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32
Mr. Winter, the District Registrar, produced the certificate which
he identified by a private mark as one out of a book supplied by
himself to defendant; he swore to the signature as being in the
same handwriting as that of many other death certificates bearing
defendant's name at the foot, but he had never seen him write, and
of course could not swear that defendant had written this particular
certificate.
The husband of deceased proved the receipt of a death certificate
from the doctor who attended his wife, but as he could not read
he was unable to swear that the certificate produced was the one
given to him.
My evidence was to the effect that from the wording of the death
certificate, and from such other information as I was able to obtain,
I was satisfied that the deceased woman had died of puerperal fever,
but in answer to the Magistrate's question I was unable to say
positively that peritonitis following labour was invariably due to
puerperal fever, and I was not permitted to put in defendant's letter
acknowledging the facts, as I had not seen him write it. I explained
to the Magistrate that the term " puerperal fever" (one of the
diseases required by Section 55 of the Public Health, London, Actr
1891, to be notified) had been expunged from the Official Nomenclature
of Diseases and ordered to be no longer used for registration
purposes. The direction substituted is that " conditions included
under the term Puerperal Fever should be returned under Affections
Consequent on Parturition, the word puerperal being in all cases
prefixed to the word denoting the local process," so that defendant
was acting strictly according to oflicial instructions in wording the
certificate as he has done in this case, except that he used the
ordinary expression " after labour" instead of the scientific term
" puerperal."
Eventually the Magistrate dismissed the summons on the ground
that he was not satisfied from the evidence produced that the
deceased woman had suffered from puerperal fever; neither did he
consider that we had proved that the death certificate produced
was written by defendant.