The Icepick Surgeon

by Sam Kean

  However tense, things still might have ended peacefully if not for what happened next. Among the political leaders called in was John Jay, a future Supreme Court justice and future governor of New York. But his pleading did no good. What did a blue blood like him know about having his loved ones’ graves robbed? Someone flung a rock at him, cracking his skull.

  Another leader called in was Baron von Steuben, an army general and one of the heroes of the Revolutionary War. He too got beaned in the skull with a brick. As von Steuben staggered backward, bloody and dazed, he reportedly called on the mayor to have the militia fire.

  Now, technically this wasn’t an order. But the soldiers were already spooked and didn’t need any more encouragement. When they heard a general yell “fire,” they snapped up their rifles—and opened up on the crowd. Estimates vary, but by the time the smoke cleared, up to twenty dead bodies lay in the street. The riot had started over one corpse, and ended with many more.

  New York was hardly an aberration. At least seventeen American anatomy riots took place before the Civil War, in Boston and New Haven, Baltimore and Philadelphia, Cleveland and St. Louis. And again, while the burden of grave-robbing fell mostly on the poor, rich folks weren’t exempt. In Ohio, U.S. Senator John Scott Harrison—the son of former president William Henry Harrison and father of future president Benjamin Harrison—was dug up, stripped naked, and laid out for dissection before his family swooped in and saved him.1

  Eventually, most American states passed anatomy acts (a.k.a. “bone bills”) modeled on the 1832 bill in Great Britain. These laws gave medical schools the right to unclaimed bodies from hospitals and poorhouses. But the bills kicked up the same ethical issues in America as they did across the Atlantic. What’s more, it soon became clear that using unclaimed bodies was not only ethically dicey but scientifically dubious, too. Because as crazy as it sounds, your income can affect your anatomy.

  These differences trace back to hormones. There’s of course lots of individual differences among poor people, but in a broad, general sense, poor people suffer from chronic stress at higher rates than those in the middle and upper classes. The reasons are obvious. Poverty-stricken populations generally have more medical problems, and fewer means to treat them. They’re exposed to more pollutants, too, and especially back in the 1800s, many of them faced eviction and starvation on a regular basis. The body responds to such stressors by releasing adrenaline and other hormones, and chronic stress can affect the size and shape of the glands that pump these hormones out. Some glands, like heavily worked muscles, swell in size. Others exhaust themselves and shrivel. And because the poor alone were undergoing dissection then, the doctors learning anatomy on them had a skewed view of what those glands should look like. There was systematic error in their science.

  This wasn’t just an academic worry, either. It had real, deadly consequences.

  In the 1800s scores of babies started dying from what we now call SIDS—sudden infant death syndrome. Naturally, doctors wanted to know the cause, so they started performing autopsies on SIDS babies. They noticed that most SIDS babies had one gland in particular that looked enormous, the thymus glands in their chests. In reality, these were normal thymus glands. They only seemed large compared to the wilted thymus glands that doctors usually found in babies from poor families. These poor babies had often died of chronic and stressful ailments like diarrhea or malnutrition. SIDS babies, in contrast, died suddenly by definition—before diarrhea or malnutrition could wither their glands down. As a result, their thymus glands were normal-sized.

  Unaware of all this, pathologists began blaming SIDS on hypertrophied thymus glands, which they decided were crushing babies’ windpipes and suffocating them. So to shrink the glands down, doctors in the early 1900s began blasting them with radiation. Thousands upon thousands of children suffered burns, depleted glands, and, later, cancer as a result, leading to an estimated ten thousand premature deaths. It’s a poignant example of how an unethical scientific setup can lead to dangerous scientific outcomes.

  Eventually, the voluntary donation of bodies eliminated the need to use unclaimed corpses. Philosopher Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, became the first person in history to donate his body to science in 1832, in part to lessen the stigma of dissection. His good deed didn’t convince many at the time, but the world had come around to Bentham’s thinking by the mid-1900s. Today, the majority of cadavers dissected in medical schools are gifts.

  Still, medical schools today often struggle to find enough cadavers. One analysis from 2016 found that New York City medical schools fell three dozen bodies short of the eight hundred they needed to train new doctors, a 5 percent gap. In other states, the gap is closer to 40 percent. Countries such as India, Brazil, and Bangladesh face even bigger shortfalls. Nigeria has close to 200 million people, yet some medical schools there get zero annual donations. To make up for shortages, latter-day resurrectionists are digging up buried bodies again or swiping them from funeral pyres and selling them on the “red market.”

  It’s not just whole bodies anymore, either. Like car thieves chopping up automobiles for parts, grave-robbers can make more money—up to $200,000—by hacking bodies up and selling individual tissues: teeth, eardrums, corneas, tendons, even bladders and skin. Often the families of the deceased have no idea this is happening; some have fetched their loved ones from funeral homes to find the bones replaced with PVC pipes. (At least they got the bodies back whole. In 2004, a funeral director from Staten Island got caught selling bodies to the U.S. Army for $30,000; the army was dressing the bodies in armored footwear and dangling them over land mines to test how well the footwear worked.) To be sure, the international laws governing transplant organs (lungs, livers, kidneys) are fairly robust and prevent such trafficking. But otherwise, as one anatomy professor lamented, “We are more careful with [importing] fruits and vegetables than with body parts.” And while the poor are once again more at risk for being chopped up, it also happened to longtime Masterpiece Theatre host Alistair Cooke in 2004.

  If all this makes you squeamish about the science of anatomy, you’re not alone. Anatomists themselves continue to debate the ethics of different practices, and even in those cases where anatomical science does real good—bringing criminals to justice in murder cases, for instance, through forensic work—there’s always a macabre undercurrent to the research. Much of forensic anatomy, in fact, traces its roots to a ghoulish case at Harvard Medical School in 1849. In many ways, it was a confrontation between the field’s past and its future: the best minds in American medicine had to determine whether this was just another shady resurrectionist deal, or whether something more sinister had occurred.

  It was the turkey that first got the janitor thinking murder. On Thanksgiving day in 1849, he had a succulent bird sitting on his kitchen table, a gift from his boss, Dr. Webster. Yet here he was, hacking at the brick wall of a latrine in the basement of Harvard Medical School. He wanted to be at home, feasting. But he just couldn’t eat with all those clues nipping at his conscience.

  The disappearing George Parkman. (Courtesy of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.)

  The janitor was hardly alone in obsessing over the case; the people of Cambridge, Massachusetts, were talking about little else that November. Dr. George Parkman—tall and gangly, with a stiff, upright walk that left his chin jutting up at an impossible angle—had stopped by a grocery store one Friday afternoon to purchase some crushed sugar and a six-pound block of butter. He’d then asked the grocer to hold onto the goods, plus a treat for his invalid daughter: a head of lettuce, a delicacy in November. Parkman told the grocer he had an appointment to keep, and would be back in a minute to pick everything up. He never returned.

  Parkman, near sixty, had graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1809, but he’d never practiced seriously. He’d preferred to amass real estate instead, and had actually donated the land on which Harvard’s squat, three-story medical building sat. Less nobly, Par
kman owned several tenement slums and was a stickler about rent. He also made a killing as a loan shark, hounding his debtors for every cent—especially if they’d crossed him.

  And Dr. John White Webster had crossed him. Webster, fifty-six, was something of a hellion. He’d graduated from Harvard Med a few years after Parkman, and had done a residency in London, where he’d loved to attend public executions. “Hang at eight, breakfast at nine!”, he’d cackle. He’d no doubt snatched a body or two in his day as well. But after practicing in the Azores for a while, Webster had given up medicine to teach geology and chemistry at Harvard; his lab sat in the medical building’s basement. His lectures often featured pyrotechnics, and he loved whipping up laughing gas to get students high.

  Harvard chemist and alleged murderer John White Webster. (Courtesy of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.)

  If Webster had given up working as a doctor, though, he was still addicted to the doctor lifestyle. The typical Harvard professor then was independently wealthy and worth about $75,000 ($2.3 million today). Three-fourths were near 1-percenters, and some professors’ mansions were so lavish that they appeared on local tourist maps, so people could walk by and gawk. In comparison, Webster’s salary was $1,200, well below the university average of $1,950. Far from being a mere inconvenience, this penury actually put his job in danger. In the mid-1840s an Italian professor at Harvard had actually been forced to resign after going bankrupt; there were consequences for not living up to Harvard’s social standards. So Webster chose to keep up the lifestyle he’d enjoyed as a doctor, buying a six-bedroom house in Cambridge with two parlors and entertaining lavishly with oysters and wine. But he couldn’t afford servants—shamefully, his wife and daughters had to dust their own home—and his savings dipped so low that he once bounced a $9 check.

  Rather than economize, Webster approached Parkman in 1842 for a $400 loan ($13,000 today). In 1847, he went back for $2,000 more ($62,000). Webster did try to make good on the loans over the next two years. But he had no financial discipline, and finally had to mortgage a beloved collection of minerals and gems to Parkman as collateral. People around town were soon whispering about Webster’s debts, which infuriated him. While getting a haircut once, he heard an acquaintance joke, “Did you ever see a man shave a monkey?” It was probably an innocent crack, unrelated to Webster’s finances. Webster hopped up anyway, snatched the barber’s straightedge, and lunged. He just missed slashing the acquaintance.

  By the fall of 1849, Parkman was pestering Webster for his money back, and the sheriff was threatening to repossess Webster’s furniture. Desperate to buy time, Webster went behind Parkman’s back and mortgaged his beloved mineral collection to two other creditors. Unfortunately, one of them was Parkman’s brother-in-law, Robert Shaw. Shaw and Parkman happened to pass Webster in the street one day, and Shaw asked Parkman about Webster’s finances. When Parkman asked why he was curious, Shaw mentioned the mortgage on the minerals. After a moment of confusion, they realized that Webster had essentially sold the same collection to both of them.

  Parkman was livid at the news, and he eventually confronted Webster in the basement of the medical school. Pay me or else, he demanded. Both men lost their tempers, and the building’s janitor overheard them quarreling—including Parkman’s threat that “something must be accomplished.” Webster finally promised to scrape together $483 ($15,000 today) and have it ready the Friday before Thanksgiving.

  When that Friday came, Parkman paid for the butter and sugar from the grocer and dropped off the head of lettuce. His chin thrust up, he then marched over to collect from Webster. Webster later told the police that Parkman snatched up the $483 without a word and hurried off.

  That’s when the mystery started. Parkman was pretty OCD in his habits, so when he didn’t turn up for dinner that night, his family began to fret. His absence the next morning panicked them. After some quiet inquiries, they put a notice in the newspaper offering $3,000 for information ($92,000 today). Seeing the notice, a chagrined Webster called on Parkman’s brother and explained about their meeting. Hearing this, the family felt their stomachs crater. Parkman had a bad habit of carrying too much cash around after collecting on debts. He’d been mugged for it before and no doubt had been again, with fatal results. With a heavy heart, the family put a second notice in the paper offering $1,000—for Parkman’s body.

  In the meantime the police started dragging the nearby Charles River. They also roughed up some local hoodlums to wring information out of them. Nothing solid turned up. The last confirmed sighting of George Parkman was at the Harvard medical building. Indeed, there were rumors going around that Parkman’s dog—who often accompanied him on debt-collecting rounds—had been seen lingering near the building, as if waiting for his master to emerge.

  So a few days before Thanksgiving, the police made their way to the medical school to poke around. First they searched the apartment of the janitor in the basement, including underneath his bed. Nothing. Only then, and with great reluctance—they hated disturbing such an eminent scholar as himself—did the police go to the room next door and knock at Webster’s office. A magnanimous Webster said he understood completely and let them in to search his lab. Or at least most of it. No one was brave enough to pick through his private latrine. They also found a locked closet, and when one cop asked what was inside, Webster explained that he kept explosive chemicals there. That ended that, and not long afterward the police bade the professor goodbye and returned to roughing up lowlifes. Little did they know, a much more obvious suspect had been right under their noses the whole time.

  Harvard janitor Ephraim Littlefield. (Courtesy of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.)

  Ephraim Littlefield was more than the medical school janitor. His chinstrap beard and high part made him look like a gentle Quaker, but he was also wrapped up in the dirty business of procuring bodies for anatomy classes. Because he and his wife lived in an apartment in the medical building’s basement, he could meet resurrectionists at all hours. Littlefield wasn’t above a little side action, either. A year earlier, a local doctor had botched a second-trimester abortion and killed his patient. Afterward, he tried selling both her and her dead fetus to a Harvard physician, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. In an unusual display of ethics for the time, Holmes said no. Desperate, the doctor turned to Littlefield and asked him to dispose of the corpses. Littlefield said he would—for $5. Littlefield got his money, but the doctor got caught anyway, and word of Littlefield’s venality embarrassed the school.

  This dark commerce should have made the janitor a prime suspect in Parkman’s disappearance—and the police had indeed searched his apartment in the medical building. So perhaps to clear his name, Littlefield began his own investigation over the next few days, focusing on some nagging doubts he had about his boss, Dr. Webster.

  Littlefield’s basement apartment sat next to Webster’s lab, and because the janitor’s jobs included stoking a fire in the lab furnace each morning, he was used to entering and leaving the lab at will. Suddenly, after Parkman disappeared, Webster began locking the lab door. Yet the furnace inside was still blazing—so hot that Littlefield couldn’t even touch the wall on the other side of it; he actually feared the room was on fire once. Even stranger was the turkey. Webster mostly ignored Littlefield as the help, and the professor was known to be in debt. Yet a few days before Thanksgiving he’d treated the janitor to an eight-pound bird. Why? And why had he made Littlefield trek across town to pick it up, instead of having it delivered? Was he getting Littlefield out of the way?

  Suspicious, Littlefield began poking around. When Webster ignored his knocking on the lab door one day, the janitor dropped to the floor and, holding his breath, peeked beneath the doorway. He could just make out Webster’s feet; the professor seemed to be dragging something toward the furnace. Later, Littlefield even slipped through an open window into Webster’s lab, but a hasty search found nothing amiss.

  That’s when he decided to dig. On
Thanksgiving Day, Littlefield found the medical building deserted. While his eight-pound turkey grew cold, he grabbed a hatchet and chisel, posted his wife as a lookout, and crept into the vault beneath the basement to hack through the brick wall of the privy there. The police had declined to search the professor’s latrine. The janitor wasn’t so squeamish.

  He was a bit lazy, though. There were five layers of brick to the vault, and a hatchet just wasn’t the right tool. So Littlefield quit after ninety minutes, cold and hungry. That night, perhaps to blow off steam, he went to a cotillion dance with his wife and stayed out until 4 a.m. He was pretty rusty the next morning, and had some odd jobs to do,2 but he eventually dragged himself over to a nearby foundry to borrow a hammer, a better chisel, and a crowbar—to start work on a new water main, he claimed. Then it was down into the vault again.

  He made swift progress for a while. Then he heard four hammer blows on the floor above him—bang, bang, bang, bang—his wife’s signal that Webster was coming. Littlefield dropped everything and raced upstairs, only to find it was a false alarm. Still, Webster did show up not long afterward, and Littlefield had to play him off before he could return to the vault.

  Several hours later he finally opened a hole in the innermost layer of brick. He held his lantern up, peering into the darkness. But a draft kicked up and almost snuffed the flame. (Given where he was digging, the draft no doubt slapped his face with some foul odors as well.) Still, Littlefield widened the hole and tried again, shielding the lantern this time as he reached it inside. It was a moment right out of Poe. He saw mostly what you’d expect in a latrine. But as his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he noticed one additional thing. In the center of the pit, glowing a dull white, sat a human pelvis.