True Crime Tuesdays on the Fearsome Fiction Podcast: The Soothing Draught – Catherine Wilson

Welcome back to True Crime Tuesdays on the Fearsome Fiction Podcast. Today’s case takes us to a Victorian sickroom, where the person meant to make you better was the one who decided whether you lived.

Her name was Catherine Wilson. She worked as a private nurse in small English towns through the 1850s and into the 1860s, sitting at bedsides, mixing medicines, and quietly becoming the beneficiary of more than one dying patient’s will. Husbands, lovers, landladies, patients. The deaths piled up for a decade before anyone thought to ask why.

This is The Soothing Draught, the story of the woman who became the first known serial killer nurse in England, caught not because anyone suspected her, but because one patient refused to die quietly.