1188 Page – Leo Frank Georgia Supreme Court Appeals Records, 1913, 1914

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ference with the brain or any pressure on the brain, no doctor could tell that -long after death whether or not the wound would have produced unconsciousness, because the skull may be broken and considerable hemorrhage and de pression occur without any loss of memory. There is no outside physical indication of any sort that a man could find that can tell whether it produced unconsciousness or not. If the body was found 8 or 10 or 12 hours after death, with that wound and some blood appears to have flowed out of the wound, that wound could have been inflicted before or after death, the blood might flow from a wound inflicted after death from one to six or eight or ten hours by gravity. If the wound was made during life by a sharp instrument I would expect it to bleed. A live body bleeds more than a corpse. If under the above conditions only a visual examination of the lungs was made and no congestion was found, it could not be stated with certainty whether or not the person died from strangulation. In such a subject I removed the stomach and found in it wheat bread and cabbage partly digested like that (State's Exhibit G), and 32 degrees of acidity in the stomach and very little liquids or anything in the smaller intestine and feces some 5 or 6 feet further down, and if the stomach was taken from the body 9 days after death, after it had been embalmed with a preparation containing 8 per cent. formaldehyde, neither I nor anybody else could give an intelligent opinion of how long that cabbage and wheat bread had been in the stomach before death. The digestion of carbo-hydrates begins in the mouth. The more cabbage and wheat bread are masticated the more easily it is digested. Cabbage chewed like that (State's Exhibit G) would take longer to digest. It is liable to stay in the stomach 3, 4 or 5 hours, and longer if it is stopped up by the pyloris, and when food is not chewed thoroughly, it causes irritation and constriction, and so the stomach would retain the food longer. Sometimes cabbage passes out of the body whole. No dependable opinion could be given as to the time that cabbage had been in the stomach from the conditions of acidity or lack of acidity, starch or the lack of starch, maltase or the lack of maltase. The conditions are too variable. A great many things retard digestion, such as excitement, anger and grief. Formaldehyde stops all fermented processes of the pancreatic juices, and after a body was embalmed with it I would not expect to find the pancreatic juices. It also destroys the pepsin, so that 10 days after death in the case of a body embalmed with formaldehyde no accurate opinion could be given as to how long the cabbage (State's Exhibit G) had been in the stomach. Each stomach is a law unto itself. Cooked cabbage is more difficult to digest than raw cabbage. I recently made tests with one man and four women with normal stomachs, giving them cabbage and wheat bread, and removing it from the stomach a little later to determine how the contents of the stomach looked. The first woman, age 22 (Defendant's Exhibit 88A) ate a loaf bread and cabbage, chewed it well and vomited it 60 minutes later. She ate it at 12 o'clock approximately. It took her 9 minutes to chew it. None of them were supposed to have eaten anything since 6:30 o'clock that morning, but she had drunk some chocolate milk at 9:30, and