Attorney of the poor, Dr John Birt Davies

“The coroner frequents more public houses than any man alive.” wrote Charles Dickens in Bleakhouse. Apparently, legislation required that inquests should take place as close as possible to the place of death, and it had long been the practice to hold them in pubs.

This and many other interesting facts and stories are part of Angela Coulter’s “Probing Deaths, Saving Lives: Birmingham’s Victorian Doctor-Coroner” https://troubador.co.uk/bookshop/biography/probing-deaths-saving-lives . Dr John Birt Davies is Angela’s great-great-grandfather and the more she learned about him the more interesting she found him. It was the same for me.

A difficulty in reading the book is every chapter is a series of deaths that John investigated. The chapter about children’s deaths was particularly upsetting. But for too many families, no one seemed to care about their loss except the coroner. And he was relentless in caring.

Early in his career, “Secretary of State at the Home Office, Robert Peel, sent a circular letter to local magistrates asking them to report on injuries sustained by prisoners while” using treadmills in prisons. These were enormous instruments of punishment, 6-18 prisoners would be made to walk on a cylinder for hours on end. “Birt Davies. His reply, though similarly reassuring about the effects of the treadmill on male prisoners, was less sanguine about its use by women. His was the only letter out of twenty-three known responses that mentioned any concerns.” It reads like he was the only one to have cared about the welfare of prisoners as humans to actually observe their health.

“Physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor, and social problems fall within their scope” is the starting quote of the book. And John certainly acted that way. The book covers the battle between lawyers and doctors over who would best serve as coroners. Lawyers thought coroners needed to know laws and process while doctors thought what mattered most was knowing about life and death. All are necessary of course but this book shows what happens when compassion is added.

He “presided over more than 30,000 inquests in total – an average of sixteen a week – working day and night to ensure that deaths were investigated with great care and jurors were provided with all relevant facts.” He was proud that “for thirty years he did not sleep out of the borough and that he never had occasion to appoint a deputy.”

This is a great book about a great man.