The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck

by Alexander Laing

  Q. And it did not occur to you that this information would be of use to the authorities?

  A. It did occur to me, sir.

  Q. Then why did you not volunteer it?

  A. It made necessary the volunteering of what I knew to be an unsubstantiated alibi. And I was asked not to reveal it by Dr. Alling.

  Q. Then you conspired with Manfred Alling to conceal knowledge of a crime?

  A. No, sir. I had no knowledge of the commission of a crime.

  Q. Did he have such knowledge?

  A. I never knew, until we were both arraigned at the magistrate’s court, last Thursday evening. His admission that he embalmed the boy seems to indicate that he did have knowledge of the crime, all along.

  Q. He never told you, or gave you cause to suspect him?

  A. He never told me. At times I suspected him, but I also suspected ten or twelve other people, most of them for better reasons.

  Q. Who were they?

  A. I consider the question improper.

  At this point Coroner Kent nodded, and said, “So do I.”

  I have given the above testimony as the only means of showing that Muriel’s name never was mentioned in my testimony, despite the fact that I answered all questions directly. It seemed best not volunteer anything that might lead to the necessity of describing my trip to New York. Several leading questions were asked to try to make me confess that I had seen Wyck at an hour later than 10:45 that evening, and I had to rehearse a number of times my actual progress on the way back to town. But the rest of my testimony brought out nothing that has not already adequately been described to the reader—and all of it concerned only the fatal night.

  Biddy was next called. Her testimony provided the first real surprise of the hearing. She did not tangle herself up nearly so much as before. Her alibi had not been asked for at the original inquest. Now, when she was requested to give it, she merely said that Dr. Alling had told her to go for a walk for half an hour, some time late at night, and that she had done so. She had walked up Atlantic Street, past the school building, to the middle of town, and had returned again by the same route. The county prosecutor then inquired:

  “Mrs. Connell, did you enter the medical school building coming or going, while you were out for a walk?”

  A. No I did not.

  Q. Did you see any lights in the building?

  A. Not to notice them.

  Q. Did you see any car standing outside the building?

  A. I don’t think— Yes, I did that, now I remember.

  Q. Please describe the car.

  A. It was a big one. The reasons I remember was because it had a dog thing on the front end of it.

  A series of questions then established the fact that the “dog thing” was a radiator-cap ornament.

  Q. (By the county prosecutor) Do you know who owns the car you described?

  A. It might be and it might not be that man’s car. (Witness indicating Coroner Kent.)

  The next page or two of the trial record indicated that Biddy was conducted to a window and indentified a car parked in front of the school at the time of the inquest as “maybe the same one. It’s got a dog like it.” In a series of curt answers, the coroner acknowledged that the car was his own, offered himself in the capacity of an ordinary witness, and suggested that the county prosecutor take over the full conduct of the inquiry. The suggestion was declined.

  No other new testimony of significance was introduced until the appearance on the stand of Dr. Alling.

  Q. (By Coroner Kent) Dr. Alling, the county prosecutor informs me that you were unwilling to answer a general question about your activities in the early morning of April 4, 1932, until you had an opportunity to display certain pieces of concrete evidence. Are you now prepared to make a general answer, or would you prefer a series of specific queries?

  A. If the sheriff will produce a package sent by my lawyers, I am ready to give a general answer and to be cross-questioned later.

  Q. Thank you, Dr. Alling. Will you please tell us anything which might have a bearing upon the Wyck case, that occurred in your presence during the period from 9:30 P.M. April 3, 1932, to 12:00 noon of April 4, 1932?

  As the first part of his answer, Dr. Alling alluded to the baffling nature of Mike’s ailment, and described how he and I had been called in by Biddy at the time of Mike’s second mysterious attack of pain, on the morning of April 3rd. He referred only casually to the faculty meeting, mentioning that at its conclusion he had walked directly to his home, accompanied by Richard Prendergast, a student, and Senator Tolland.

  “I did not notice the exact time when Mr. Prendergast and Senator Tolland left my house,” Dr. Alling continued. “Probably it was a little before eleven o’clock. I stayed up, working in my study, until midnight, when Dr. Wyck rang my doorbell. Although he never had spoken about it, I had had good reason to suspect that he was a very sick man. He lowered himself into a chair, and said, ‘Fred, I’m about at the end of my strength, and I’m just on the verge of what may be a tremendously important scientific discovery. You’ve got to help me with it.’ Of course I was willing, and asked how. ‘You may think me mad,’ he said to me, ‘You mustn’t. This is extremely important—the first wonderful step in a whole new field of inquiry.’ He was very earnest, ‘Fred,’ he said, ‘I want you to sit up all night with Mike Connell, and make the most scrupulous scientific report of his conduct from one o’clock till morning.’ I reminded him that he himself had seemed very little interested in Mike, that very morning, as Mrs. Connell had said she had phoned him in vain to come to attend her husband. But Dr. Wyck assured me that the significance of Mike’s attacks had occurred to him only tardily, late in the afternoon.

  “Well, I had reasons to think that Wyck’s mind was failing, but I also was highly interested in Connell’s amazing symptoms. I agreed to go to the Connells’ at one A.M. Dr Wyck then gave me the key to his office, and told me to stop in there as soon as I came from the Connells’ and compare the prediction I would find there with the actual events that had happened. As a final precaution, he synchronized our watches exactly, and urged me to keep a minutely careful record of the beginning and enduring of any unusual symptoms. I offered to drive him home, but he insisted that the walk would benefit him.

  “When I reached the Connell home, Mrs. Connell complained that she had been unable to sleep for two nights. I knew that she needed relief from her vigil as a prelude to sleep, and told her to walk around for half an hour. At 1:23 A.M. Mr. Saunders, who lived at the Connell house, came in. He had been there not more than a minute when Connell began to have the most violent maniacal symptoms. I had little time to keep track of the time, and impulsively smashed my watch down on the table, to stop it with at least the first important time element on record. Saunders was knocked unconscious by the maniac, and I was physically inadequate to the situation. Connell dashed from the house. I phoned the hospital, and was taken there with Saunders. After reassuring the staff that I was unhurt, I left without an examination of any sort, and hat put my car away and locked the garage before I remembered that Dr. Wyck had said an explanation would be found in his office. I felt chilled, and decided to warm myself by walking to the medical school building. The doors proved to be unlocked, a fact which argued that someone was still in the building. As I had seen no light in front, I assumed it must be Dr. Wyck. The door of his office was ajar, and a light was burning. I found him apparently asleep at his desk, his head resting on his right forearm. A closer look showed that blood was trickling from the back of his neck, and that his left wrist was encased in a leather wristlet capable of translating pulse beats into electrical impulses. In a drawer of the desk was the school’s kymograph, arranged to register these pulse beats.

  “My first reaction, of course, was the thought that my colleague had been murdered. Then I caught sight of a letter on the desk, addressed to me. May I have it, Mr. Palmer?”

  The sheriff meanwhile had broken the seals of a large package whic
h had been impounded with Dr. Alling’s lawyers. He drew out of it the kymograph, and several documents. Dr. Alling read the letter, which I reproduce in full:

  Dear Fred:

  I want you to be the recipient of my remains, literary, scientific, corporeal. My daughter is to have my tangible property. Today I have been given the sardonic opportunity to use, as the materials of my last experiment, my own life. I cannot live more than a few more months, and they would be sour ones for me and for the immediately contiguous part of the cosmos.

  Mike Connell, as you know, has been a regular blood donor. About twenty-four hours ago, Peter Tompkins died with some of Mike’s blood in his veins. A few minutes before the fact of Peter Tompkins’s death was ascertained, Mike himself had suffered extraordinary paroxysms. We do not know exactly when the Tompkins boy died, but there is a startling inference that the paroxysms in Mike were a direct reaction to the fact that some of his own blood was at that moment suffering pain of death, so to speak, in another body.

  You will think at once of numberless cases when recipients of blood have died without any effect upon the donor. But Connell’s case is separate, because this reaction occurred only after the arm from which the blood was drawn off was amputated. The nervous system at the point where the arm was severed was the center of the attack.

  Now, Fred, we don’t know what death is. We don’t know what the relationship is between the life of a supposedly self-sufficient organism in the blood stream and the life of the whole complex community of cells of which it is a part. This reaction in the arm of Mike Connell, under unique conditions, is, I believe, the first definite opportunity science has had to make a deliberate experiment in the nature of life and death.

  I realized this, alas, only after I had let a second similar phenomenon, this morning, slip by unobserved. Thus it becomes my privilege to give my own life to death, in order that you may observe and record the result. As I told you earlier in the day, I have received more blood from Mike than anyone else has. I have transfused about three liters of blood into myself. As this is several times as much as in the case of the Tompkins boy, the reaction should be correspondingly more pronounced, should it not?

  I have set your watch and mine in synchronism. The second hand on mine is 17 seconds faster than on yours. At this point, 1:00 A.M. precisely (with my second hand at 60, yours at 43), I have set the school’s kymograph in motion. The error in two trial revolutions is –3 seconds in 15 minutes. The needle of the kymograph is actuated by my pulse in the usual way.

  Before commencing to write this letter, I swallowed ten grams of veronal, which already is numbing my perceptions, and which should kill me within a few hours at most. The moment of my death will be accurately recorded on the drum of the kymograph. You will be able to observe the time of the consequent reaction (if any) on Connell. The implications, if the experiment results positively, I leave to your scientific acumen as a trust and a legacy.

  Farewell, then, and one last request. (My brain is swimming, but I shall hold death off to finish my letter, as I have held it off before.) This is a clinical demise, and I desire to go the whole way. It is therefore my well considered wish that my body be used for dissection in the anatomy course. I charge you to embalm it yourself, immediately, to assure its fitness, and I charge you to supervise its placing in the school vaults, in the next vacant stall, to be taken out for dissection in the normal course of events. Play no favorites with it.

  My daughter has prepared a typewritten transcript of all my recent notes of scientific labors. These notes are to be held in absolute confidence for disposition at your own discretion. I suggest that you impound them with a trust company if you do not wish to take the responsibility for making them public or for withholding them. Perhaps you will want to order them published at the end of a period of years, the length of which you can judge best. My hand is like cotton. I shall say goodbye.

  Gideon Wyck, M.D.

  After this amazing letter had been read, Marjorie Wyck, the comptroller of the hospital, an several other persons familiar with Gideon Wyck’s handwriting were called in briefly in verify the holograph. Marjorie admitted that she had made a full transcript of a book of laboratory notes—probably the same one Daisy and I had found at the ruined farm—and had given the transcript to Dr. Alling in accordance with a wish expressed by her father before he disappeared. When she and Dr. Alling were asked to produce the original of the transcript, both testified that the original was not in their possession, and Dr. Alling refused in his capacity as trustee of the copy to make it public. Marjorie said that she had taken no note of the highly technical material, while copying, and could say nothing about its specific nature. She left the room, and Dr. Alling continued his story:

  “Having read this letter, my first impulse was to refer to my watch, which I had stopped by striking it at the moment of the first symptom of violent reaction on the part of Mike Connell. It read 1:24, with the second hand at 49. I then opened the drawer in which the kymograph had been placed, and noticed that the record of pulsations had made something less than two full revolutions of the smoked drum. As two complete revolutions would have required one-half hour from the moment of starting at one o’clock, I saw at once that death had probably occurred at very nearly the same moment as that of the reaction noted in the blood donor, Mike Connell. I can only plead my scientific training, and my awe in the presence of an amazing implication, as excuse for having stopped then and there to calculate precisely the length of time which the kymograph had been running.

  “Mr. Palmer, will you hand me the sheet of paper covered with figures, from the impounded material? Thank you. As you will see, the kymograph records the fact that Dr. Wyck’s heart ceased beating at 24 minutes and 28 seconds past one o’clock, after corrections have been made for the lag of the kymograph. Since Dr. Wyck’s watch, and therefore the kymograph, were 17 seconds faster than mine, it is necessary to add 17 seconds to 28 seconds to show the instant of Wyck’s death according to my own watch. Thus—using my watch to time both events, Wyck’s heard stopped at 1:24:45 o’clock, precisely, and Mike’s maniacal reaction occurred at 1:24:49 o’clock, or four seconds later.

  “Assuming a connection between these events, it is to be expected that to any stimulus a sleeping man would react tardily, and that my consequent reaction in striking my watch was also a trifle delayed. Therefore, it was inescapable indicated that the death of Gideon Wyck did have a direct and violent effect upon the donor who had given him blood.”

  The prosecutor interrupted to ask, “Do you yourself, as a sworn witness, believe that the reaction of Connell was caused by Wyck’s death.”

  “I believe it implicitly,” Dr. Alling replied.

  The prosecutor then turned to Coroner Kent and asked his opinion of the plausibility of the explanation. The reply of the coroner was:

  “Such an explanation is contrary to all known laws of physics and of the science of medicine.”

  “Do you think it is established, at least as a reasonable hypothesis, by these data?” the prosecutor inquired; and Kent answered, “I should personally want further proof before admitting such a thesis to the dignity of further consideration. Moreover, Dr. Alling has pointed out a coincidence in one case only, out of three seizures suffered by the blood donor. Of the other two, in the first case the coincidence is doubtful, and in the second no cause is given at all.”

  Dr. Alling once asked Sheriff Palmer for the letter from Joe Baker’s mother and submitted it as evidence that the second seizure had certainly as much claim as the first to be related to the death of a recipient of Mike’s blood.

  Q. (By prosecutor) Why do you suppose that Dr. Wyck himself did not refer to this second apparent coincidence?

  A. I can only suggest that it was because he had swallowed a large quantity of poison, and felt that he did not have time to write about anything not absolutely vital.

  Q. Very well. Will you please proceed with an account of your whereabouts and acti
ons on the morning of April 4th?

  “When I had read the letter and made these calculations,” Dr. Alling continued, “I next happened to notice that the heart action recorded on the kymograph, although progressively weaker through the second revolution, showed at the end a series of slowed, regular, and extremely exaggerated beats such as one might expect from the sudden inhibition of the accelerator nerves and the complete dominance of the vagus or inhibitor fibers.

  “Please give the instrument to Dr. Kent, Mr. Palmer. Thank you. This was an indication that death when it came was violent and convulsive, which was not likely to have been the case if the cause of death had been veronal. I then realized that Dr. Wyck, despite his effort to commit suicide, had in reality been murdered, and that I was provided with an absolutely accurate record, on the kymograph, of the moment when the sharp instrument had severed the spinal cord.

  “For perhaps ten minutes I pondered the question of what to do. Dr. Kent as my closest advisor is fully aware of the intense worry to which I have been put by Dr. Wyck’s conduct. It had brought us to the verge of a legislative investigation which might have had the most unfortunate results in rendering it impossible to get cadavers and animals for anatomy courses and laboratory experimentation, to say nothing of the danger of cessation of state funds, without which the school could not exist another month.

  “In defense of my subsequent actions, I can only say that this acute worry, sharpened by the lecture which I had just been read by Senator Tolland, must have temporarily unbalanced my judgment. Under the stress of these happenings, it seemed to me that I was justified in following the course of action which Dr. Wyck had adjured me to follow, in the letter that was his last will and testament. I was convinced that a scandal in the school at that time would destroy it. This may have been a hallucination of extreme worry. At any rate, I found myself pushing Dr. Wyck’s body, still in the swivel chair, until I got it to the elevator. Then I lowered it and myself down to the preparation room. There, with the aid of the block and tackle, and an incline plane made from removable table top, I overcame my physical inadequacy by application of the laws of force, and got the cadaver in place for embalming.