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BOOK REVIEWS Olivier went to medical school, became a pediatrician, married, and then ironicaUy lost her objectivity and became passionately involved with James Strachey. She never traded on her relationship with Brooke, but as Virginia Woolf noted in her 1923 diary, these letters were precious to Olivier: "But when she read his love letters—beautiful beautiful love letters—real love letters, she said—she cries and cries." This is why the title of the volume (from one of Brooke's finest poems, The Fish"), which can be so easily misunderstood as sentimentality, is aptly selected. When it came to love—human, mature, responsible love—both Brooke and Olivier were fish underwater. Love was both physical ("sightless clinging") and metaphysical ("the infinite distance"), and only later in her life was Olivier able to reconcile them—Brooke never. As sad as their tale might have seemed to some of their friends, what actually transpired was ultimately the best ending. William Laskowski ------------------- Jamestown College Social Deviance Angus McLaren. A Prescnptfan for Murder: The Victorian Serial Killings of Dr. Thomas Neill Cream. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. xv + 217 pp. $22.50 JUST AS THERE SEEM to be "fashions" in mental Ulness—not simply in diagnoses but also in occurrence—so are there styles in crime. Serial kUling gained notoriety in England, France, Spain and the United States during the late nineteenth century. Most studies of the subject (if not purely sensational) take a psychological approach to the killer, looking for the famUy history and early experience that determined his pathology. In A Prescription for Murder, however, Angus McLaren suggests that social forces may implicitly authorize particular crhnes so that an individual's deviance takes one form rather than another. Thomas NeUl Cream (1850-1892) murdered at least seven women in England and North America in a period that bracketed the "Jack the Ripper" kUlings. (Cream himself, however, was in prison during 1888, and his weapon of choice was strychnine rather than the knife.) Born in Glasgow to parents who iminigrated to Canada when he was four, Cream graduated from McGiU University with a degree in medicine and had further training at St. Thomas's Hospital. His wife expired in suspicious circumstances; in Canada his obstetrical practice vanished after a patient's questionable death; in Chicago he was known to the police as an abortionist and accused of kUling at least one client. 79 ELT 37 : 1 1994 Convicted for poisoning a man—husband of one of the many women he romanced—Cream served ten years in the IUinois State Prison at Joliet. When he was paroled in 1891, Cream went back to London where he began to pick up streetwalkers and (kindly doctor that he was) give them pUls which he said would prevent venereal disease. After watching them swaUow the dose, Cream sometimes sent blackmailing letters accusing a prominent man of the murder and demanding money to suppress his evidence. He also volunteered helpful information to a detective friend. Arrested and convicted with the help of compelling testimony from one savvy prostitute who had spit the pUls into her hand, Cream was executed in November 1892. A psychiatric study of a crazy sex-kiUer could certainly be shaped from these materials: Cream's medical specialty in women's diseases, the blackmaU and clue-dropping that virtually forced police to notice him, rumors of arson earlier in his life. Yet without denying Cream's evident irrationality, McLaren demonstrates that his murder of prostitutes and of women who took control of their fertility implicates the historical moment. He also suggests why society chooses to sanitize male violence as the isolated act of a deranged monster. A Prescription for Murder is so clearly written that both the prose and the ideas can be foUowed by nonspecialists. Its first part narrates a story of crime, detection, trial and execution. The second (and longer) portion analyzes the social context in topical chapters devoted to prostitution , abortion, blackmaU, doctors, detectives, degenerates, and women. The links of history and crime are wonderfully suggestive. Soon after Cream arrived in London to train at St. Thomas's, Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh were charged with obscenity for publishing a birth...

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