Long’s core claim, recorded in the Newgate Calendar’s account of his Old Bailey trial testimony and evidence as his stated theory: “in cases of internal disease he proposed, by creating an external wound and a discharge, to carry off the malady.” No mechanism of this kind exists in contemporary or modern pathology or pharmacology. At Catherine Cashin’s inquest and trial, the attending surgeon Benjamin Brodie testified he was “at a loss to imagine how the production of such a wound could be supposed to have any effect in curing a patient of consumption, or in preventing such a disease,” and the wound in fact caused her death by infection rather than curing or preventing anything. The Medico-chirurgical Review had already criticized Long’s method in a January 1829 notice, more than a year before Cashin’s death.