Trial of G.H. Lamson, at the Old Bailey, for Poisoning.

Dr. George Henry Lansom was a English physician who, afetr the Crimean War, suffered from an addiction to morphine and was in need of funds. To bring family estate funds into his domestic control, in December 1881, he selected as his victim his 18-year-old handicapped brother-in-law, Percy Malcolm John.

While visiting John, and having tea and a Dundee raisin cake, he made a big deal of showing his relative a new American invention, the gelatin capsule, atating that it would make taking medicine much easier. To illustrate his point, he filled a capsule with sugar and asked John to take it.

A few hours later, after Dr. Lamson left by return train for London, John began to suffer from severe stomach distress and soon died. Dr. Lamson was eventually caught and charged, after trying to bribe the newspapers with inside knowledge of John’s dead.

How did the poison get into the victim? Not in the capsule; Dr. Lamson had carefully tampered with some of the raisins in the slice of Dundee cake given to John, using the powerful alkaloidal poison aconite. His reward for this crime was his death by hanging on April 28, 1882.

“Criminal poisoning” – John Harris Trest

From the original edition of the Illustrated London News.