State v. Crofford

The appellant is a physician, and for several years prior to the date of the crime with which he is charged conducted a sanitarium or hospital at Lamoni, in Decatur county. Maud Stone, a young unmarried woman, about twenty-one years of age, residing with her parents upon a farm in said county, entered the appellant’s sanitarium about January 22, 1901, and died there one week later. A post-mortem examination revealed, as it is claimed, evidences that she had been lately pregnant, and had suffered an abortion. It is the theory of the state that the pregnancy was the result of an intimacy…