0586 Slide – Georgia Supreme Court Leo Frank Appeals Documents, 1913, 1914

Visible Translated Text Is As Follows:

It nor the pepsin would be present in any degree 8 or 10 days after death. Embalming fluid destroys the pancreatic juices so that it would be impossible to find them. Babbage like that (State Exhibit G) is liable to obstruct the opening of the pyloris, and to delay digestion. Food of that character might remain in the stomach undigested for 10 or 12 hours irrespective of the acid found there. If shortly after death a doctor makes a digital and visual examination of the vagina, opening the walls of the vagina with his hand, and finds no signs of violence and then 9 or 10 days after death a post mortem examination shows the epithelium detached from the walls of the vagina in a number of places, and a microscope shows on parts of the vagina removed from the body that the blood vessels are congested, this may be due to menstruation or the natural gravitation of blood to those parts and is not necessarily indicative of violence. Manipulation of the membrane would account for the displacing of the epithelium. The use of embalming fluid would make a diagnosis of violence utterly unreliable. Strangulation might result in a distension of the blood vessels. The entire pelvic vessels are always more or less congested during menstruation. No one could make a digital examination of the vagina of a corpse without disturbing the epithelium. It would be impossible for a doctor to find those conditions in the vagina by means of a microscope 9 or 10 days after death to tell that that violence had been inflicted from 5 to 15 minutes before death.

CROSS EXAMINATION. There are medical tables showing that wheat bread digests in about 3 1/2 hours and cabbage in about 4 1/2 hours. If cabbage cooked in the same way and bolted down in the same way is taken from the stomach of a living person within 30 or 50 minutes after having been eaten and is found in a similar condition to that of cabbage taken from the dead person's stomach 10 days after death, that would not necessarily mean that the latter cabbage had been in the stomach an equal length of time.