By Paul Carrier
When Charles Dickens visited Boston on his second American tour in 1867-68, he desperately wanted to see a specific local landmark. But it wasn’t a historic church or an old graveyard that he had in mind. Dickens asked Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. — poet, essayist, and medical school professor — to take him to the scene of a gruesome murder whose notoriety had spread far beyond Massachusetts, and even the United States.
In November 1849, Dr. George Parkman, a wealthy Boston physician and landlord, disappeared. His dismembered and partially burned remains were later found at the Massachusetts Medical College (Harvard Medical School) in Boston, leading to the eventual arrest of John White Webster, a professor at the school.
The murder and its aftermath created a sensation because of the shocking nature of the crime, the social and professional prominence of both Parkman and Webster, their shared Harvard connection, and the high profile of Webster’s trial, which drew tens of thousands of spectators to the courtroom over time and attracted widespread news coverage. Dickens’ desire to visit the murder scene some 19 years after the fact opens Blood & Ivy, Paul Collins’ account of what his subtitle calls “the 1849 murder that scandalized Harvard.”
Almost inevitably, the discovery of the remains at the medical college pulled the school’s faculty and alumni into the coroner’s investigation. As Collins writes, the forensic evidence had been found “in the very building of those best qualified to examine it.” Various aspects of the case were parceled out to graduates of the college, who “brought an extraordinary range of expertise” to the task at hand.
But the grisly, sensational case did not necessarily enhance the public’s impression of the medical school, a repository for cadavers acquired for dissection by medical students. Whether all of those corpses were obtained by legitimate means rather than grave robbing and body snatching was subject of debate in the public mind.
Collins’ evocative and thoroughly researched work, which reads like a fast-paced novel, creates a richly detailed sense of place, transporting the reader to the bustling metropolis that was antebellum Boston and the more bucolic byways of Cambridge, a neighboring community on the opposite shore of the Charles River.
The contrast is startling. Once the snow begins to fall in November, Collins writes of a period shortly before the murder, “the sleepy wooden cottages” of Cambridge would be isolated from “the grimy brick of the thriving port city” of Boston. At least some Cambridge residents worried that the planned opening of a railroad link between Cambridge and Boston would create more harm than good. They wondered if the coming of the rails would ”bring the city’s filth and wickedness upon Cambridge even faster and more efficiently” than in the past.
Into this milieu plagued by provincialism, rigid class distinctions and nativist bigotry, Collins introduces a wide range of characters, including the tall, lean, aristocratic Parkman, who was easily recognizable in life because he routinely walked to and from his many Boston properties, collecting rents; and Webster, a physician better known as a sociable and entertaining chemistry professor who lived in Cambridge but worked at the medical college in Boston.
Francis Tukey, the Boston city marshal who led the investigation of Parkman’s murder, had a checkered past, as did medical college janitor Ephraim Littlefield, who first suspected Webster’s guilt. Dr. Nathan Cooley Keep, a prosecution witness at Webster’s trial, was a pioneer in the development of modern dentures, a fact that played a key role in the case. Fellow dentist William T.G. Morton, at odds with Keep over competing claims to the discovery of anesthetic ether, testified for the defense. It marked the first time dental evidence was used in an American capital case.
As Collins explains, the trial was legally memorable as well, thanks to Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, who presided. In his instructions to the jury, Shaw offered what Collins calls a “remarkably clear explanation” of the relatively new concept of reasonable doubt. So clear, in fact, that it became the standard definition for decades to come.
Collins drops the names of assorted 19th-century New England luminaries, helping to situate the murder in a setting that provides tantalizing glimpses of the world at large. He does so with apparent relish, and some regularity.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow pops up as a friend of the defendant. Nathaniel Hawthorne gets a mention, thanks to the upcoming release of a novel having something to do with a woman who gives birth out of wedlock. Holmes is on hand as dean of the Massachusetts Medical College and, like Webster, a member of the faculty there. We even learn that Shaw, the state supreme court justice, was the father-in-law of author Herman Melville.
The newspapers of the era, including the so-called penny press, play a prominent — and sometimes entertaining — roll in Blood & Ivy. The competition for scoops among more than a dozen daily and weekly papers in Boston quickly reached a fever pitch, further undermining the already dubious standards of many in the press of the period. Rumors blossomed and quickly found their way into print, with or without evidence to support them.
Collins offers an engrossing true-crime saga from an era when a nation roiled by sectional discord a decade before the Civil War still found time to obsess over other facets of life and death, including murder most foul.
In November 1849, Dr. George Parkman, a wealthy Boston physician and landlord, disappeared. His dismembered and partially burned remains were later found at the Massachusetts Medical College (Harvard Medical School) in Boston, leading to the eventual arrest of John White Webster, a professor at the school.
The murder and its aftermath created a sensation because of the shocking nature of the crime, the social and professional prominence of both Parkman and Webster, their shared Harvard connection, and the high profile of Webster’s trial, which drew tens of thousands of spectators to the courtroom over time and attracted widespread news coverage. Dickens’ desire to visit the murder scene some 19 years after the fact opens Blood & Ivy, Paul Collins’ account of what his subtitle calls “the 1849 murder that scandalized Harvard.”
Almost inevitably, the discovery of the remains at the medical college pulled the school’s faculty and alumni into the coroner’s investigation. As Collins writes, the forensic evidence had been found “in the very building of those best qualified to examine it.” Various aspects of the case were parceled out to graduates of the college, who “brought an extraordinary range of expertise” to the task at hand.
But the grisly, sensational case did not necessarily enhance the public’s impression of the medical school, a repository for cadavers acquired for dissection by medical students. Whether all of those corpses were obtained by legitimate means rather than grave robbing and body snatching was subject of debate in the public mind.
Collins’ evocative and thoroughly researched work, which reads like a fast-paced novel, creates a richly detailed sense of place, transporting the reader to the bustling metropolis that was antebellum Boston and the more bucolic byways of Cambridge, a neighboring community on the opposite shore of the Charles River.
The contrast is startling. Once the snow begins to fall in November, Collins writes of a period shortly before the murder, “the sleepy wooden cottages” of Cambridge would be isolated from “the grimy brick of the thriving port city” of Boston. At least some Cambridge residents worried that the planned opening of a railroad link between Cambridge and Boston would create more harm than good. They wondered if the coming of the rails would ”bring the city’s filth and wickedness upon Cambridge even faster and more efficiently” than in the past.
Into this milieu plagued by provincialism, rigid class distinctions and nativist bigotry, Collins introduces a wide range of characters, including the tall, lean, aristocratic Parkman, who was easily recognizable in life because he routinely walked to and from his many Boston properties, collecting rents; and Webster, a physician better known as a sociable and entertaining chemistry professor who lived in Cambridge but worked at the medical college in Boston.
Francis Tukey, the Boston city marshal who led the investigation of Parkman’s murder, had a checkered past, as did medical college janitor Ephraim Littlefield, who first suspected Webster’s guilt. Dr. Nathan Cooley Keep, a prosecution witness at Webster’s trial, was a pioneer in the development of modern dentures, a fact that played a key role in the case. Fellow dentist William T.G. Morton, at odds with Keep over competing claims to the discovery of anesthetic ether, testified for the defense. It marked the first time dental evidence was used in an American capital case.
As Collins explains, the trial was legally memorable as well, thanks to Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, who presided. In his instructions to the jury, Shaw offered what Collins calls a “remarkably clear explanation” of the relatively new concept of reasonable doubt. So clear, in fact, that it became the standard definition for decades to come.
Collins drops the names of assorted 19th-century New England luminaries, helping to situate the murder in a setting that provides tantalizing glimpses of the world at large. He does so with apparent relish, and some regularity.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow pops up as a friend of the defendant. Nathaniel Hawthorne gets a mention, thanks to the upcoming release of a novel having something to do with a woman who gives birth out of wedlock. Holmes is on hand as dean of the Massachusetts Medical College and, like Webster, a member of the faculty there. We even learn that Shaw, the state supreme court justice, was the father-in-law of author Herman Melville.
The newspapers of the era, including the so-called penny press, play a prominent — and sometimes entertaining — roll in Blood & Ivy. The competition for scoops among more than a dozen daily and weekly papers in Boston quickly reached a fever pitch, further undermining the already dubious standards of many in the press of the period. Rumors blossomed and quickly found their way into print, with or without evidence to support them.
Collins offers an engrossing true-crime saga from an era when a nation roiled by sectional discord a decade before the Civil War still found time to obsess over other facets of life and death, including murder most foul.
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