Drs. Williams and Chew unhesitatingly stated on the witness-stand that
they recognized poisoning as early as the Saturday of Mr. Van Ness's
illness.[23] Yet they gave no antidote. They employed on Monday and
Tuesday a treatment which, although well adapted to a case of natural
disease presenting such symptoms, would in a case of poisoning have
materially increased the risk to life. They did not save the matters
vomited: they did not save the secretions, which would certainly
have contained antimony if Mr. Van Ness had been poisoned as alleged.
According to their testimony, Mr. Van Ness received six doses of
poison on as many different days, four of the doses administered under
their eyes; yet they gave no warning to the unfortunate victim or to
his friends. If the theory they upheld be correct, that Mrs. Wharton
poisoned both General Ketchum and Mr. Van Ness, the extraordinary
spectacle was presented of one man lying dead in the house from the
effect of poison, of another receiving day after day the fatal dose
with the knowledge of the attending physician, yet no antidote given,
no warning word put forth, no saving of the evidences of guilt! It
would seem as though silence at a trial would best become gentlemen
with such a record, yet they were the only experts who asserted that
strychnia was the sole possible cause for the attack of the 24th of
June, and tartar emetic of the subsequent attacks.

The experts for the defence asserted that the convulsion of Saturday
could not have been caused by strychnia or other known poison; that
although the symptoms of the later attacks resembled those of tartar
emetic poisoning, they were not identical with those usually produced
by that drug; and that it was exceedingly improbable that these
attacks were due to the poison named, because obvious natural causes
for them existed.[24]