eBook A Prescription for Murder: The Victorian Serial Killings of Dr. Thomas Neill Cream (The Chicago Series on Sexuality, History, and Society) download

More a research-book with many notes and references than a story. Excellent reference for the topic. I'm writing a novel involving Dr Cream and will this closely.

Terrible quality

How it described late 1800s history of London.

The dust jacket was worn and folded but for one penny I don't suppose I ought to complain.

Mr. McLaren's book is unique in its approach toward the analysis of the murders of Dr. Thomas Neill Cream and the reasons why serial murders of women, especially prostitutes occurred with a high frequency; committed by men who saw both prostitutes and women seeking abortion as less than full and productive members of society. His analysis of the murders of Dr. Cream is a virtual handbook explaining the phenomenon of the murders not only of Cream but also of such other notorious murderers such as "Jack the Ripper." While McLaren analyzes only the murders of Dr. Cream, he is able to postulate why such murders became so prevalent in the Victorian Era in London and other places in the world. His book is written in two parts:

1) The Crimes
2) The Context

McLaren seems to be the first person to analyze these murders and how they relate to societal attitudes. Others who wrote books on the murder of women occurring in this time period did little more than recount the horrific descriptions of the crimes. McLaren took a very sociological approach to the murder of these women and gives credible and comprehensible reasons for why such murders were easily accomplished; as well as why there were men who might be driven to enact these terrible person to person crimes.

In the first part of his book, McLaren describes the murders, the police, the suspects and finally the trial of Dr. Cream which resulted in his sentence of death by hanging. In the second part, McLaren covers such topical areas as prostitution, abortion, backmail, doctors, detectives, degenerates and the attitude towards women. What McLaren reveals in his careful study is that society was basically a male dominated social system. In the Victorian Era, women were not yet granted suffrage and were considered in many ways to be 2nd class citizens. In addition, men and especially doctors who controlled the attitudes and punishments for the society, looked upon women who might wish to engage in either prostitution or abortion as less than proper members of society.

McLaren found that many women of the period found that they could more easily work as prostitutes and be remunerated much more significantly as a prostitute than they could be as a factory worker or a secretary. For the most part, women who engaged in prostitution for a living did so without any interest or regard to the sex, but rather to the money. In the case of women seeking abortion, again the most common driving force behind the desire to terminate pregnancies was economic and not infanticide or cruelty. Most families were not able to support many more than 2 or 3 children. Birth control was new, expensive and proscribed by the Catholic Church and therefore preventive methods to control pregnancy were not often used and while women were inventive in the manner in which they tried to restrict unwanted pregnancies, the methods were crude and ineffective in comparison to the techniques available to women in the late 20th century and beyond.

Finally, because women were in essence discriminated against by men in Victorian society and other countries' social context, women who sought to obtain abortion or practice prostitution were considered less than human in many cases and their suffering or even murder was often thought to be a result of their crimes against God and therefore just punishment for their behavior.

McLaren writes a landmark study of women and these practices and why men would prey upon them with significant success. In addition, these societal attitudes may have been the cause for the serial murderer to be driven to commit the acts of brutality in the first place. Therefore, the prevalent feeling that these women deserved punishment for their actions allowed the serial killer to psychologically justify acts of murder against women who engaged in practices that were condemned on the surface, but which were utilized often by the same men who were speaking out against them.

The book is highly recommended to readers with interest in serial killings of the era and readers interested in the sociological perspective which by its very nature induced men to practice homicide against women who were engaged in practices that were so duplicitously condemned by men of the social era. The author does extremely careful research and even physical observation of the area of London where Dr. Cream's murders took place so as to integrate all available information into a theory explaining how so many of these homicides could have taken place. The book is a very serious study of the social mores of the times and the actions that people took in reaction to these sociological phenomena.

Neill Cream, the doctor/serial killer was one of a number of Victorian medical murderers who flourished in 19th c. England. Feeding unwary prostitutues various poisons and then following their cases in the press, stirring up interest when the police failed to uncover the crimes, making near-confessions to other people are all now commonly recognized behavior patterns of sexual killers. Viewing this case in light of the recent science of criminal profiling, this book provides a most fascinating example of 20/20 hindsight. In late 19th c. England doctor-killers (among them Pritchard, Palmer etc), were seen as absolutely evil (especially after the unsolved Whitechapel horrors) and no attempt was made to understand the psychological quirks that led Cream et al. to the gallows (where he forever taunted crime buffs with with words "I am Jack..." as the trap fell). The study of killers such as Cream distanced by time and culture make them seem almost quaint, and certainly safe, compared with the grotesque sensationalism sexual predators attract today. With fewer graphic details, less scientifc jargon and the titalation of Victorian repression coloring the crimes, "Prescription for Murder" is an almost "cosy" true crime story. Admittedly, it is not over-burdened with an insistance on factual accuracy or with providing a throughtful historical framework, but it still a satisfying read for all true crime buffs. Especially those who like their thrills at a safe remove.

I found Prescription for Murder to be an insightful and scholarly examination of violence in society and its historic antecedents that was also a good reading experience. Not that much has changed from 1890 to 2013.