The Case of the Telltale Polyp I. N. Dubin Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, Volume 20, Number 4, Summer 1977, pp. 598-602 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/pbm.1977.0028
For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/404033/summary
Access provided at 17 Nov 2019 18:33 GMT from Carleton University Library
THE CASE OF THE TELLTALE POLYP I. N. DUBIN*
Time:1933
Place:Montreal, Canada Detective:Guillaume R. C. Osler
Category:Fiction Guillaume Osler and I first met in 1933 in front of the cadaver lying on the dissecting table in the anatomy lab of McGiIl University School of Medicine. We were freshmen and had been assigned to the same subject.
"Call me Bill," he said with characteristic modesty. I replied, "Call me
anything but 'Dubious Dubin,' " a sobriquet I had earned by asking so many stupid questions in the classroom. With a graciousness that bespoke his distinguished lineage, he compromised, "I'm happy to meet
you, Dubie." This was the beginning of a long and fast friendship. My partner at the dissecting table also became my partner in
crime—more accurately, in combating crime. Both of us being con-
sumed by an insatiable curiosity and always challenged when problems
seemed insoluble or even unapparent to others, we combined our forces (feeble as mine were) to unravel several crimes that had baffled or even hoodwinked the police and the coroner. Our first case involved the tragic death of the captivating cadaver lying before us.
But first a few words about my friend. Guillaume Revere Capet Osier
came of a long, distinguished lineage. His father was Lieutenant Edward Revere Osier (only child of Sir William and Lady Grace Revere Osier), tragically killed in action during World War I in Flanders Field, 1917, at the age of 2 1 . In Revere Osier's blood ran the hardy Canadian pioneer stock of his father and, through his mother, that of the great American patriot, his great-great-grandfather, Paul Revere. Guillaume's mother
was Blanche Eleanor d'Aquitaine Capet. Blanche Capet was a descendant of Eleanor of Aquitaine, wife and mother of kings; one of queen Eleanor's descendants, Louis VIII of France of the Capetian dynasty, *Professor of pathology, Medical College of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
19129.
598 I I. N. Dubin ¦ Case of the Telltale Polyp
had married Blanche of Castile. So in Blanche Capet's veins flowed the
blue blood of the royal houses of England, France, and Spain. Both Blanche and Revere were fascinated by history, and so it was that they first met by chance while touring the medieval castle in Boulogne-surMer, 12 miles north of Camiers to which the McGiIl medical unit (includ-
ing Lieutenant Osier) had been posted in 1915. Their mutual interest in history and each other was enhanced when Revere told Blanche that the
Revere family of Boston was originally of French origin, the family name having been Revier. Things moved quickly in wartime; the young couple met, fell in love, and secretly married. Guillaume was born in 1916. He was named Guillaume after Revere's father, the great physician, and also—because he had such a lusty voice—after "William the
Troubadour," Eleanor of Aquitaine's grandfather William, Count of Poitou and Duke of Aquitaine. The mother reared the orphaned boy by herself, and when she saw his great interest in medicine, sent him to McGiIl University in Montreal where he could study at the same medical school where his grandfather, Sir William, was graduated and later
taught as professor. Furthermore, in Montreal young Guillaume could pursue his abiding interest in French culture. From the beginning Bill and I were enthralled by the cadaver, a beautiful young woman, about 25, with serene, noble features. How did such a patrician end up on our dissecting table? Continuously nagged by this
question, we finally bribed the appropriate persons and learned her identity. She was Patricia Margaret Shippen, scion of an old Philadelphia family, one branch of which had moved to Canada. She was a distant
cousin of Margaret Shippen, the second wife of General Benedict Arnold, and was related also to Dr. William Shippen, first professor of surgery, anatomy, and midwifery at the University of Pennsylvania and
chief of the medical department of the continental army. Patricia was
not only beautiful, she was learned, and as a patron of the arts and
sciences she had willed her body to science. And so it came to pass, after her suicide with arsenic, that she became the handmaiden of anatomy.
At the time of her death some crystals of arsenic were found in her throat, identical to the arsenical crystals present in a phial found near her body. In her left hand was a copy of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary and near her right hand a piece of paper on which she had
scrawled in her dying moments an uncompleted word, "Ars------."
Further, the young lady was known to be an incurable romantic, like those young people in an earlier generation who on reading Goethe's Werther would immediately commit suicide. And didn't Madame Bovary herself take her own life with arsenic?
When she was found dead in her apartment a subordinate policeman suggested that one should perhaps perform an autopsy. But his chief, the noted Arsène Lupin, scion of the famous detective of the same
Perspectives in Biology and Medicine ¦ Summer 1977 | 599
name, immortalized by Edgar Allan Poe, exploded, "Zut alors! But why ze autopsie! It is not nécessaire! It is sad that the charming mademoiselle
has done herself out! Quel dommage! But zis case is couped and dried, forwardstraight, as plain as ze mustache on your face! It is no use—how you say en anglais—to flog a horse dead! Non, non, no autopsie!" And then he added with a chuckle, "Besides, is my name 'Arsène' for
nothing; am I not to recognize a case of poisoning with arsenic?" His staff was already enured to his poor puns, but this one made them wince.
When we learned the mode of Patricia's death, Bill became pensive
and offered sadly, "What a miserable way to die! It is so horribly painful! Surely our learned Patricia knew that. Ay, there's the rub, Dubie, death from arsenical poisoning is agonizing. Yet the features of our dear Patricia were not contorted in pain; on the contrary, they were placid and serene. Further, even beneath the embalmer's cunning hand one can see that in death all her muscles had been relaxed, even flaccid. No, no.
Dubie, arsenical poisoning won't do. Incroyable! I am reminded," he added thoughtfully, "of the summer I spent studying anthropology
among the Indians on the Orinoco, and I recall how they paralyzed their prey with their curare-tipped arrows." But we found no curare-tipped arrows, and the skin of Patricia was intact.
Over the next few weeks we continued our dissection. We meandered
through the muscles and traveled along the pathways of the vessels and
nerves. We made our safari through the heart, the lungs, and other viscera. Then, one day, as we continued our trek through the abdomen, Bill's otherwise skillful scalpel accidentally cut into the bowel. "Merde!" he expostulated. I was shocked. Here was this perfect gentleman, who
even in moments of greatest stress allowed himself only a mild sacrebleu, using a coarse expletive! But then as I saw the expository look on his face, I knew at once that he was merely instructing me as to the contents
of the viscus he had just pierced. After a neat and skillful cleanup of the terrain, we struck gold. There in the lower colon, lined up like soldiers on parade, were about a dozen polyps. And hidden away among them was a tiny mound I had missed in my usual slapdash manner. But Bill's keen eye had picked up this little swelling within the mucosa, and in the center of it, a tiny perforation. "Formidable!" he exclaimed, "our curaretipped arrow!" Seeing the usual blank, dubious look on my face, he elaborated, "Not a real arrow, Dubie, a symbolic one—a needle and
syringe. This perforation was caused by a needleprick; this is where the
curare must have been injected." But how to prove it? In 1933 there was no way of chemically identifying curare in tissue. But Bill was undaunted. We excised the tissue and
froze it. Bill then retired into his private chemistry laboratory that his landlady allowed him to operate in the basement of his lodgings. For 3
weeks he worked late into the night. During classes he barely spoke.
600 I I. N. Dubin ¦ Case of the Telltale Polyp
Finally, gaunt and wan, and essaying a weak smile, he said, "Dubie, I've got it. I've worked out a method for identifying and bioassaying curare
in tissue." "Épatant!" I exclaimed, for by now his clean French expletives had replaced the coarse ones I had learned as a boy growing up on the streets of Montreal.
But who was the culprit? And what was the motive? And how was the foul deed perpetrated? Allowing myself a weak pun, "We'll get to the
bottom of it," I vowed. Bill grimaced tolerantly. During the next few
weeks all of our spare time, and more, was spent in slow, slogging detective work, made tolerable by Bill's intuitive genius each time the trail grew cold. We perforce skipped some classes. Bill's grades remained as high as ever, but I almost flunked anatomy, and to this day I cannot tell
the left lobe of the liver from the right. We quizzed Patricia's family, friends, and acquaintances, and knowing that she must have had some
symptoms caused by her polyposis, we inquired as to her physicians. We finally learned that Patricia, plagued by her polyps, had consulted the foremost surgeon in town, Dr. Randolph Franklin Jones, a descen-
dant of a branch of the Randolphs of Virginia who were United Empire Loyalists and had chosen to move to Canada during the Revolutionary War. Jones was handsome, wealthy, and a bit of a womanizer. He came by the latter trait honestly, for he was a descendant of Benjamin Franklin's illegitimate son, whom old Ben had sired while living in
Montreal after General Benedict Arnold had set up his headquarters there following the capture of the city by General Montgomery. (Old Ben had lived in the Château de Ramezay, where he set up his presses, trying unsuccessfully to convince the French to join the Americans in revolt against the British. But he took some consolation in convincing some French ladies, individually, of the merit of his cause—hence the forebear of Randolph Franklin Jones.) During the course of her treatment, Patricia learned of the Philadelphia connection—her Shippen blood and Jones's Franklin blood—and, incurable romantic that she was, fell in love with the surgeon. They became lovers.
AU went well until Patricia insisted that Jones divorce his wife and marry her instead. But this was unacceptable to the doctor, for he was
married to the richest woman in Canada. When Patricia pressed too hard, he decided to get rid of her. So one day when Patricia called up the surgeon to make an appointment to see him about the sporadic polypal bleeding, he saw his chance. "Pat, why bother coming to the office; let's have a bash at your apartment.
I'll bring some champagne and my portable proctoscope." Jones had invented several surgical instruments, among them the telescoping portable proctoscope that could be slipped into one's pocket; it could also double as an esophagoscope and bronchoscope.
Perspectives in Biology and Medicine ¦ Summer 1977 | 601
And so the foul deed was accomplished in her apartment. After a few bottles of champagne (to dull Pat's suspicion and his own conscience) and with unsuspecting Pat in the appropriate position, the doctor inserted the Jones Patented Scope and injected a fatal dose of curare into the colon. Then wiping the instrument clean—for he was always fastidious—he used it to blow some arsenic crystals into the victim's
throat. He dropped a small phial of arsenic near the body and pressed a copy ofMadame Bovary into her left hand. But now, with her last ounce
of strength, Patricia started to write a dying clue, "Ars------," which she, alas, could never complete. The doctor, at first alarmed, soon saw this would serve his foul purpose well, for who would not take it to point to "arsenic"?
But he had reckoned without the astute genius of my friend Bill. And as we wound up our case (for the doctor broke down and confessed when we confronted him with the evidence), Bill challenged me, knowing I always rose to the bait, like a Laurentian trout rising to the fly. "Dubie, do you now see what our Patricia was trying to write in her dying
moments?" After considerable thought I offered, "Perhaps the lady,
being a classical scholar, was trying to comfort herself in her dying moments with that aphorism of Hippocrates that says, Ars longa, vita
brevis." Bill smiled indulgently. "Good try, old boy, mais incroyable. Think again, Dubie. Imagine our poor Pat, knowing she was dying and had only a moment to live. Wouldn't she pick out a short, four-letter Anglo-
Saxon word to point to that region of her anatomy where the murderer had struck?" A rare flash of intelligence permeated my brain. "Then she
wasn't trying to write 'arsenic' after all: she was trying to write 'arse'!" "Indubitably, my dear Dubie."
602 I I. N. Dubin ¦ Case of the Telltale Polyp
For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/404033/summary
Access provided at 17 Nov 2019 18:33 GMT from Carleton University Library
THE CASE OF THE TELLTALE POLYP I. N. DUBIN*
Time:1933
Place:Montreal, Canada Detective:Guillaume R. C. Osler
Category:Fiction Guillaume Osler and I first met in 1933 in front of the cadaver lying on the dissecting table in the anatomy lab of McGiIl University School of Medicine. We were freshmen and had been assigned to the same subject.
"Call me Bill," he said with characteristic modesty. I replied, "Call me
anything but 'Dubious Dubin,' " a sobriquet I had earned by asking so many stupid questions in the classroom. With a graciousness that bespoke his distinguished lineage, he compromised, "I'm happy to meet
you, Dubie." This was the beginning of a long and fast friendship. My partner at the dissecting table also became my partner in
crime—more accurately, in combating crime. Both of us being con-
sumed by an insatiable curiosity and always challenged when problems
seemed insoluble or even unapparent to others, we combined our forces (feeble as mine were) to unravel several crimes that had baffled or even hoodwinked the police and the coroner. Our first case involved the tragic death of the captivating cadaver lying before us.
But first a few words about my friend. Guillaume Revere Capet Osier
came of a long, distinguished lineage. His father was Lieutenant Edward Revere Osier (only child of Sir William and Lady Grace Revere Osier), tragically killed in action during World War I in Flanders Field, 1917, at the age of 2 1 . In Revere Osier's blood ran the hardy Canadian pioneer stock of his father and, through his mother, that of the great American patriot, his great-great-grandfather, Paul Revere. Guillaume's mother
was Blanche Eleanor d'Aquitaine Capet. Blanche Capet was a descendant of Eleanor of Aquitaine, wife and mother of kings; one of queen Eleanor's descendants, Louis VIII of France of the Capetian dynasty, *Professor of pathology, Medical College of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
19129.
598 I I. N. Dubin ¦ Case of the Telltale Polyp
had married Blanche of Castile. So in Blanche Capet's veins flowed the
blue blood of the royal houses of England, France, and Spain. Both Blanche and Revere were fascinated by history, and so it was that they first met by chance while touring the medieval castle in Boulogne-surMer, 12 miles north of Camiers to which the McGiIl medical unit (includ-
ing Lieutenant Osier) had been posted in 1915. Their mutual interest in history and each other was enhanced when Revere told Blanche that the
Revere family of Boston was originally of French origin, the family name having been Revier. Things moved quickly in wartime; the young couple met, fell in love, and secretly married. Guillaume was born in 1916. He was named Guillaume after Revere's father, the great physician, and also—because he had such a lusty voice—after "William the
Troubadour," Eleanor of Aquitaine's grandfather William, Count of Poitou and Duke of Aquitaine. The mother reared the orphaned boy by herself, and when she saw his great interest in medicine, sent him to McGiIl University in Montreal where he could study at the same medical school where his grandfather, Sir William, was graduated and later
taught as professor. Furthermore, in Montreal young Guillaume could pursue his abiding interest in French culture. From the beginning Bill and I were enthralled by the cadaver, a beautiful young woman, about 25, with serene, noble features. How did such a patrician end up on our dissecting table? Continuously nagged by this
question, we finally bribed the appropriate persons and learned her identity. She was Patricia Margaret Shippen, scion of an old Philadelphia family, one branch of which had moved to Canada. She was a distant
cousin of Margaret Shippen, the second wife of General Benedict Arnold, and was related also to Dr. William Shippen, first professor of surgery, anatomy, and midwifery at the University of Pennsylvania and
chief of the medical department of the continental army. Patricia was
not only beautiful, she was learned, and as a patron of the arts and
sciences she had willed her body to science. And so it came to pass, after her suicide with arsenic, that she became the handmaiden of anatomy.
At the time of her death some crystals of arsenic were found in her throat, identical to the arsenical crystals present in a phial found near her body. In her left hand was a copy of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary and near her right hand a piece of paper on which she had
scrawled in her dying moments an uncompleted word, "Ars------."
Further, the young lady was known to be an incurable romantic, like those young people in an earlier generation who on reading Goethe's Werther would immediately commit suicide. And didn't Madame Bovary herself take her own life with arsenic?
When she was found dead in her apartment a subordinate policeman suggested that one should perhaps perform an autopsy. But his chief, the noted Arsène Lupin, scion of the famous detective of the same
Perspectives in Biology and Medicine ¦ Summer 1977 | 599
name, immortalized by Edgar Allan Poe, exploded, "Zut alors! But why ze autopsie! It is not nécessaire! It is sad that the charming mademoiselle
has done herself out! Quel dommage! But zis case is couped and dried, forwardstraight, as plain as ze mustache on your face! It is no use—how you say en anglais—to flog a horse dead! Non, non, no autopsie!" And then he added with a chuckle, "Besides, is my name 'Arsène' for
nothing; am I not to recognize a case of poisoning with arsenic?" His staff was already enured to his poor puns, but this one made them wince.
When we learned the mode of Patricia's death, Bill became pensive
and offered sadly, "What a miserable way to die! It is so horribly painful! Surely our learned Patricia knew that. Ay, there's the rub, Dubie, death from arsenical poisoning is agonizing. Yet the features of our dear Patricia were not contorted in pain; on the contrary, they were placid and serene. Further, even beneath the embalmer's cunning hand one can see that in death all her muscles had been relaxed, even flaccid. No, no.
Dubie, arsenical poisoning won't do. Incroyable! I am reminded," he added thoughtfully, "of the summer I spent studying anthropology
among the Indians on the Orinoco, and I recall how they paralyzed their prey with their curare-tipped arrows." But we found no curare-tipped arrows, and the skin of Patricia was intact.
Over the next few weeks we continued our dissection. We meandered
through the muscles and traveled along the pathways of the vessels and
nerves. We made our safari through the heart, the lungs, and other viscera. Then, one day, as we continued our trek through the abdomen, Bill's otherwise skillful scalpel accidentally cut into the bowel. "Merde!" he expostulated. I was shocked. Here was this perfect gentleman, who
even in moments of greatest stress allowed himself only a mild sacrebleu, using a coarse expletive! But then as I saw the expository look on his face, I knew at once that he was merely instructing me as to the contents
of the viscus he had just pierced. After a neat and skillful cleanup of the terrain, we struck gold. There in the lower colon, lined up like soldiers on parade, were about a dozen polyps. And hidden away among them was a tiny mound I had missed in my usual slapdash manner. But Bill's keen eye had picked up this little swelling within the mucosa, and in the center of it, a tiny perforation. "Formidable!" he exclaimed, "our curaretipped arrow!" Seeing the usual blank, dubious look on my face, he elaborated, "Not a real arrow, Dubie, a symbolic one—a needle and
syringe. This perforation was caused by a needleprick; this is where the
curare must have been injected." But how to prove it? In 1933 there was no way of chemically identifying curare in tissue. But Bill was undaunted. We excised the tissue and
froze it. Bill then retired into his private chemistry laboratory that his landlady allowed him to operate in the basement of his lodgings. For 3
weeks he worked late into the night. During classes he barely spoke.
600 I I. N. Dubin ¦ Case of the Telltale Polyp
Finally, gaunt and wan, and essaying a weak smile, he said, "Dubie, I've got it. I've worked out a method for identifying and bioassaying curare
in tissue." "Épatant!" I exclaimed, for by now his clean French expletives had replaced the coarse ones I had learned as a boy growing up on the streets of Montreal.
But who was the culprit? And what was the motive? And how was the foul deed perpetrated? Allowing myself a weak pun, "We'll get to the
bottom of it," I vowed. Bill grimaced tolerantly. During the next few
weeks all of our spare time, and more, was spent in slow, slogging detective work, made tolerable by Bill's intuitive genius each time the trail grew cold. We perforce skipped some classes. Bill's grades remained as high as ever, but I almost flunked anatomy, and to this day I cannot tell
the left lobe of the liver from the right. We quizzed Patricia's family, friends, and acquaintances, and knowing that she must have had some
symptoms caused by her polyposis, we inquired as to her physicians. We finally learned that Patricia, plagued by her polyps, had consulted the foremost surgeon in town, Dr. Randolph Franklin Jones, a descen-
dant of a branch of the Randolphs of Virginia who were United Empire Loyalists and had chosen to move to Canada during the Revolutionary War. Jones was handsome, wealthy, and a bit of a womanizer. He came by the latter trait honestly, for he was a descendant of Benjamin Franklin's illegitimate son, whom old Ben had sired while living in
Montreal after General Benedict Arnold had set up his headquarters there following the capture of the city by General Montgomery. (Old Ben had lived in the Château de Ramezay, where he set up his presses, trying unsuccessfully to convince the French to join the Americans in revolt against the British. But he took some consolation in convincing some French ladies, individually, of the merit of his cause—hence the forebear of Randolph Franklin Jones.) During the course of her treatment, Patricia learned of the Philadelphia connection—her Shippen blood and Jones's Franklin blood—and, incurable romantic that she was, fell in love with the surgeon. They became lovers.
AU went well until Patricia insisted that Jones divorce his wife and marry her instead. But this was unacceptable to the doctor, for he was
married to the richest woman in Canada. When Patricia pressed too hard, he decided to get rid of her. So one day when Patricia called up the surgeon to make an appointment to see him about the sporadic polypal bleeding, he saw his chance. "Pat, why bother coming to the office; let's have a bash at your apartment.
I'll bring some champagne and my portable proctoscope." Jones had invented several surgical instruments, among them the telescoping portable proctoscope that could be slipped into one's pocket; it could also double as an esophagoscope and bronchoscope.
Perspectives in Biology and Medicine ¦ Summer 1977 | 601
And so the foul deed was accomplished in her apartment. After a few bottles of champagne (to dull Pat's suspicion and his own conscience) and with unsuspecting Pat in the appropriate position, the doctor inserted the Jones Patented Scope and injected a fatal dose of curare into the colon. Then wiping the instrument clean—for he was always fastidious—he used it to blow some arsenic crystals into the victim's
throat. He dropped a small phial of arsenic near the body and pressed a copy ofMadame Bovary into her left hand. But now, with her last ounce
of strength, Patricia started to write a dying clue, "Ars------," which she, alas, could never complete. The doctor, at first alarmed, soon saw this would serve his foul purpose well, for who would not take it to point to "arsenic"?
But he had reckoned without the astute genius of my friend Bill. And as we wound up our case (for the doctor broke down and confessed when we confronted him with the evidence), Bill challenged me, knowing I always rose to the bait, like a Laurentian trout rising to the fly. "Dubie, do you now see what our Patricia was trying to write in her dying
moments?" After considerable thought I offered, "Perhaps the lady,
being a classical scholar, was trying to comfort herself in her dying moments with that aphorism of Hippocrates that says, Ars longa, vita
brevis." Bill smiled indulgently. "Good try, old boy, mais incroyable. Think again, Dubie. Imagine our poor Pat, knowing she was dying and had only a moment to live. Wouldn't she pick out a short, four-letter Anglo-
Saxon word to point to that region of her anatomy where the murderer had struck?" A rare flash of intelligence permeated my brain. "Then she
wasn't trying to write 'arsenic' after all: she was trying to write 'arse'!" "Indubitably, my dear Dubie."
602 I I. N. Dubin ¦ Case of the Telltale Polyp
