Blood & Ivy

May 28, 2018
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.

June 1, 2018
A true-crime chronicle of dark doings among the upper crust of Harvard Medical School in the middle of the 19th century.On Nov. 23, 1849, the esteemed Dr. George Parkman went missing. The dour doctor, a well-known lecturer in the nascent science of medicine at Harvard, was last seen making his rounds. At the time, he was also collecting considerable cash receipts from his many real estate ventures. Naturally, foul play was suspected, and substantial rewards for information were posted. Collins (Chair, English/Portland State Univ.; Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living, 2014, etc.) introduces a cast of diverse players. There was Littlefield, the school's janitor, who found the grisly remains of Parkman dismembered and burned in the laboratory and adjacent privy used only by chemistry professor John White Webster. Then there was Cambridge marshal Francis Tukey, whose past was not unblemished. Also included in this drama were Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. A nimble writer, the author skillfully sets the stage for this 19th-century murder mystery. Skeletons, death masks, pickled organs, and cadavers abounded in the medical school. There were demijohns, casks, and bubbling retorts in the labs, and outside the building were pools of fetid water, clattering hansom cabs, and an occasional riot. Mesmerism was popular, and reporters did their agitated best to add colorful detail, true or imaginary, to their stories. It was a wonderful world of daguerreotypes, roaring printing presses, and even a mechanical man, all advertised to be powered by steam. The murderer was discovered, and the subsequent trial featured some forensic and jurisprudential innovations. Dental evidence was seriously employed for the first time, and the judge's charge to the jury became accepted law. Collins also reveals lively bits of information about police procedurals as practiced during that time.A vivid true-crime tale from a fascinating bygone era.

COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

July 1, 2018

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 Journal, LLC Used with permission.