This is a very interesting case that I have decided to write about, after finding Asneth Cohen’s case while researching and thinking it worthy of due attention. Asneth Cohen was indicted for the ‘Wilful murder of her newly born female child’ on 7 March 1898 and was found guilty but insane due to puerperal mania and sent to Broadmoor.[i] Puerperal mania begins quite suddenly in the first or second postnatal week, and sufferers display ‘behaviours described as highly excitable, elated, irritable, furious madness or wildly incoherent raving and very difficult to control’ … usually manic, often severe and occasionally fatal’. [ii]
Asneth Cohen was a Russian Jew working in London, who is discussed by Daniel J R Grey in his case study of Jewish women and infanticide, and within her trial there are many voices, both professional and lay, who refer to Cohen’s ‘serious mental instability’.[iii] Cohen’s sister, Rachael Clenoivich is the first to give evidence in the trial and is interpreted because of her Yiddish tongue.[iv] Clenoivich testified that when Cohen was not up at her usual time she went to see Cohen in her room and queried her but Cohen made no answer. Clenoivich later states that a ‘dark ray girl came and told me there was a baby on the pavement’.[v] Rachael then went back to her sister and found her dressed, and saw marks of blood on the floor which Asneth describes as her monthly, but upon cross-examination does not know where the baby on the street came from.[vi] Daniel Grey confirms the trial testimony by stating that no attempt was made to hide or conceal the birth, indeed ‘immediately after giving birth, she had flung the unfortunate infant from an upper storey window, nearly striking a woman down below’.[vii] The woman nearly struck by Cohen’s falling baby was Leah Limberger, who saw something coming down from a window and saw it was a little baby and ran away.[viii]
Another witness in the trial, Elizabeth Spiller, upon seeing the baby on the pavement, wounded and bleeding from the head, wrapped it up and took it to Commercial St Police station, where it was examined by the Divisional Surgeon Frank Oliver.[ix]Oliver stated that the child was alive, badly wounded, about an hour old and full term. He stayed with the baby until it passed, testifying the death was caused from a fall from a three-storey window.[x]Oliver went to the room and found blood stains and directed Cohen be immediately taken to an infirmary because ‘she was ill and destressed’, and ‘that she should not be then charged- her health was so much affected’.[xi]This is confirmed by historian Ann Higginbotham who writes, ‘The birth of the child was most often detected when the woman’s changed appearance, erratic behaviour, or apparent illness aroused suspicion or when (In Cohen’s case) the body of the child was discovered’.[xii]
Cohen’s illness and extremely poor mindset was referred to by Sarah Clenoivich, a long-time friend, who stated that she looked very ill and had ‘suffered a misfortune that something had come from her which she had thrown out of the window’.[xiii] When informed by Sarah of a baby thrown out of a window Cohen said “Do they say it is a baby, I am sure I don’t know”, and when asked if she heard it cry Cohen states “No, I felt so dazed, I was mad”.[xiv]
The first to testify that Cohen admitted to the murder is James Taylor, a police inspector, who was present when Cohen was charged. He stated the prisoner said, “I opened the window and threw the baby out”’.[xv] This is Cohen’s first true admission of the crime. Another inspector, Stephen White, who was present at the inquest, testified that:
‘I told the prisoner she would be charged with the wilful murder of a female child by throwing it out of a window – she said “Yes, I threw the baby out of the window; it was on the Sunday night- I hope they won’t kill me” … and upon cross-examination continued ‘I did not charge her then: I did at the station – she was mumbling, I could not say dazed … she said “I opened the window and threw the baby out”’.[xvi]
The Medical Superintendent at Cohen’s trial, Herbert Larder stated the prisoner needed immediate attention, and upon cross examination stated ‘she was very weak and of a highly nervous temperament, and very likely under the circumstances might be subject to puerperal mania’.[xvii] Carole Reeves in her work on Jewish mental health between 1880 and 1920 demonstrated according to Colney Hatch records – Colney Hatch being the asylum that took almost all the Jewish patients – the Jewish women were ‘vastly over diagnosed with puerperal mania’.[xviii] Asneth Cohen, rather than being sent to Colney Hatch, was sent to Broadmoor as a criminal lunatic.[xix]
Grey quotes Harvey Baird, the Colney Hatch Assistant Medical Officer, who speculated in 1908 that various factors made Jewish women more prone to reproductive insanity, including early marriage, workload outside the home, poverty and a ‘perceived characteristic – ‘being more of a neurotic temperament’.[xx] Grey continues to state that because Cohen made no ‘attempt to harm either themselves or anybody else’, such a diagnosis dramatically increased the chance of an insane verdict being reached by the jury.[xxi]
Overall, the collection of varied testimonies and the evidence given within Cohen’s trial make it an excellent study for infanticide cases in Victorian London in both mental and social contexts as puerperal mania is directly detailed, as well as Cohen’s fearful statement that is the title of this blog.
[i]Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 8.0, 16 March 2019), March 1898, trial of ASNETH COHEN (22) (t18980307-232).
[ii]I. Loudon, ‘Puerperal Insanity in the 19thCentury’, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 81 (February 1988) 76-79, (78, 76).
[iii]Daniel J.R. Grey, ‘Almost Unknown Amongst the Jews’: Jewish Women and Infanticide in London 1890-1918’, The London journal 37:2, (July 2012), 122-135, (128).
[vii]Grey, ‘Almost Unknown Amongst the Jews’, 128.
[xii]Ann, Higginbotham, “Sin of the Age”: Infanticide and Illegitimacy in Victorian London’, Victorian Studies 32:3 (Spring 1989), 319-338, (325).
[xviii]Grey, ‘Almost Unknown Amongst the Jews’, 128.
[xix]‘Criminal Lunatics and Lunatic Convicts’, The British Medical Journal2:705, (July 1874) [online resource], https://www-jstor-org.proxy.library.lincoln.ac.uk/stable/25238956Accessed 20/05/2019.
Mad or Bad? Criminal Lunacy in Britain, 1800-1900 