Georgia in the fall of 1865. The following spring he was elected to the chair of physiology and pathology at the University of Nashville. ... In 1868 Jones moved to New Orleans to accept the chair of chemistry and clinical medicine in the medical department of the University of Louisiana (now Tulane University) and to become a visiting physician at Charity Hospital. ... While Jones had first encountered [yellow fever] as early as the 1850s in the wards of the Savannah marine hospital, it was in New Orleans that he was introduced to epidemic yellow fever. By the great outbreak of 1878 [the year of the present pamphlet] he had become a yellow fever expert. ... Jones’s growing reputation as a sanitarian earned him an appointment to the Louisiana State Board of Health in 1877. Three years later he was named president. Founded in 1855, this was the nation’s oldest permanent state board of health.”

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