Sensational by Kim Todd (good short books .txt) 📗

the Ripper reporters decades later. As anyone who has walked through a forest littered with mouse bones or along the seashore peppered with shells and crab carapaces knows, to be dead is to have lost the ability to hide. The body is exposed to the wandering eyes and wondering thoughts of whoever may encounter it. It will reveal its clues, its secrets, if only we look hard enough. While killers might have peered at this body obscenely, readers tell themselves they look on it in righteous pursuit of justice. In this, the papers hit on a formula that would be a staple of murder mysteries and police procedurals far into the future.

Over time, many people wondered whether Rogers died not of murder but of an attempted abortion, a suspicion buoyed by the deathbed confession of the innkeeper, who changed her testimony to say that Mary had turned up with a doctor who planned to help her with a “premature delivery.” The innkeeper’s son helped dispose of the body.

At the same time, the troubles of another, very different woman dominated the newspapers—one who was decidedly alive and in charge of her destiny, too in charge for some. Madame Restell, an alias for businesswoman Ann Lohman, was on trial for providing an illegal abortion. Her advertisements in papers in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York for pills that offered a remedy for “obstinate and long-standing cases of derangement in those functions of nature” called to “females in delicate health.” One of her clients, dying of consumption, revealed to her husband that she’d become pregnant and sought out Madame Restell. Her husband told the police, and they arrested Restell and threw her in jail. As New York watched the Mary Rogers mystery unfold, Restell’s case wound its way through the New York courts.

Restell, her faux French flair and constant press coverage, was famous enough that she inspired a new vocabulary. Abortion and its promotion was “Restellism.” Competing papers deemed the New York Herald, which included many ads for abortifacients and dogged coverage of the trial, “Madame Restell’s organ.” When Mary Rogers was dragged from the river, she was (rightly) feared to be a victim of the “Restell school.”

Restell appealed her case to the New York Supreme Court in 1842. And her letter to the newspapers on that occasion showed all the reasons the male physicians would want to put her out of business. One witness testified that a man had attended the operation. Restell scoffed: “In no case do I engage a ‘man’ or physician, for the simple and all abundant reason that, whatever I undertake, I feel myself competent, as well by study, experience and practice, to carry through properly.” In fact, many pregnant women prefer to be treated by a woman, she wrote. And propriety demanded a lady, “provided always she is skillful, should attend in preference to a gentleman.”

Not long after the Restell trial, both New York and Massachusetts passed stronger antiabortion legislation. New York’s law banned advising, administering, or prescribing abortions. Seeking abortion also became a crime, making a criminal of the patient for the first time. As the antiabortion campaign of the doctors accelerated, it continued to be fueled by newspaper coverage. In 1871, the New York Times ran a series of articles called “The Evil of the Age” about a reporter and a female friend pretending to seek an abortion and their reception at various doctors and midwives. Unlike the Chicago Times pieces, only the man, Augustus St. Clair, wrote his interpretation of events; the woman was just a prop. St. Clair described guns brandished in his face and aborted fetuses left to disintegrate in vats of lime.

In St. Clair’s account, he targeted newspapers advertising abortion as much as the practitioners themselves: “The mails go burdened with the circulars of such people, and come laden with money enclosures for pills, ‘drops,’ and other vile humbugs. The best home firesides in the land have been invaded by these advertisements, either in the newspapers or in letters.” In a jab at the New York Herald, the couple used addresses listed in the paper’s medical advertisements as a map of places to go, following their lead throughout the city. Their reporting took them to see Dr. Mauriceau, a relative of Madame Restell, at one of her offices. They visited Madame Restell at another. She started to talk with them but was interrupted by her daughter, who pulled her out of the room to confer. When Restell came back, she was dismissive. Apparently, the reporter’s disguise needed work. He then stopped in to see a man with a thick German accent who went by both “Dr. Rosenzweig” and “Dr. Asher.” Pale faces of patients peered through the blinds, St. Clair reported.

Soon, things became much worse. One of these patients, allegedly spotted by St. Clair in Rosenzweig’s office, turned up dead a few days later, her body in a trunk bound for Chicago, leading to a week’s worth of headlines about the “trunk murder” and the arrest of Dr. Rosenzweig.

These kinds of grisly rumors (the reporting is highly questionable) aided the passage of even stricter antiabortion statutes and ramped up enforcement. At the time, an 1869 New York law banned “articles of indecent and immoral use,” as well as advertisements for them. This included not just playing cards with naked women on the back, racy daguerreotypes, and dildos, but contraceptives and abortifacients. It was a hard law to uphold, though, because while the good men of the YMCA’s Committee for the Suppression of Obscene Literature took it very seriously, the police didn’t. In April 1872, though, the YMCA found its own detective. Anthony Comstock, a Brooklyn man dismayed by the printing houses peddling smut in his neighborhood, was the ideal enforcer—energetic and fired with holy motivation. He began ordering scandalous books and arresting those who sold them, amassing a mountain of photos, pamphlets, catalogues. Each year, he printed details of his haul in a booklet: 181,600 obscene photos and pictures, 6,000 dirty watch