1280 Sheet – Supreme Court Georgia Appeals of Leo Frank, 1913, 1914

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RE-DIRECT EXAMINATION,
288

160 cubic cc. of liquid in the stomach taken out nine days afterwards would be a little in excess of what I would consider normal under the conditions already named.

DR. GEORGE M. NILES, sworn for the State in rebuttal.
I confine my work to diseases of digestion. Every healthy stomach has a certain definite and orderly relation to every other healthy stomach. Assuming a young lady between thirteen and fourteen years of age at 11:30 April 26, 1913, eats a meal of cabbage and bread, that the next morning about three o'clock her dead body is found. That there are indentations in her neck where a cord had been around her throat, indicating that she died of strangulation, her nails blue, her face blue, a slight injury on the back of the head, a contused bruise on one of her eyes, the body is found with-the face down, rigor mortis had been on from sixteen to twenty hours, that the blood in the body has settled in the part where gravity would naturally carry it, that the body embalmed immediately with a fluid consisting chiefly of formaldehyde, which is injected in the veins and cavities of the body; that she is disinterred nine days thereafter; that cabbage of this texture (State's exhibit G) is found in her stomach; that the position of the stomach is normal; that no inflammation of the stomach is found by microscopic investigation; that no mucous is found, and that the glands found under this microscope are found to be normal, that there is no obstruction to the flow of the contents of the stomach to the small intestine; that the pyloris is closed; that there is every indication that digestion was progressing favorably; that in the gastric juices there is found starch granules that are shown by the color test to have been undigested, and that in that stomach you also find the same degrees of hydrochloric acid, no maltose, no dextrin, no free hydrochloric acid (there would be more or less free hydrochloric acid in the course of an hour or more in the orderly progress of digestion of a healthy stomach where the contents are carbohydrates), I would say that indicated that digestion had been progressing less than an hour. The starch digestion should have progressed beyond the state erythrodextrin in course of an hour. There should have been enough free acid to have stimulated the pyloris to relax to a certain extent, and there should have been some contents in the duodenum. I am assuming, of course, that it is a healthy stomach and that the digestion was not disturbed by any psychic cause which would disturb the mind or any severe physical exercise. I am not going so much on the physical appearance of the cabbage. Any severe physical exercise or mental stress has quite an influence on digestion. Death does not change the composition of the gastric juices when combined with hydrochloric acid for quite awhile. The gastric juices combined with the hydrochloric acid are an antiseptic or preservative. There is a wide variation in diseased stomachs as to digestion.