Courtroom Drama

THE TRIAL OF DOCTOR ADAMS (245 pp.)--Sybille Bedford--Simon & Schuster ($3.75).

Nobody stages better murder trials than the British, or writes about them with a more intriguing combination of solemnity and excitement. The 1957 murder trial of Dr. John Bodkin Adams, the longest (17 days) in recent English history, was easily one of the outstanding legal dramas ever to be seen at London's Old Bailey. Its major appeal did not rest on sex, money or gore; it came from the encounter between law and medicine, two intricate, big, imprecise and sometimes deadly disciplines. British Author Sybille Bedford, noted for her brilliant novel The Legacy (TIME, Feb. 11, 1957), has recreated the trial in a fascinating book.

Medical Mystery. Among Dr. Adams' patients in the coastal resort of Eastbourne was wealthy old Mrs. Morell, who had suffered a cerebral stroke in 1948. For her Dr. Adams prescribed 1,629 grains of barbiturates. 1,928 grains of Sedormid (a sedative). 164 grains of morphine and 139 grains of heroin, over a period of ten and a half months. At the end of that time, 82-year-old Mrs. Morell died and was cremated. Six years later, after police investigated his treatment of Mrs. Morell and other patients, he was charged with having murdered Mrs. Morell by administering excessive doses of drugs.

The prosecution case had three major weaknesses. One was motive. Under Mrs. Morell's will Dr. Adams got a case of silver, worth no more than $761--hardly a sufficient incentive for murder. The second weakness was heavy reliance on three nurses, who gave testimony damaging to Dr. Adams; brilliant Defense Counsel Geoffrey Lawrence produced the actual sickroom records kept by the nurses, and the discrepancy between what they remembered six years later and what they had actually written down at the time rendered their evidence absurd. Finally, there was the medical mystery of the human constitution: were the injections excessive or were they reasonable to keep the patient comfortable? Were they fatal or would Mrs. Morell have died anyway? Physicians' testimony was neatly split.

Shadow Play. To the account of all this--the fencing of crossexamination, the cumbersome but deeply civilized legal safeguards of the individual, the Greek chorus of spectators and newsmen commenting on the proceedings--Author Bedford brings a superb style and a magic eye through which she sees old scenes in a new way. One of her courtroom vignettes: "Some of the seats have emptied. People have crept out into the hall, to send off the latest or just to smoke, for air . . . Looking back through the glass panels of the shut door, one can see into the court--wigged heads, writing hands, the judge enthroned, red-robed, heraldic like a king of cards; the back of the doctor's head and neck solid above the parapet; counsel in shadow-play shooting out an arm; lips moving soundless, all silent, sharp, like fish inside a bowl."

Defendant Adams did not testify: his attorney argued that after six years the doctor's memory might fail him. The jury, virtually directed to do so by the judge, acquitted Adams of the murder charge. He later faced 15 other charges, including improper concealment of drugs, forging other doctors' names on prescriptions and falsely stating on three patients' cremation certificates that he had no pecuniary interest in their deaths (they had actually made bequests to him in their wills). He pleaded guilty to all but one of these charges, paid a stiff fine, was later barred from medical practice; he now lives quietly in his 18-room house in Eastbourne.

Although the outcome of The Trial of Doctor Adams is known to the reader from the start, the book remains suspenseful to the end. It proves once again that the Old Bailey often makes for better drama than the Old Vic.

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