At Eckbolsheim, Dr. Robert Flocken had ministered to Michael Mathis for years. He knew the house, the patient’s habits, and those who frequented his sickroom. On October 31, 1887, he prescribed for him an internal remedy and a liniment for external friction. In the prescription, by an error of the pen, he ordered two grammes of extract of colchicum in one hundred and fifty grammes of vehicle. He had intended to specify tincture of colchicum, a vastly different and far weaker preparation. He later confessed to the blunder. Yet on that autumn day, none foresaw that a single erroneous line would pit two mourning families, an esteemed practitioner, and a dispensary against one another.
The Meisen pharmacy, in Strasbourg, compounded the draft. Mathis took three spoonfuls at intervals of approximately two hours. He was soon seized with violent vomiting and purge. On the morning of November 1, Flocken arrived at the bedside. He examined the sufferer, took up the vial, stripped away its label, and emptied the contents. Having rinsed the glass, he caused another remedy to be prepared. The chronicle makes no mention of his alerting the family to the misprision, nor of his calling upon a colleague to assume the case. Mathis’s strength ebbed further, and he expired the following morning, some thirty minutes after the physician had departed.
The certificates of death made no mention of colchicum. They assigned the demise to affections of the heart, the bowel, or the kidneys, according to the varying opinions of the practitioners consulted. The corpse was subsequently exhumed. Anatomical examination revealed no conclusive lesion, and chemical analysis failed to detect colchicine. To the magistrates, this absence of chemical traces by no means closed the inquiry; rather, it rendered the inquiry into the dosage, the course of symptoms, and the physician’s conduct all the more pressing.
The innkeeper Herter, in Strasbourg, had received an identical prescription from Flocken. Having taken three doses on October 31, he was promptly seized with violent spasms. The doctor visited him again, and others ministered to his needs, but his condition worsened without reprieve. He died on November 3. His widow, who as yet knew nothing of the Mathis affair, demanded an explanation regarding the prescription. Reading the public prints, she learned of the sudden death of another of Flocken’s patients. She forthwith demanded the original recipe, bent on discovering what the draft had contained. Two deaths, hitherto sundered by household and address, converged upon the counter of the same apothecary.
The public prosecutor had been apprised of the Mathis case on November 3. The interrogations directed at Flocken and at Greiner, the master of the dispensary, soon brought another object into view: the prescription daybook. That very evening, Greiner dispatched the apprentice Jakob Andres to purchase a fresh blank ledger. On the morrow, Alfred Wolff, an assistant in the shop, transcribed into it altered entries designed to bestow upon the prescriptions a date and a semblance favorable to their defense. Herter’s prescription was destroyed; that of Mathis, which Flocken had taken away, could no longer be found. The old leaves of the original register vanished into thin air.
The accused began by offering flat denials. But the stationer had duly entered the sale of the ledger into his own commercial books. This paper trail led the investigators straight back to the shop. Wolff and Andres ultimately confessed their complicity; Greiner held out longer before owning to the facts. The sequence of their shifting versions proved as damning as the missing ledger itself. Each successive lie compelled the court to scrutinize the hours, the bedside visits, and the measures taken once the mortal peril had been understood.
Flocken, too, altered his account. He maintained that he had discovered his error upon consulting the daybook around ten o’clock on the night of October 31. Greiner and the dispensing chemist Schmidt testified that he had come to the pharmacy and openly stated that he had prescribed extract of colchicum by mistake. The physician contested the number of times this error had occurred: he acknowledged two instances, whereas certain depositions intimated he had spoken of three such drafts. The third remained shrouded in doubt. At the trial, the presiding judge questioned him regarding a possible third victim; Flocken denied it, and the proceedings never established the matter as verified fact.
The investigators were forced to reconstruct the dosages without the benefit of the two original prescriptions. The depositions placed the doses taken by Mathis and Herter at different hours, yet within the very span of time during which Flocken had realized what he had written. The phials, their labels, and the apothecary’s registers might have linked each potion directly to its formulation; yet these objects had been cleansed, emptied, or destroyed. As material evidence fell away, the timing of the physician’s visits assumed paramount gravity: who had known what, at what precise hour, and who might still have stayed the hand of death by warning the families? The court was thus compelled to judge a man’s conduct from a tangle of retrospective testimonies, mindful that these narratives had taken shape only after the fatalities and the initial falsehoods.
A more pointed question remained: having comprehended his error, why had he failed to send word to Herter? He pleaded that he had realized the blunder too late and had not grasped the full gravity of the peril. Yet the witnesses from the pharmacy placed his visit in the evening, well before Herter had swallowed all his doses. The defense leaned heavily upon the uncertainties of medical science and the impossibility of proving the poison’s presence by chemical reagents. The prosecution countered that professional conduct is not to be weighed solely by the post-mortem findings of the laboratory: one had to consider what any qualified physician must have understood upon discovering that he had ordered an extraordinary preparation at a formidable dose.
At the assizes of May 11 and 12, 1888, the expert witnesses spoke with divided voices. Professor Schmiedeberg maintained that the quantity contained in the potion vastly exceeded what would have been present in the prescribed tincture, and that it was capable of producing fatal intoxication. The medical experts of Strasbourg largely concurred with this assessment. Professor Husemann, summoned by the defense, contested whether the dose sufficed of itself to bring about death, casting doubt upon what Flocken could reasonably have foreseen. The negative chemical tests and the inconclusive autopsy hung heavily over the debate; yet they could not relieve the bench of its duty to weigh the clinical symptoms and the accused’s documented acts.
Four men stood in the dock. The responsibility of the physician was not to be confounded with that of the apothecaries. Wolff had fabricated the false entries; Greiner had procured the new register and directed the concealment; Andres had acted merely as an errand boy. In acquitting the youth, the court cited his tender age, his lack of experience, and the probability that he had acted merely to shield himself from the law. The judges found Flocken guilty of negligence, weighing both the fatal slip of the pen and his inaction once the truth was known. Wolff was sentenced to two months’ imprisonment for his negligence in compounding and delivering the medicine; Greiner received two weeks for his part in concealing the crime. Andres was acquitted. Flocken was condemned to nine months’ imprisonment.
In its statement of grounds, the tribunal held it established that the remedies had caused both deaths. It did not, however, confound a negligent prescription with willful poisoning. Rather, it fixed the exact boundary where professional prudence and the sacred duty to sound the alarm had been abandoned. Greiner and Wolff appealed; the Reichsgericht rejected their petition on September 27, 1888. Flocken submitted to the verdict. By an act of executive clemency, his sentence of common imprisonment was commuted to fortress detention, which he served at Bitche. The families of Mathis and Herter received financial restitution through civil settlement. In the apothecary’s back room, a clean ledger had been bought to wipe away a crime; it was the humble daybook of the stationer that betrayed the deed.