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On any given day outside Ottawa’s best-known abortion clinic, protesters carry placards bearing pictures of bloody and dismembered fetuses. But in the Ottawa of 100 years ago, abortion was killing and maiming women. It was a desperate gamble that many were nonetheless willing to take, Megan Gillis writes.
Pregnant and single, the 24-year-old waitress at a Sparks Street lunch counter said she’d drown herself in the Rideau Canal if Annie Balcomb didn’t agree to help her.
Emily Cornick got her abortion but died anyway, weeping to her sister as she succumbed to peritonitis, “I’m going to die. I am sorry I came here. Oh, what will Mother say?”
Meanwhile, Rose Ferguson, a 40-year-old mother of five, had been both recently widowed and told by her doctor that another pregnancy would kill her.
She managed to end the pregnancy and survive — barely — but found herself dragged into court, too weak to stand and in “paroxysms of tears,” as she testified at the sensational trial of her accused abortionists.
This was abortion in the Ottawa of a century ago — illegal, taboo and potentially deadly.
The bloody reality trickles through the breathless newspaper coverage of the trials of Dr. J.A. Ouimet, a prominent Hull doctor, and Annie Balcomb, a Sandy Hill landlady.
Together and separately, the pair became notorious, accused between 1911 and 1914 of murdering the abortion-seeking women who died and performing “criminal operations” on the ones who lived.
But so desperate were the women seeking abortions that Balcomb’s being charged with murder — twice — only brought more of them to her Chapel Street door.
“If you look at history,” explains Constance Backhouse, a University of Ottawa law professor who’s written about the history of abortion in Canada, “when abortions were all unlawful, there are just scores of women whose records we can find in the legal registers who would go to potential death to avoid having a carry a child.”
Nor was a young woman threatening to throw herself in the canal mere histrionics.
“Women did. They threw themselves down the stairs, they threw themselves off horses, they drank unbelievably dangerous poisons and chemicals, they used knitting needles to try to self-abort.”
As a young researcher, Backhouse remembers visiting the Archives of Ontario, where the exhibits of the trials were filed and seeing the needles, knives and hooks.
At the time, birth control was illegal, unwed motherhood meant ruin and only tuberculosis killed more young women than childbirth. Even in the 1920s, childbirth was killing four Canadian women a day.
Prosecutions of abortionists were rare — and abortions only came to the attention of the authorities when they went horribly wrong.
“I think we should remember that … what it looks like on the other side of unlawful,” Backhouse said. “You can have a Draconian law prohibiting abortion and women are still going to search for it and are still going to abort their pregnancies. It doesn’t matter what the law does.”
The Balcomb family surrounds nine-year-old Warner, who drowned trying to save a friend at the Rideau Canal. His mother went on to become an infamous abortionist at a time when the practice was illegal and taboo.
Before the 19th century, abortion wasn’t a crime in England or Canada. Long before pregnancy tests, life was widely believed to begin at “quickening,” when the fetus first stirred in the womb, now pegged at between 16 and 20 weeks gestation.
In 1810, New Brunswick was the first Canadian province to follow England in adding abortion to criminal law, specifying it covered women “quick with child.” Upper Canada was the first to dispense with that distinction in 1841, which posed “obvious evidentiary difficulties,” Backhouse noted.
A hundred and fifty years ago, the federal government took charge of criminal law and two years later passed the toughest provisions against abortion yet seen in Canada.
The same thing was happening in the United States for reasons including efforts to formalize criminal law and the influence from religious figures, but the staunchest advocacy came from the newly organized medical profession.
One 1875 editorial in Canada Lancet called abortionists “traffickers in human life” who “live and flourish on the blood they spill.”
Yet in all the reams of newspaper accounts, there’s never a mention of abortion ending a human life — unless the woman died — or even of a baby at all.
A prosecutor at one point explained that charging an abortionist with murder was like a murder charge against an arsonist who burns a house down for insurance without knowing that there were people inside. If the abortionist was convicted of murder, the sentence would be commuted from death to life in prison, he assured the reporter.
Constance Backhouse, a University of Ottawa law professor who’s written about the history of abortion in Canada.
Charges for abortion were rare. Even rarer were prosecutions for infanticide, the resort for the poorest of the poor without the means even to abort.
“These infants were abandoned and they found their bodies, loads of them, all over, in railway stations, in rivers, in ditches, in tree stumps; there were babies everywhere,” Backhouse said. “When you read the historical record, you’re just overwhelmed by that. But they never found anybody to charge.”
The reason was partly practical — it was hard to trace a guilty mother from a dead newborn — but it was also, Backhouse thinks, ideological.
“They were far more worried that middle-class and upper-class women were choosing not to have babies. They called that race suicide,” Backhouse said. “There was a great alarm, they had to nip that in the bud, and make the right class of women bear children.
“But babies that were murdered and showing up all over the place, nobody much cared about them. It’s so shocking today. It was viewed as far less worrying than abortion.”
Also largely invisible in the historical record are the men who fathered the unwanted babies — with the notable exception of Frank Spain, who testified at Ouimet’s trial on charges of murdering Spain’s 26-year-old wife.
A cook at the then newly-opened Rivermead Golf Club, Edith died of “blood poisoning” in 1911, leaving a 2 1/2-year-old son and 18-month-old daughter.
A “deathly pale” Frank Spain collapsed altogether on the witness stand before pulling himself together “by a strong effort of will,” with “his pluck … favourably commented on by many of the onlookers.”
Whether he really didn’t know what his wife was planning — he’d once boarded at Balcomb’s house — his tail was harrowing.
Spain testified that his wife had told him two months earlier that she was “determined never to have any more children.” Two days before she died, she went to Ouimet’s office.
While Ouimet later insisted that all he’d done was prescribe her a “mild cathartic,” Edith was soon in agony
“I told her to go for a doctor and she said she was afraid if she did she would be sent to gaol,” — meaning jail — the couple’s landlady testified.
Frank Spain gave his wife a little brandy, which seemed to revive her but, as the doctor who did the autopsy testified, “every organ in the body displayed evidence of infection.” Her body, the coroner testified, was “quite black” and “swollen to a terrible degree.”
Among 19 instruments seized from Ouimet’s office, the coroner testified, were a few beyond what would normally be found in a doctor’s kit – a rubber syringe and two long steel knitting needles.
“Finally,” Spain testified, in the middle of the night, “she threw her arms around me saying, ‘Kiss me, Frank, I’m going.'”
With that, she sank back, dead.
A pro-choice protest in Ottawa in 1970.
In 1969 the Criminal Code was amended to decriminalize abortions done by doctors in hospitals and approved by a committee who judged a woman’s life or health would be threatened by a pregnancy, liberalizing laws that would ultimately be struck down entirely as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1988.
Although doctors were among those later fighting for safe and legal abortion by the 1960s, they were among the most outspoken lobbyists for the criminalization of abortion a century earlier, aiming to cement their status and drive “irregulars,” from the practice of medicine, Backhouse said.
Annie Balcomb was one of those irregulars.
Born in Nepean in 1864, she came from one of hundreds of Tipperary Protestant immigrant families who’d arrived from Ireland early in the century.
In 1900, she was left alone with four young children under the age of 10 after the death of her husband, an Ottawa police officer turned hotel keeper. His body was exhumed as rumours swirled he’d been poisoned, although it appears he’d simply taken too much of the Gold Cure, a patent medicine for alcoholism that actually contained both booze and strychnine.
Balcomb began running a boarding house and, in 1901, tragedy struck again when her 10-year-old son, Warner, died a “little hero,” trying to save a friend from drowning as the pair fished in the Rideau Canal.
By 1911, when she was first charged, she was holding herself out as a “garde malade” (or “home nurse”) and her house at 148 Chapel St. as a kind of unofficial hospital.
Dr. J.A. Ouimet, meanwhile, was an affluent Hull doctor and a staunch Conservative.
Instantly recognizable for his “thick, iron-gray hair brushed up in a pompadour,” well-cut suits and showy private carriage, his home and office was “one of the lumber city’s landmarks.”
The police spared no effort to nab the pair.
Balcomb’s house was alleged by the police “morality squad” to have been used for “criminal operations” for quite some time but police couldn’t prove it. A “woman spy of police” was rumoured to have been a maid in Balcomb’s house.
Ouimet was first charged in early 1911 with murder after the death of Edith Mary Spain, a waitress and mother-of-two.
His indignant brother blamed other doctors for his troubles — “they always try to beat a smarter man than themselves,” he said — and threatened a libel suit.
He was acquitted but the detective on the case vowed that “you’ll see, before snow covers the ground, Ouimet will again be in the cells.”
Police set a detective on a bicycle to trail Ouimet every time he left his house.
“Day after day, a web of evidence was woven,” the paper wrote.
There probably wasn’t yet snow on the ground in October 1911 when Ottawa detectives arrested Ouimet at his Pontiac fishing camp. They’d taken the train to Gracefield, hired a team of horses to take them 18 miles through the bush then boarded skiffs to cross as “a fierce gale was blowing and the water was whipped.” Balcomb was arrested at 148 Chapel Street home.
Rose Ferguson of Carleton Place had confessed “upon being questioned” while she was still in her hospital bed, her condition “not yet without danger” — that she’d been operated on by Ouimet on Oct. 18 with Balcomb’s help.
Ottawa Journal June 17, 1911
Only those connected with the case were allowed inside the courtroom so “a noisy, morbidly curious crowd waited and signified their impatience and disapproval at being excluded by occasionally kicking the door and shouting for admittance.”
Balcomb — described by a reporter as a “tall, dark, heavily built woman” — arrived at court wearing a big hat trimmed with four large black and green feathers to answer the lawyer’s questions with a “nonchalant” attitude.
Ferguson was “so weak and emaciated as the result of a period of dangerous sickness and suffering,” that she had to be helped into a chair in the witness box.
She first said that she went to Ouimet’s office for help and he sent her to Chapel Street where the operation was performed with Balcomb assisting but she changed her story on the stand, denying even knowing she was pregnant or seeking Ouimet’s help for that condition.
“What a lot of untruths you told,” the prosecutor said acidly.
“Today, I am telling the truth,” Ferguson insisted.
Five young married women were ready to testify that Ouimet had operated on them, too, for sums ranging from $1 to $40 but the defence called it irrelevant to the case at hand and the judge refused to call them forward to incriminate themselves.
Balcomb herself was called to testify against the doctor but ultimately refused to implicate him.
Given the “unexpected turn” of the testimony, Ouimet was acquitted and the charge against Balcomb withdrawn.
Ottawa Journal November 10, 1911
Balcomb’s troubles weren’t over.
Nearly two years later, she was charged with causing the death of Emily Cornick, a 24-year-old waitress, by a criminal operation. Cornick, whose Slater Street landlady called a “good girl” (though the newspaper noted she didn’t live at home with her parents), died of peritonitis at the Carleton General Hospital on Rideau Street.
Apparently suspicious, Mrs. A.H. Saunders, a friend of Cornick’s, did some sleuthing to help nab Balcomb. She went to Chapel Street, told her she was “in trouble” and Balcomb agreed to “fix her up” for the princely sum of $100, or nearly $2,200 today. Police Chief Alexander Ross himself took Saunders’ statement.
Emily Cornick’s sister, Josphine Matthews, testified that Balcomb told her that she was “used to attending such cases but that my sister’s was rather far advanced.” But she admitted to tearing up her sister’s letters and Balcomb’s lawyer, the distinguished Dr. Gordon Henderson, suggested that she was “quite vindictive towards Mrs. Balcomb.
“In fact you would like to do her all the harm you could?” Henderson asked.
“‘Yes, I would,’ blazed back the witness,” an anonymous reporter wrote in a 1913 account. A judge would ultimately toss out the sister’s statement.
When Ouimet was acquitted in the Ferguson case in late 1911, the judge told him that whether he was guilty “is a matter between you and your Maker” before the doctor shook each juror’s hand, sobbing and smiling, and his jubilant friends “literally carried him down Nicholas Street.”
He appears to have simply resumed his practice — his 1921 obituary refers to an “immense” practice spanning more than three decades and his charity to the poor.
In December 1913, Balcomb was acquitted of performing an abortion on Margaret Walsh, who testified that she’d gone to see Balcomb, who at first refused to help her, after seeing her name in the newspaper and had been “all right” since. In January 1914, a grand jury refused to send Balcomb to trial in Gillis’s death.
Later that month, Balcomb was acquitted of Cornick’s murder. After waiting three hours in the prisoner’s dock for the jury’s verdict, her sister, Miss Stanley, and one of her sons by her side, she “received the verdict calmly” and shook hands with her supporters.
It wasn’t until April 1914 that the province’s Attorney General would wire the Ottawa Crown instructions to stay the prosecution of the charge of performing an illegal operation on Cornick.
“Mrs Balcomb has now been acquitted of all the charges laid against her,” a reporter concluded.
There she disappears from the inky pages. Her address turned up in the paper when both sons fought in the First World War. She wouldn’t live to see a grandson return from the second, dying at her daughter’s modest frame house on Strathcona Avenue in 1942.
Ottawa Journal December 7, 1911
mgillis@postmedia.com
查看原文...
Pregnant and single, the 24-year-old waitress at a Sparks Street lunch counter said she’d drown herself in the Rideau Canal if Annie Balcomb didn’t agree to help her.
Emily Cornick got her abortion but died anyway, weeping to her sister as she succumbed to peritonitis, “I’m going to die. I am sorry I came here. Oh, what will Mother say?”
Meanwhile, Rose Ferguson, a 40-year-old mother of five, had been both recently widowed and told by her doctor that another pregnancy would kill her.
She managed to end the pregnancy and survive — barely — but found herself dragged into court, too weak to stand and in “paroxysms of tears,” as she testified at the sensational trial of her accused abortionists.
This was abortion in the Ottawa of a century ago — illegal, taboo and potentially deadly.
The bloody reality trickles through the breathless newspaper coverage of the trials of Dr. J.A. Ouimet, a prominent Hull doctor, and Annie Balcomb, a Sandy Hill landlady.
Together and separately, the pair became notorious, accused between 1911 and 1914 of murdering the abortion-seeking women who died and performing “criminal operations” on the ones who lived.
But so desperate were the women seeking abortions that Balcomb’s being charged with murder — twice — only brought more of them to her Chapel Street door.
“If you look at history,” explains Constance Backhouse, a University of Ottawa law professor who’s written about the history of abortion in Canada, “when abortions were all unlawful, there are just scores of women whose records we can find in the legal registers who would go to potential death to avoid having a carry a child.”
Nor was a young woman threatening to throw herself in the canal mere histrionics.
“Women did. They threw themselves down the stairs, they threw themselves off horses, they drank unbelievably dangerous poisons and chemicals, they used knitting needles to try to self-abort.”
As a young researcher, Backhouse remembers visiting the Archives of Ontario, where the exhibits of the trials were filed and seeing the needles, knives and hooks.
At the time, birth control was illegal, unwed motherhood meant ruin and only tuberculosis killed more young women than childbirth. Even in the 1920s, childbirth was killing four Canadian women a day.
Prosecutions of abortionists were rare — and abortions only came to the attention of the authorities when they went horribly wrong.
“I think we should remember that … what it looks like on the other side of unlawful,” Backhouse said. “You can have a Draconian law prohibiting abortion and women are still going to search for it and are still going to abort their pregnancies. It doesn’t matter what the law does.”
The Balcomb family surrounds nine-year-old Warner, who drowned trying to save a friend at the Rideau Canal. His mother went on to become an infamous abortionist at a time when the practice was illegal and taboo.
The wrong side of the law
Before the 19th century, abortion wasn’t a crime in England or Canada. Long before pregnancy tests, life was widely believed to begin at “quickening,” when the fetus first stirred in the womb, now pegged at between 16 and 20 weeks gestation.
In 1810, New Brunswick was the first Canadian province to follow England in adding abortion to criminal law, specifying it covered women “quick with child.” Upper Canada was the first to dispense with that distinction in 1841, which posed “obvious evidentiary difficulties,” Backhouse noted.
A hundred and fifty years ago, the federal government took charge of criminal law and two years later passed the toughest provisions against abortion yet seen in Canada.
The same thing was happening in the United States for reasons including efforts to formalize criminal law and the influence from religious figures, but the staunchest advocacy came from the newly organized medical profession.
One 1875 editorial in Canada Lancet called abortionists “traffickers in human life” who “live and flourish on the blood they spill.”
Yet in all the reams of newspaper accounts, there’s never a mention of abortion ending a human life — unless the woman died — or even of a baby at all.
A prosecutor at one point explained that charging an abortionist with murder was like a murder charge against an arsonist who burns a house down for insurance without knowing that there were people inside. If the abortionist was convicted of murder, the sentence would be commuted from death to life in prison, he assured the reporter.
Constance Backhouse, a University of Ottawa law professor who’s written about the history of abortion in Canada.
Fears of ‘race suicide’
Charges for abortion were rare. Even rarer were prosecutions for infanticide, the resort for the poorest of the poor without the means even to abort.
“These infants were abandoned and they found their bodies, loads of them, all over, in railway stations, in rivers, in ditches, in tree stumps; there were babies everywhere,” Backhouse said. “When you read the historical record, you’re just overwhelmed by that. But they never found anybody to charge.”
The reason was partly practical — it was hard to trace a guilty mother from a dead newborn — but it was also, Backhouse thinks, ideological.
“They were far more worried that middle-class and upper-class women were choosing not to have babies. They called that race suicide,” Backhouse said. “There was a great alarm, they had to nip that in the bud, and make the right class of women bear children.
“But babies that were murdered and showing up all over the place, nobody much cared about them. It’s so shocking today. It was viewed as far less worrying than abortion.”
Also largely invisible in the historical record are the men who fathered the unwanted babies — with the notable exception of Frank Spain, who testified at Ouimet’s trial on charges of murdering Spain’s 26-year-old wife.
A cook at the then newly-opened Rivermead Golf Club, Edith died of “blood poisoning” in 1911, leaving a 2 1/2-year-old son and 18-month-old daughter.
A “deathly pale” Frank Spain collapsed altogether on the witness stand before pulling himself together “by a strong effort of will,” with “his pluck … favourably commented on by many of the onlookers.”
Whether he really didn’t know what his wife was planning — he’d once boarded at Balcomb’s house — his tail was harrowing.
Spain testified that his wife had told him two months earlier that she was “determined never to have any more children.” Two days before she died, she went to Ouimet’s office.
While Ouimet later insisted that all he’d done was prescribe her a “mild cathartic,” Edith was soon in agony
“I told her to go for a doctor and she said she was afraid if she did she would be sent to gaol,” — meaning jail — the couple’s landlady testified.
Frank Spain gave his wife a little brandy, which seemed to revive her but, as the doctor who did the autopsy testified, “every organ in the body displayed evidence of infection.” Her body, the coroner testified, was “quite black” and “swollen to a terrible degree.”
Among 19 instruments seized from Ouimet’s office, the coroner testified, were a few beyond what would normally be found in a doctor’s kit – a rubber syringe and two long steel knitting needles.
“Finally,” Spain testified, in the middle of the night, “she threw her arms around me saying, ‘Kiss me, Frank, I’m going.'”
With that, she sank back, dead.
A pro-choice protest in Ottawa in 1970.
The ‘irregulars’
In 1969 the Criminal Code was amended to decriminalize abortions done by doctors in hospitals and approved by a committee who judged a woman’s life or health would be threatened by a pregnancy, liberalizing laws that would ultimately be struck down entirely as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1988.
Although doctors were among those later fighting for safe and legal abortion by the 1960s, they were among the most outspoken lobbyists for the criminalization of abortion a century earlier, aiming to cement their status and drive “irregulars,” from the practice of medicine, Backhouse said.
Annie Balcomb was one of those irregulars.
Born in Nepean in 1864, she came from one of hundreds of Tipperary Protestant immigrant families who’d arrived from Ireland early in the century.
In 1900, she was left alone with four young children under the age of 10 after the death of her husband, an Ottawa police officer turned hotel keeper. His body was exhumed as rumours swirled he’d been poisoned, although it appears he’d simply taken too much of the Gold Cure, a patent medicine for alcoholism that actually contained both booze and strychnine.
Balcomb began running a boarding house and, in 1901, tragedy struck again when her 10-year-old son, Warner, died a “little hero,” trying to save a friend from drowning as the pair fished in the Rideau Canal.
By 1911, when she was first charged, she was holding herself out as a “garde malade” (or “home nurse”) and her house at 148 Chapel St. as a kind of unofficial hospital.
Dr. J.A. Ouimet, meanwhile, was an affluent Hull doctor and a staunch Conservative.
Instantly recognizable for his “thick, iron-gray hair brushed up in a pompadour,” well-cut suits and showy private carriage, his home and office was “one of the lumber city’s landmarks.”
The police spared no effort to nab the pair.
Balcomb’s house was alleged by the police “morality squad” to have been used for “criminal operations” for quite some time but police couldn’t prove it. A “woman spy of police” was rumoured to have been a maid in Balcomb’s house.
Ouimet was first charged in early 1911 with murder after the death of Edith Mary Spain, a waitress and mother-of-two.
His indignant brother blamed other doctors for his troubles — “they always try to beat a smarter man than themselves,” he said — and threatened a libel suit.
He was acquitted but the detective on the case vowed that “you’ll see, before snow covers the ground, Ouimet will again be in the cells.”
Police set a detective on a bicycle to trail Ouimet every time he left his house.
“Day after day, a web of evidence was woven,” the paper wrote.
There probably wasn’t yet snow on the ground in October 1911 when Ottawa detectives arrested Ouimet at his Pontiac fishing camp. They’d taken the train to Gracefield, hired a team of horses to take them 18 miles through the bush then boarded skiffs to cross as “a fierce gale was blowing and the water was whipped.” Balcomb was arrested at 148 Chapel Street home.
Rose Ferguson of Carleton Place had confessed “upon being questioned” while she was still in her hospital bed, her condition “not yet without danger” — that she’d been operated on by Ouimet on Oct. 18 with Balcomb’s help.
Ottawa Journal June 17, 1911
The Trial
Only those connected with the case were allowed inside the courtroom so “a noisy, morbidly curious crowd waited and signified their impatience and disapproval at being excluded by occasionally kicking the door and shouting for admittance.”
Balcomb — described by a reporter as a “tall, dark, heavily built woman” — arrived at court wearing a big hat trimmed with four large black and green feathers to answer the lawyer’s questions with a “nonchalant” attitude.
Ferguson was “so weak and emaciated as the result of a period of dangerous sickness and suffering,” that she had to be helped into a chair in the witness box.
She first said that she went to Ouimet’s office for help and he sent her to Chapel Street where the operation was performed with Balcomb assisting but she changed her story on the stand, denying even knowing she was pregnant or seeking Ouimet’s help for that condition.
“What a lot of untruths you told,” the prosecutor said acidly.
“Today, I am telling the truth,” Ferguson insisted.
Five young married women were ready to testify that Ouimet had operated on them, too, for sums ranging from $1 to $40 but the defence called it irrelevant to the case at hand and the judge refused to call them forward to incriminate themselves.
Balcomb herself was called to testify against the doctor but ultimately refused to implicate him.
Given the “unexpected turn” of the testimony, Ouimet was acquitted and the charge against Balcomb withdrawn.
Ottawa Journal November 10, 1911
Not done yet
Balcomb’s troubles weren’t over.
Nearly two years later, she was charged with causing the death of Emily Cornick, a 24-year-old waitress, by a criminal operation. Cornick, whose Slater Street landlady called a “good girl” (though the newspaper noted she didn’t live at home with her parents), died of peritonitis at the Carleton General Hospital on Rideau Street.
Apparently suspicious, Mrs. A.H. Saunders, a friend of Cornick’s, did some sleuthing to help nab Balcomb. She went to Chapel Street, told her she was “in trouble” and Balcomb agreed to “fix her up” for the princely sum of $100, or nearly $2,200 today. Police Chief Alexander Ross himself took Saunders’ statement.
Emily Cornick’s sister, Josphine Matthews, testified that Balcomb told her that she was “used to attending such cases but that my sister’s was rather far advanced.” But she admitted to tearing up her sister’s letters and Balcomb’s lawyer, the distinguished Dr. Gordon Henderson, suggested that she was “quite vindictive towards Mrs. Balcomb.
“In fact you would like to do her all the harm you could?” Henderson asked.
“‘Yes, I would,’ blazed back the witness,” an anonymous reporter wrote in a 1913 account. A judge would ultimately toss out the sister’s statement.
While her case was ongoing, Balcomb was hit with a second charge of murder, this time in the case of Stella Gillis, who died of sepsis after, a coroner’s jury heard, being operated on at Balcomb’s house then smuggled out on the day Cornick died.
“For God’s sake, don’t squeal, for you know what will become of me,” a witness testified to having heard Balcomb tell Gillis as she was taken away.
By November 1913, languishing in the Nicholas Street jail and facing two murder charges and a charge of committing an illegal operation on a third woman, jailers reported that Balcomb was “seriously ill and on the verge of a nervous breakdown.”
When Ouimet was acquitted in the Ferguson case in late 1911, the judge told him that whether he was guilty “is a matter between you and your Maker” before the doctor shook each juror’s hand, sobbing and smiling, and his jubilant friends “literally carried him down Nicholas Street.”
He appears to have simply resumed his practice — his 1921 obituary refers to an “immense” practice spanning more than three decades and his charity to the poor.
In December 1913, Balcomb was acquitted of performing an abortion on Margaret Walsh, who testified that she’d gone to see Balcomb, who at first refused to help her, after seeing her name in the newspaper and had been “all right” since. In January 1914, a grand jury refused to send Balcomb to trial in Gillis’s death.
Later that month, Balcomb was acquitted of Cornick’s murder. After waiting three hours in the prisoner’s dock for the jury’s verdict, her sister, Miss Stanley, and one of her sons by her side, she “received the verdict calmly” and shook hands with her supporters.
It wasn’t until April 1914 that the province’s Attorney General would wire the Ottawa Crown instructions to stay the prosecution of the charge of performing an illegal operation on Cornick.
“Mrs Balcomb has now been acquitted of all the charges laid against her,” a reporter concluded.
There she disappears from the inky pages. Her address turned up in the paper when both sons fought in the First World War. She wouldn’t live to see a grandson return from the second, dying at her daughter’s modest frame house on Strathcona Avenue in 1942.
Ottawa Journal December 7, 1911
mgillis@postmedia.com
查看原文...
