Peter, a junior doctor at St Thomas's Hospital in Lambeth, was killed in the Blitz in 1940, while Alan died of tuberculosis in 1945, shortly after the Second World War.

Depression over his finances and his declining health are believed to have been a key factor in his decision to commit suicide by gas in his laboratory at University College, London, in 1947.

Spilsbury later gave evidence at the trial of Herbert Rowse Armstrong, the solicitor convicted of poisoning his wife with arsenic.

Although the man accused of the second murder, Tony Mancini (real name Cecil Louis England), was acquitted, he confessed to the killing in 1976 just before his own death, vindicating Spilsbury's evidence.

Judges began to express concern about his invincibility in court and recent researches have indicated that his inflexible dogmatism led to miscarriages of justice.

The hand-written cards, discovered in a lost cabinet, were the notes that Spilsbury apparently accumulated for a textbook on forensic medicine which he was planning, but there is no evidence that he ever started the book.

Spilsbury is mentioned in the Severed Heads song 'Dead Eyes Opened' by the narrator, Edgar Lustgarten as 'a great pathologist with unique experience'.

The song uses Edgar Wallace's transcription of Patrick Herbert Mahon's trial for the murder of his lover Emily Beilby Kaye.

The BBC science documentary series Horizon cast a critical eye on Spilsbury's work in the 1970 episode The Expert Witness.

During Spilsbury's lifetime, and as early as 1925 after the murder conviction of Norman Thorne, concern began to be expressed by informed opinion about his domination of the courtroom and about the quality of his methodology.

The influential Law Journal expressed 'profound disquiet' at the verdict, noting 'the more than Papal infallibility with which Sir Bernard Spilsbury is rapidly being invested by juries.'.

'[15] Keith Simpson wrote of Spilsbury 'whose positive evidence had doubtless led to conviction at trials that might have ended with sufficient doubt for acquittal.

'[16] Burney and Pemberton (2010) noted how the "virtuosity" of Spilsbury's performances in the mortuary and the courtroom "threatened to undermine the foundations of forensic pathology as a modern and objective specialism.