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Library | Material Type | Call Number | Shelf Location | Status | Item Holds |
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Searching... East Library | Book | 364.152 COLL | Nonfiction | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
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Summary
Summary
On November 23rd of 1849, in the heart of Boston, one of the city's richest men simply vanished. Dr. George Parkman, a Brahmin who owned much of Boston's West End, was last seen that afternoon visiting his alma mater, Harvard Medical School. Police scoured city tenements and the harbor, and offered hefty rewards as leads put the elusive Dr. Parkman at sea or hiding in Manhattan. But one Harvard janitor held a much darker suspicion: that their ruthless benefactor had never left the Medical School building alive.
His shocking discoveries in a chemistry professor's laboratory engulfed America in one of its most infamous trials: The Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. John White Webster. A baffling case of red herrings, grave robbery, and dismemberment--of Harvard's greatest doctors investigating one of their own, for a murder hidden in a building full of cadavers--it became a landmark case in the use of medical forensics and the meaning of reasonable doubt. Paul Collins brings nineteenth-century Boston back to life in vivid detail, weaving together newspaper accounts, letters, journals, court transcripts, and memoirs from this groundbreaking case.
Rich in characters and evocative in atmosphere, Blood & Ivy explores the fatal entanglement of new science and old money in one of America's greatest murder mysteries.
Author Notes
Paul Collins is the author of nine books of nonfiction. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and chair of the English Department at Portland State University.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
With the rigor of a historian and a novelist's eye for detail, Collins (Duel with the Devil) constructs a mesmerizing account of the 1849 murder of a socially prominent, Harvard-educated physician. The victim, Dr. George Parkman, who was last seen entering Harvard Medical College on the afternoon of November 23, was a stern and humorless man who despite maintaining an active practice spent most of his days patrolling the streets of Boston's West End collecting rent from the tenants of his numerous properties. His disappearance galvanized law enforcement and Boston locals, due in part to a hefty reward for his body, which was eventually found dismembered in the lab of John White Webster, a distinguished professor of chemistry who had fallen into a prodigious amount of debt and was subsequently convicted of murder and hanged. Combining elements of a police procedural, a legal drama, and a comedy of manners, Collins adroitly explores the characters immersed in the tragedy and their tangled relationships, with appearances by the era's celebrities of literature, medicine, and law, including Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Herman Melville, and Henry Longfellow. This is a fine mixture of true crime, historical exposition, and class conflict in mid-19th-century American history. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Collins (Duel with the Devil, 2013) has a penchant for American murder trials, here recounting the case of the disappearance of a wealthy Boston citizen on November 23, 1849. Suspicion soon fell on a professor of the Massachusetts Medical School, which was part of Harvard College. Collins' propulsive telling covers the search for George Parkman, rumors of sightings, offers of rewards, and the police learning from the janitor of strange happenings in the laboratory of the medical school's chemistry professor, John Webster, who was quickly clapped into jail when a dismembered human body was discovered there. Journalists reveled in the lurid details about the crime scene and the exposure of Webster, a Harvard eminence for decades, as a debtor to Parkman. The court proceeding, writes Collins, produced legal precedents for forensic dental evidence and for the definition of reasonable doubt. Webster's play to evade the gallows with a subsequent admission of his role in Parkman's death will be as eagerly followed by Collins' readers as was the case with Boston's newspaper buyers of yore. A fine reconstruction of an indelible case.--Gilbert Taylor Copyright 2018 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Cambridge, MA, and Harvard University in the 1800s were fascinating places. Harvard itself was full of dichotomies: an influential university that paid its professors a pittance, a world-renowned medical school with an embarrassing connection to grave robbing. Guggenheim Fellow Collins (English, Portland State Univ.; The Murder of the Century) writes how this all came into focus when wealthy landowner Dr. George -Parkman disappeared while on his regular collection rounds. Harvard chemistry professor John White Webster claimed to have seen Parkman on his way, yet an examination of his laboratory brought to light a grisly assortment of human remains-but were they Parkman's? This spellbinding murder case was not only notorious in its day but also led to two important innovations in jurisprudence: the first case of dental records testimony convicting a murderer and the "Webster charge," a legal definition of "reasonable doubt" given to the jury by Judge Lemuel Shaw, which became the standard for more than a century. VERDICT This page-turning popular history of the life and crimes of a Harvard professor in the 1840s will be appreciated by fans of true crime and the history of criminal law.--Deirdre Bray Root, formerly with MidPointe Lib. Syst., OH © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.