Overview

Hook: the documented advertisement. An advertisement ran in the Bristol Times & Mirror through the 1880s and 1890s. Married couple with no family would adopt healthy child, nice country home. Terms, £10. The married couple did not exist. The country home did not exist. The woman who took the infant and the cash at a Reading railway platform in 1896 had been running the same notice, under three rotated names, for twenty-seven years. The body of one of the children she received that March was pulled from the Thames at Caversham Lock by a bargeman on the morning of 30 March, with a length of white dressmaking tape knotted beneath the left ear. Amelia Dyer was the first English baby farmer to leave a documentary record of an industrial scale of practice. She was not the first to have killed her charges. Twenty-three cases collected here run from Dyer's hanging at Newgate in June 1896 to the Argentine cassation appeal pending against Brenda Agüero in Córdoba in 2026. The credential profile runs from baby farmer and live-in caregiver through the registered nurse, the State Enrolled Nurse, the nursing assistant, the orderly, the general practitioner, and the medical doctor. What the cases share, across nine countries and one and a third centuries, is the position of trust - the bedside, the ward, the domiciliary house call, the credential the patient's family did not question, the access to medication the protocol did not require a second signature for. Three of the cases sit in a category the chapters mark as live controversy: the 2010 Hoge Raad exoneration of Lucia de Berk; the 2025 Court of Appeal upholding of the Colin Norris convictions; the continuing review of the Lucy Letby case at Chester. For readers of Harold Schechter, Patricia Pearson, and Atul Gawande's narrative pieces.

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