Murder, mystery, and medicine

No doubt it is unusual for the founders of great institutions of learning to be deliberately poisoned to death with strychnine, let alone at the second attempt, but such seems to have been the fate in 1905 of the immensely rich Jane Stanford, the joint founder of Stanford University. First someone put strychnine in her mineral water in San Francisco, and then in her bicarbonate of soda in Honolulu, to which she had escaped to recover from the physical and emotional shock of having been poisoned.

The president of Stanford University at the time was a medical man, a keen eugenicist and ichthyologist, called David Starr Jordan, who was much in favour of compulsory sterilisation of so called unfit individuals. For some reason, perhaps never to be explained, he worked hard to cover up the fact that Stanford had been poisoned and was successful in his endeavours. He himself had a motive, namely that Stanford was about to dismiss him from his post; but, unlike Stanford’s personal secretary, Bertha Berner, who was the only person present at both poisonings, he lacked the opportunity. Berner, by contrast, lacked a motive.

Jordan managed to divert public attention from the opinion of four doctors that Stanford had been poisoned by citing the opinion of a young doctor, Ernest Waterhouse, that she had died of heart disease, brought on or exacerbated by eating too much at a picnic (despite the fact that her stomach was empty at postmortem examination) and unaccustomed exercise (she had walked a short distance).

Jordan maintained that the strychnine that was found in Mrs Stanford’s bicarbonate of soda had been put there after she died by her physician, Dr F H Humfris, to defend his diagnosis of strychnine poisoning. He also suggested that the analytical chemist who had found it (and found it also in her body), Dr Edmund Shorey, was in on the conspiracy. Although the coroner’s jury found that Stanford had been murdered, the police dropped the case, and journalists eventually accepted that she had died from natural causes.

The fates of the principal doctors involved, Humfris and Waterhouse, diverged. Jordan claimed that the former (who was present at the death) was incompetent and unprofessional, while the latter was extremely knowledgeable. Humfris, an Englishman, returned to England, where he became a distinguished advocate of actinotherapy, which is the therapeutic application of light, writing textbooks on the subject that went through several editions (he used it as a prophylactic against congenital rickets, and it might have been partly due to him that I was put regularly under a sun lamp as a child). Waterhouse left Honolulu to become a rubber planter in Malaya and Sumatra, lost all his money, and died down and out, selling newspapers in the street in New York.

This story is wonderfully investigated in The Mysterious Death of Jane Stanford, by Robert W P Cutler, emeritus professor of neurology at Stanford. The book was published in 2003, a year before his own death from metastatic lung cancer. Cutler, who was an expert on Parkinson’s disease and published a review of the diagnostic use of cerebrospinal fluid in the very year of his death, wrote it while more or less permanently on oxygen, a tribute, surely, to human courage.