John White Webster

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Webster during his trial.

Dr. John White Webster (Boston, May 20, 1793–Boston, August 30, 1850) was a professor of chemistry and geology at the Harvard University School of Medicine. He became famous for being convicted in the Parkman-Webster murder case, and subsequently hanged for the murder of Dr. George Parkman, in a trial that shook the Boston society to its core.

1 Biography
2 Notes
3 Related articles
4 References

[edit] Biography

John White Webster was from a well-connected family: his grandfather had earned a fortune as a merchant in Boston; his mother Hannah (White) Webster was a Leverett; his wife's sister married into the Prescotts; he was friends with Robert Gould Shaw's family; and his Unitarian pastor was the Reverend Francis Parkman Sr. (brother of George Parkman, the man he would be convicted of murdering). However, as he grew up, his father Redford Webster, an apothecary, offered him only a small allowance, which later caused him to claim that he never understood money.

After graduating from Harvard College in 1811 and Harvard Medical College in 1815, he went to London for further study. At Guy’s Hospital he was a surgeon’s pupil, a physician’s pupil, and a surgeon’s dresser. He then went to São Miguel Island in the Azores (1817–1818). There he practiced medicine, published his first book, and met the daughter of the American vice-consul on the island, Harriet Fredrica Hickling, whom he married on May 16, 1818. She would give him four daughters. Once he returned to Boston, he entered private medical practice, but a lack of success prompted him to change careers. In 1824, he was appointed a lecturer of chemistry, mineralogy, and geology at the Harvard Medical College, and three years later he was promoted to the Erving professorship.

Webster, a short, stocky man with dark hair and glasses, continued teaching at Harvard, 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.

He wrote A Description of the Island of St. Michael (1821), was associate editor of the Boston Journal of Philosophy and the Arts (1824–26), compiled A Manual of Chemistry (1826), and brought out editions of Andrew Fyfe's Elements of Chemistry (1827) and Justus von Liebig's Animal Chemistry or Organic Chemistry (1841).

Webster, indulged as a child and pampered in youth, had a petulant and fussy disposition but was known for his kindly nature.^[1] 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.^[2]