Most Horrible & Shocking Murders

November 7, 2010 10:23 AM

The National Library of Medicine has put a selection of murder pamphlets from the late 1600s to the late 1800s online.

These pamphlets have been a rich source for historians of medicine, crime novelists, and cultural historians, who mine them for evidence to illuminate the history of class, gender, race, the law, the city, crime, religion and other topics. The murder pamphlets in the NLM's collection address cases connected to forensic medicine, especially cases in which doctors were accused of committing-or were the victims of-murder.

The "PAMPHLETS" link contains 12 pages with descriptions of the crimes.

(Previously)

posted by gman (7 comments total)

OH HECK YEAH

Thanks for the link!

My late grandmother, bless her twisted little heart, loved nothing more than a really salacious, horrifying true crime novel. I will now imagine her as a colonial dame pouring over salacious, horrifying true crime pamphlets.
posted by Neofelis at 10:42 AM on November 7, 2010

Looks like only the cover of each is online, or am I missing something? Bit of a teaser. This is juicy material.
posted by stonepharisee at 11:04 AM on November 7, 2010

Yeah I would love high res scans of the entire pamphlets
posted by clockworkjoe at 11:24 AM on November 7, 2010

Without a search function (or am I missing it?) and full text this is not actually very useful.
posted by LarryC at 11:50 AM on November 7, 2010

The exhibit's bibliography lists Dying Speeches and Bloody Murders: Crime Broadsides in the Collection of the Harvard Law Library as a resource, which provides complete digitized pages of over 500 broadsides documenting/sensationalizing criminal executions and dying speeches. These aren't the full murder pamphlets, but provide additional images and text for fiends of true crime to explore.

Proceedings of the cases depicted in the broadsides can be delved into at Old Bailey (previously).
posted by skenfrith at 2:03 PM on November 7, 2010 [2 favorites]

What is a murder pamphlet?
posted by LogicalDash at 4:57 PM on November 7, 2010

I would love to paw through
'Guts, instinct and evidence'.

great find gman.
posted by clavdivs at 6:20 PM on November 7, 2010