The Parkman-Webster murder case was a highly-publicized crime, investigation, and trial that shook the American city of Boston, Massachusetts to its core in 1849–1850, due to the crime's gruesome nature and the high social station of the victim and murderer.
Dr. George Parkman, (February 19, 1790–November 23, 1849), a Boston Brahmin (a term actually not coined by Parkman contemporary Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. until 1860, after Parkman’s death), belonged to one of the moneyed city’s richest families. A son of his father Samuel’s second wife, Sarah Rogers, Parkman had three full brothers and one sister—and another six half-siblings, children of Sarah Shaw. George’s father and family patriarch, Samuel, had bought up low-lying lands and income properties in Boston’s West End. He owned the towns of Parkman, Maine and Parkman, Ohio. His sons from his first marriage oversaw the Ohio properties; his second set of boys were responsible for the Maine parcel. Samuel’s daughters inherited wealth as well. The most notable was George’s full-sister Elizabeth Parkman whose spouse Robert G. Shaw, grandfather of Robert Gould Shaw, grew his wife’s share of the fortune to become the senior partner in the most powerful commercial house in a city glutted with the proceeds of the China Trade. To add to the resources, the eleven Parkman scions united in marriage with the Beacon Hill families of Sturgis, Blake, Tuckerman, Cabot, Mason and Tilden. Of the offspring, it was tightfisted George who his father chose to administer the Parkman estate.
George Parkman’s poor health as a youngster led him to want to study medicine. He entered the freshman class of Harvard at 15 and delivered the “Salutory Oration” in 1809. Despite his assured wealth, a lecture by Dr. Benjamin Rush inspired him to take an interest in the terrible state of asylums for the mentally ill. He spent two years at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland obtaining his medical degree. After returning to Boston, he traveled aboard the U.S.S. Constitution to Europe and was under the charge of a former Bostonian, Count Rumford, who introduced him to the Minister of France, Joel Barlow. Barlow introduced him to many doctors in Paris. While there, he observed the pioneering and humane treatment methods of two famous French psychiatrists, Drs. Philippe Pinel and Etienne Esquirol. He studied at the Salpêtrière Hospital for his graduate work. “My first knowledge of the Saltpêtrière , was with the high privilege of the guidance of its great physician, Pinel, and of his new illustrious associate, Esquirol. Pinel received me kindly, and inquired with much interest after Dr. Benjamin Rush, who had lately written his book on Diseases of the Mind,” Parkman wrote from Paris. That same interest helped to cement the relationship between Parkman and Pinel. The 70 year-old Pinel’s ideas impressed Parkman. Under great teachers like Pinel and Esquirol, Parkman practiced at the great Parisian Asylum, and learned the history and treatment of mental “diseases.” At this time Parkman developed his own path of his career. He spent time in England studying with men of Science, as well.
Parkman returned to the U.S. in 1813. The War of 1812 called for the service of young men and Parkman “received a commission as a surgeon in a regiment of the third brigade belonging to the first division of the Massachusetts militia.” He began in South Boston and simultaneously served as a physician to the poor with a desire to replicate the practices of Pinel and Esquirol.
Parkman believed that psychiatric institutions should reflect a residence-like setting, where patients could enjoy hobbies and socializing and participating in household chores, as permitted. Parkman thought Saltpêtrière a good model and talked to the faculty of Massachusetts General Hospital about having a lunatic hospital connected to it. In 1817, he wrote two papers, Remarks on Insanity and The Management of Lunatics in an effort to convince the trustees of the Massachusetts General Hospital that he could supervise an asylum they were considering opening. That same year he offered to raise $16,000 for the construction of a full-size institution. Unfortunately, the trustees interpreted the offer as a proposal to fully endow the project. Later, the McLean Asylum was established, but the trustees feared the taint of corruption if Parkman had held an appointment he had endowed. Interesting to note, Dr. Rufus Wyman, the father of Dr. Jeffries Wyman and Dr. Morrill Wyman, who both were involved in the Webster case, was appointed. The embarrassed Parkman retired, but continued his interest in medicine and insanity. He would visit and entertain them, he bought them an organ, and opened up his own mansions for the treatment of cholera and small pox epidemics’ victims. The Court frequently called upon him to testify in alleged insanity pleas.
In 1823 Parkman organized and published the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal with Drs. J. C. Warren and John Ware. 1837 he revisited Saltpêtrière, and having not written for many years, he sent a letter and sketches to the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, outlining some Parisian hospitals.
For his income, Parkman relied on business. When the elder Parkman died in 1835, George took complete control of the estate and bought vast amounts of land and real estate in Boston, including many poorly maintained tenements. Money lending and real estate augmented his income; he also sold the land for the new Harvard Medical School and the Charles Street jail. His house still stands at 8 Walnut Street.
Parkman was a well-known figure in the streets of Boston, which he walked daily, collecting his rents (a thrifty man, he did not own a horse). He was tall, lean, had a protruding chin, and wore a top hat. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. said that "he abstained while others indulged, he walked while others rode, he worked while others slept." Fanny Longfellow, wife of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, called him "the lean doctor... the good-natured Don-Quixote." He was worth some half a million dollars in 1849.
Main biographical article: John White Webster
Webster, a short, stocky man with dark hair and glasses, taught at Harvard Medical College, publishing chemistry books, lecturing to students, and seeing his annual pay rise from $800 to $1200, with a few hundred dollars more coming from lecture ticket sales at the Massachusetts Medical College. Some reports criticized his teaching ability: for instance, The Boston Daily Bee described him as "tolerated rather than respected, and has only retained his position on account of its comparative insignificance. As a lecturer he was dull and common-place and while the students took tickets to his lectures, they did not generally attend them." The Yarmouth Register also hinted at this defect: "his reputation in his profession is respectable but not brilliant", but noted that "With a mild, kind and unassuming disposition, with eminently social feelings and manners of uncommon affability, he probably had not any enemy." Still, it referred to his poor "management of pecuniary affairs."
Indeed, debt was Webster's great problem. With two daughters of debutante age (one of them married) by the late 1840s, he tried desperately to keep up appearances and provide lavishly for his family. The family had been forced to give up a mansion he had built in Cambridge, although they were leasing a respectable but not grand house in 1849. He was in debt to a number of friends, as his salary and meager lecture earnings could not cover his expenses.
Webster, indulged as a child and pampered in youth, had a petulant and fussy disposition but was known for his kindly nature. Longfellow attests to his macabre streak in an anecdote relating how at one dinner at the Webster home, the host amazed his guests by lowering the lights, fitting a noose around his own neck, and lolling his head forward, tongue protruding, over a bowl of blazing chemicals, to give a ghastly imitation of a man being hanged.
A Swamp Yankee of rural origins, Littlefield was the janitor of the new Harvard Medical College, built in 1846, and had also been the janitor at the previous one since 1842. He and his wife Caroline lived in the basement of the medical college, right next to professor John Webster's laboratory. He knew Webster and the other Harvard doctors well, and observed their study of medicine, including the dissection of cadavers for the study of human anatomy. To supplement his income, he obtained cadavers for dissection at a price of about twenty-five dollars a body, selling them to students and professors. As janitor, he cleaned the doctors' rooms and laboratories, started their fires, generally set up the specimens for their lectures, and did whatever else they asked. Littlefield was hostile toward his social betters the Brahmins, but also felt his job threatened by the Irish immigrants then pouring into Boston. He secretly loathed Webster. After the latter's trial, he collected a $3000 reward for providing information about Parkman's disappearance and was able to retire comfortably.
Webster first borrowed $400 from Parkman in 1842.
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