On November 23rd of 1849, in the heart of Boston, one of the city's
richest men simply vanished. Dr. George Parkman, a Brahmin who owned
much of Boston's West End, was last seen that afternoon visiting his
alma mater, Harvard Medical School. Police scoured city tenements and
the harbor, and offered hefty rewards as leads put the elusive Dr.
Parkman at sea or hiding in Manhattan. But one Harvard janitor held a
much darker suspicion: that their ruthless benefactor had never left the
Medical School building alive.
His shocking discoveries in a chemistry professor's laboratory engulfed
America in one of its most infamous trials: The Commonwealth of
Massachusetts v. John White Webster. A baffling case of red herrings,
grave robbery, and dismemberment--of Harvard's greatest doctors
investigating one of their own, for a murder hidden in a building full
of cadavers--it became a landmark case in the use of medical forensics
and the meaning of reasonable doubt. Paul Collins brings
nineteenth-century Boston back to life in vivid detail, weaving together
newspaper accounts, letters, journals, court transcripts, and memoirs
from this groundbreaking case.
Rich in characters and evocative in atmosphere, Blood & Ivy explores
the fatal entanglement of new science and old money in one of America's
greatest murder mysteries.
