Background
John White Webster was born in Boston, Massachussets, the son of Redford and Hannah (White) Webster.
Professor of chemistry professor of geology
John White Webster was born in Boston, Massachussets, the son of Redford and Hannah (White) Webster.
His father's success as an apothecary ensured young Webster an academic education, foreign travel, and leisure to deliberate upon a profession. He was graduated from Harvard, B. A. , 1811, and M. D. , 1815.
Completing his medical studies in London, he was entered at Guy's Hospital in 1815 as, successively, surgeon's pupil, physician's pupil, and surgeon's dresser. A visit to St. Michael in the Azores (1817 - 18) resulted in his first book. From 1824 to 1849 Webster taught chemistry at Harvard, holding from 1827 onward the Erving professorship of chemistry and mineralogy. In Cambridge his scale of living and hospitality exhausted his inheritance and strained his income. His salary was $1, 200 a year, while his lectures at the Massachusetts Medical College brought but a few hundred more. In 1842 Webster borrowed $400 from Dr. George Parkman, uncle of the historian, Francis Parkman. In 1847, with but little of this repaid, he gave Parkman his note for $2, 432, representing the unpaid balance and a further loan. This was secured by a mortgage of Webster's personal property, including a cabinet of minerals. In 1848, still in distress, he borrowed $1, 200 from Robert Gould Shaw, Sr. , making over to him the minerals already pledged to Parkman. The latter, hearing of this, became furious; he considered Webster fraudulent, and took care to let him know it. Interviews between the two men became acrimonious. Early on November 23, 1849, Webster called at Parkman's house, and arranged a meeting in his own laboratory at 1:30 p. m. Parkman, at about that hour, was seen approaching the Medical College, on Grove Street, Boston. He was not seen again. His disappearance was a mystery for a week, when Littlefield, janitor of the College, who had become suspicious of Webster's conduct, broke into a vault beneath the laboratory and found some human bones. Other human fragments were found in the furnace and in a tea-chest. As a result of this and of Webster's obviously false statements that he had paid Parkman, Webster was arrested. At the police station he attempted suicide by strychnine. His trial (March 19-April 1, 1850) before Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw is famous for the judge's charge and its definitions of circumstantial evidence. Proof that the remains were really Parkman's depended on the testimony of Dr. Nathan C. Keep, who identified Parkman's false teeth, found in Webster's furnace, as teeth made by himself. Webster's conviction was followed by public protests, founded on the usual ill-informed distrust of circumstantial evidence. Webster sent a plea to the governor, asserting his entire innocence, and in the most solemn and affecting language calling upon God as witness to his truthfulness. Later, however, he made a written confession, basing a new plea, for lesser punishment than death, upon his contention that the crime was not premeditated, but the governor and council could give no credence to any of his statements, and he was hanged, August 30. As a teacher, Webster was far from brilliant. 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 Liebig's Animal Chemistry or Organic Chemistry (1841).
Indulged as a child and pampered in youth, he developed a petulant and fussy disposition, but his kindly nature was such that for him to commit murder at the age of fifty-six astounded his acquaintances, and gives some weight to his assertion that the act was sudden and unpremeditated. That he had a curiously macabre streak, however, appears from Longfellow's anecdote of a dinner at Webster's home, when 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.
He married on May 16, 1818, to Harriet Fredrica Hickling, daughter of the American vice-consul at St. Michael. They had four daughters.
