The Icepick Surgeon

by Sam Kean

  Littlefield sprinted off and fetched the police, who finally did a thorough search of the lab. They found bone fragments and dentures among the ashes in the furnace, as well as several more shanks of leg in the latrine, which they hauled up on a plank. Most gruesome of all, one cop began digging through Webster’s tea chest—where he kept his beloved minerals, the source of all this trouble. Near the bottom, the cop felt something squishy and decidedly un-rocklike. It was a gutted-out ribcage, with a left thigh jammed inside like a human turducken.

  The remains of George Parkman recovered from the lab of John White Webster at Harvard. (Courtesy of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.)

  The public was stunned. A murder—at Harvard? As one newspaper put it, “In the streets, in the marketplace, at every turn, men greet each other with pale, eager looks, and the inquiry, ‘Can it be true?’” Poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who taught Italian at Harvard and counted Webster as a friend, was crestfallen. “All minds,” he lamented, “are soiled by this foul deed.”

  But if many were ready to hang Webster, local prosecutors looked at the evidence and swallowed hard. Just like with Burke and Hare, making a case wouldn’t be easy. There was a body, sure, but it was headless. Was this actually Parkman? After all, corpses were shuttled in and out of the medical building all the time. Even if it was Parkman, perhaps someone had killed him elsewhere—or found him after a natural death and sold the body to the school. The police couldn’t discount Littlefield, either. After all, who’d found the body? Everyone remembered his willingness to dispose of a dead mother and dead fetus for five lousy bucks, too. Perhaps he’d anticipated a reward for Parkman’s body, or was in cahoots with some resurrectionists. Any way you sliced it, there was reasonable doubt everywhere.

  Given the juiciness of the scandal, Webster’s trial in March 1850 was likely the biggest court case in American history to that point. City officials actually built cattle chutes to herd spectators in and out of the courtroom; sixty thousand people tromped through over eleven days, and newspapers printed tweet-like hourly updates. The case also exposed fault lines of class and caste within the greater Boston area. Hardscrabble Bostonians blasted Webster as a psychopath and demanded that he swing. Haughty Cambridgians, meanwhile, sneered at Littlefield as a slimy sneak who’d obviously framed his boss. (Outside newspapers picked sides, too. One Virginia paper thundered over “that most disgusting of all bipeds, Ephraim Littlefield.”) The presiding justice at the trial was Herman Melville’s father-in-law. The judge also sat on Harvard’s board of overseers, which normally would have been a conflict of interest—except that both the defendant and murder victim were also Harvard alums. As were the lead lawyers for both sides, plus twenty-five of the witnesses. It was half trial, half reunion.

  Webster’s defense was simple. I’m a Harvard man, and Littlefield’s not. So between the two of us, he obviously did it. A bit more materially, Webster’s lawyers pointed out that the state had no murder weapon and no idea how Parkman died. It was like a game of Clue: at different times the prosecuting attorneys suggested a sledgehammer, a knife, and Webster’s “hands and feet” as the instruments of death. Could the jury really convict a man with no weapon and no visible wound on the corpse? Especially in a building full of corpses?

  Still, the prosecution had one big thing going for it. The body had been found in a medical school, steps away from some of the world’s foremost authorities on anatomy. They were experts at reading the human body, and while they respected Webster as a colleague, the corpse in his latrine told a damning tale.

  First of all, the anatomists proved the body was Parkman’s. Several of them had known Parkman for years, and their practiced eyes recognized the gaunt, trapezoidal torso discovered in the tea chest. Similarly, Parkman’s dentist (another Harvard fellow) recognized the scorched false teeth from the furnace, since he’d crafted them himself. What’s more, the dentist could tell that the teeth had been cooked inside a human head. If cooked in a furnace by themselves, he noted, false teeth would heat up quickly and pop like popcorn. These teeth hadn’t popped, implying they’d been shielded from the heat by something moist, like human flesh. It was a virtuoso display of forensic dentistry.

  As for who killed Parkman, the clues pointed to Webster. Whoever had carved up the body, witnesses noted, had betrayed an expert hand in separating the sternum, rib cage, and collarbone. Given the thick muscles and tendons in the breast, it was difficult to disengage the sternum without cracking it; only someone with practice dissecting bodies would know where to cut. The ex-doctor Webster fit that description, while Littlefield, for all his commerce in dead bodies, had never wielded a scalpel.

  Still, despite all the evidence against Webster—the precise cuts; the scorched teeth; the fact that the body had turned up in his toilet—everyone knew that he’d get off, given the pro-Cambridge jury. The trial ended just before 8 p.m. on a Saturday, and the jury returned three hours later with the verdict. Melville’s father-in-law hushed the courtroom and asked them how they found the defendant.

  Webster had remained aloof throughout the proceedings, betraying no emotion. But when the word guilty rang out, he “started as if shot,” said one witness, then slumped backward into his chair. A few yards behind him, Ephraim Littlefield broke down weeping.

  Because of all the publicity surrounding it, Webster’s trial provided a huge boost for forensic science in the United States, much like the O.J. Simpson trial familiarized laypeople with DNA evidence 150 years later. Equally important, after a century of riots and grave-robbing, the trial helped rehabilitate the reputation of anatomical science. Anatomists had not only collared a murderer, but in condemning the well-off professor and exonerating the poor janitor, they’d inverted the usual class alliance of anatomy. One observer, in fact, called the trial perhaps the fairest in American history: “There was never seen a more striking instance of equal and exact justice[:] money, influential friends, able counsel, prayers, petitions, the prestige of a scientific reputation, [all] failed to save him.”

  A dramatic recreation of the Webster-Parkman murder at Harvard.

  And make no mistake, Webster did kill Parkman: he finally confessed to this a few days before he was scheduled to hang. During their final, fatal meeting, Webster said, Parkman had called him some dastardly names and threatened to get him fired—the last step toward financial ruin. In a fit of rage Webster had snatched a nearby log and smashed his tormenter’s temple in. (As a former doctor, he apparently knew where to strike.) Parkman crumpled, and a panicked Webster dismembered the body and started burning it.

  The confession, it turned out, was a last-ditch plea for clemency. As Webster told the governor’s office, he’d committed manslaughter, not murder, and deserved jail time, not death. The governor was unmoved, and like William Burke before him, John White Webster was hanged for an anatomy murder a few days later.3

  Despite the scandalous history of anatomy research, we can at least say this: The odd Burke-Hare murder aside, the people whose bodies were ransacked and dissected never felt a thing. It was still disgraceful, but at least they were beyond suffering.

  Unfortunately, that hasn’t always been the case. Most medical research takes place on the living, and as we’ll see in later chapters, even the anatomists of the 1800s would have squirmed at some of the barbaric experiments that were coming in the following century. Human beings weren’t the only ones to suffer, either. Medical research often treats animals as means, not ends, and their pain and anguish is brushed aside as collateral damage. That’s a serious ethical quandary even when the experiments provide useful data. But in the case of Thomas Edison—who tortured horses and dogs with electricity simply to discredit a business rival—it strays into truly sinful territory.

  Footnotes

  1 Even Abraham Lincoln was the target of a body-snatching plot, albeit not for anatomical reasons. On election night in 1876—a night chosen because most people would be distracted with the news—several felons bro
ke into Abe’s vault to snatch his bones and hold them for ransom. In addition to money, they also wanted to use the bones as leverage to help spring a good buddy of theirs from jail, an expert counterfeiter. Unfortunately for them, the Secret Service had infiltrated their gang with a spy, and the plot was foiled.

  2 One of Littlefield’s odder jobs—the task that occupied him the morning after Thanksgiving—was moving around phrenology busts for an eminent professor at Harvard Med, John Warren. Readers of my book Caesar’s Last Breath will recognize Warren as the surgeon who first championed anesthesia in the medical world. It’s a great example of how scientists who seem so modern in some respects can seem so bizarrely antiquated in others.

  That wasn’t the only anesthesia connection, either. Both William Morton (the dentist-cum-confidence man who discovered anesthesia) and Charles T. Jackson (who claimed that Morton stole the idea from him) would later testify at Webster’s murder trial. Jackson testified for the prosecution about some odd chemical splashes he’d seen in the Harvard medical building. Unbelievably, Webster and Jackson were allowed to chat with each other during a break in the trial, and Webster chided Jackson for opposing him. Jackson immediately offered to testify again—as a character witness for the defense.

  3 The notoriety of the case didn’t end with Webster’s death. The public couldn’t get enough of the scandal and, bowing to necessity, Harvard eventually turned the crime scene into a tourist attraction. Littlefield became a local legend as well; souvenir hunters actually jumped him sometimes and snipped locks of his hair as mementoes.

  The case had a long afterlife in people’s memories, too. When Mark Twain visited the Azores in 1861, he was tickled to meet two of Webster’s daughters, who’d no doubt moved there to escape their father’s shadow. When Charles Dickens visited America in 1869, the one place he wanted to see in Massachusetts was the Parkman murder scene—to the mortification of locals, who assured him that the city had more to offer. Even as late as the early 1900s, a prominent Cambridge astronomer named Harlow Shapley could still get a big laugh with a joke about the case—that the most astonishing thing to him was that, in its whole long history, only one Harvard professor had murdered another.

  5

  ANIMAL CRUELTY: THE WAR OF THE CURRENTS

  The crowd in the auditorium had no idea what they were about to witness, but the appearance of the dog put them instantly on guard. It was July 1888, at Columbia College in New York, and an electrician named Harold Brown dragged a seventy-six-pound Newfoundland mix onstage and forced it into a wooden cage surrounded by wire mesh. Sensing the audience’s unease, Brown assured them that the dog was “a desperate cur, and had already bitten two men.” A reporter on hand thought it actually looked meek—and was no doubt terrified.

  While the dog cowered, Brown read a paper about the merits of alternating current (AC) versus direct current (DC), with an emphasis on how alternating current was deadlier. Upon finishing, he proceeded to do what everyone present feared, wrapping wet cotton around the dog’s right forelimb and left hind limb, then wrapping the cotton with bare copper wire. The wire was connected to a generator, and when everything was ready, Brown flipped the switch.

  Three hundred volts of direct current surged into the dog. It snapped into a rigid posture, and remained frozen until Brown killed the current. Brown then repeated the spectacle with higher voltages—400, 500, 700, 1000. After each pulse, the dog howled and quaked, and once slammed so hard against the cage that its head ripped through the wire mesh. “Spectators left the room, unable to endure the revolting exhibition,” the reporter wrote. The dog’s “vitality had been so reduced that it was a question with the audience whether he was dead or alive.”

  At this point, one spectator stood and demanded that Brown put the animal out of its misery. Brown archly answered that the dog “will have less trouble when we try the alternating current.” Brown swapped the DC generator out for an AC one, and proceeded to zap the dog with 330 more volts—at which point, another reporter wrote, it “gave a series of pitiful moans, underwent a number of convulsions, and died.”

  One witness said the demonstration made a bullfight look like a petting zoo. Brown, meanwhile, was elated. He felt he’d proved his main point: that AC killed at lower voltages than DC. He knew this would be music to the ears of his benefactor, too, the man who’d sponsored the torture of the Newfoundland as well as several other animals—that American saint, Thomas Edison.

  We all know the story. Despite less than three months of formal schooling, Thomas Alva Edison, through a mixture of gumption and genius, helped invent (or at least develop) dozens of innovative technologies—stock tickers, vote recorders, movie cameras, fire alarms, and more. His machine to record voices, the phonograph, so astounded people in the 1800s that many refused to believe it wasn’t a magic trick. And while Edison didn’t invent the lightbulb, he and his team of tinkerers did turn a dim, fragile, expensive fire hazard into a cheap, reliable device capable of illuminating the world. Edison absolutely deserves to be an American folk hero.

  Thomas Edison and an early version of his phonograph—a brilliant invention that did not make him much money. (Courtesy of Gallica, Bibliothèque nationale de France.)

  That said, Edison could be a real bastard sometimes. He and his assistants all put in grueling hours, regularly working past midnight and sleeping in closets at the lab. But Edison alone hogged the glory for “his” inventions. He was a backstabbing businessman, too. In the 1870s, Edison once accepted $5,000 ($110,000 today) from a telegraph company to develop some new electrical equipment. Edison did the job—then sold the rights to their competitor for $30,000. Even with the lightbulb, Edison lied several times in announcing publicly that he’d perfected it, both to spur investment in his company and destroy the stock price of natural-gas firms. Many people agreed with one executive who sneered that Edison “had a vacuum where his conscience ought to be.”

  For all his ruthless brilliance, though, Edison’s inventions had one big flaw: they made very little money. Even the phonograph, however marvelous, was mostly used as a toy, since there was no market for recorded music then. Without steady income, Edison couldn’t fund his true passion, his research lab. Moreover, Edison felt that, as a man of genius, he needed to transform the world somehow, and his scattered collection of gizmos wasn’t getting the job done.

  Finally, in the 1880s, Edison came up with his killer idea: wiring cities for electricity. Even at that time, the residents of most big cities walked around beneath a cat’s cradle of wires strung overhead. These were mostly telegraph and arc-lighting wires, specialized for one purpose and restricted to certain businesses. Edison proposed threading electrical wires into every business, and even into people’s homes. What’s more, Edison’s wires wouldn’t be restricted to one purpose, but would supply power for everything—motors, looms, lightbulbs, you name it. Because Edison owned patents on every step in the process, from generators to transmission lines to consumer devices, all the profits from wiring cities would end up in his pockets. He also understood, like few contemporaries, just how revolutionary electricity would be—and he wanted to be the man to power America. He planned to start in Manhattan, perfect the technology, and expand to the rest of the country.

  There was just one problem: His patents relied on direct current. Direct current is like a river, a flow of electrons in one direction only. Alternating current, in contrast, is like a fast tide: the electrons flow first one way, then another, alternating direction dozens of times per second. Both DC and AC can provide useful power, and for various reasons DC has always dominated with consumer goods: cars, phones, televisions, appliances, computers—all of them use direct current internally. But Edison’s plans involved transmitting current—sending it over wires from power plants into homes and factories. And when it came to transmitting current, both AC and DC had distinct advantages and disadvantages in the 1880s.

  The advantage of DC was that, again, consumer goods like motors ra
n internally on DC power. If your power supply was also direct current, you could therefore avoid the mess and inefficiency of converting from AC to DC before plugging in. The disadvantage of DC was the huge upfront cost. Given the limitations of transmitting direct current then, Edison needed to build power plants every few blocks—and do so mile after mile. Plus, Edison had to connect the power plants to people’s homes with copper wires, and copper was a pricey metal. Edison then made things even harder on himself by insisting that his company bury its wires belowground. For various reasons, he hated seeing wires strung overhead—too ugly, too dangerous, too liable to break. His company began tearing up cobblestone streets instead and laying its wires beneath them. To his credit, Edison often got right down in the trenches with his crews, heaving up the stones and getting smeared with mud. The undertaking was expensive, however, and his crews were allowed to work only at night, to avoid disrupting traffic.

  AC power, in contrast, required less upfront investment. To see why, you can think about electricity moving through a wire as akin to water moving through a pipe. Thicker pipes allow for higher water flow, but they’re more expensive to make. If you need to deliver a certain amount of water per day, then, and you’re forced to use thin pipes, your best option is to increase the water pressure. High pressure, in other words, can make up for the shortcomings of thin pipes.

  A similar dynamic is at play with electricity. Thick copper wires can deliver more power, but they’re expensive. To get around that, you have to increase the “pressure” in the wires—what scientists call the voltage. (Many people in Edison’s day actually used the term “electrical pressure” to mean voltage.) The key point is this: with alternating current, it’s trivial to boost the voltage-pressure for transmission. As a result, people could send loads of power down an AC line even when the wires were thin and used little copper. DC was different. At the time, it was hard to increase the electrical pressure with DC and boost the voltage.