Blood and Ivy: The 1849 Murder That Scandalized Harvard
New York: W.W. Norton Company, 2018.
Stated First Edition. Hardcover. Stated First Edition with full number line indicating first printing. 9 1/2" X 6 1/2". xix, 347pp. Very mild shelf wear to covers, corners, and edges of unclipped dust jacket. Red paper over boards with spine backed in brown and lettered in gilt. Pages are clean and unmarked. Binding is firm and sound.
ABOUT THIS BOOK:
A delectable true-crime story of scandal and murder at America’s most celebrated university.
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.
8 illustrations(Publisher). Very good + / Very good +. Item #7130
ISBN: 9780393245165
Price: $25.00