18 Tiny Deaths, page 12
Grasping the organ block in his arms, Magrath lifted the organs en mass and placed them on the dissecting table. Lee peered into the hollowed-out body, looked at the smooth, shiny lining of the chest and thick bones of the vertebral column.
Magrath felt for the mastoid process—the bump behind the ear—and drew his scalpel in an arc over the top of the head to the other side. He used the scalpel to work the scalp away from the skull, pulling the skin and hair far forward over the face until the calvarium, or skullcap, was completely exposed.
Using a bone saw with a broad, flat blade, Magrath scored around the circumference of the skull. He then used a chisel, tapped with a hammer, to separate the bowl-like calvarium. Once removed, the brain sat encased in its milky meningeal membranes. Magrath worked the tip of his scalpel around the skull opening to cut the cranial nerves, lifting the frontal lobes to access the optic nerves and finally to sever the brain stem from the spinal cord.
The organs, spread out on the dissecting table, were examined individually. Magrath dictated a description of the appearance of each organ as he felt it between his fingers. Each organ was measured and weighed, then sliced like a loaf of bread to inspect the tissues inside and out. Magrath set aside a specimen from each organ, dropping it in a jar of formaldehyde for later examination under a microscope.
When Magrath had completed the postmortem examination, the tissues and organs were returned to the decedent’s abdominothoracic cavity. The diener put the skull back together, pulled the scalp back into place, and closed the Y incision with a rough baseball stitch using heavy cord thread.
Lee watched as the gurney was rolled toward the elevator that would take the decedent back to the refrigerator room.
At home at The Rocks, Lee read the National Research Council report, The Coroner and the Medical Examiner. Ruminating on the recommendations in the report and everything she had learned from Magrath, Lee identified three areas that needed development in order for American society to truly throw off the vestiges of the Middle Ages and embrace modernity in its investigations of unexpected death. Medicine, the law, and the police all desperately needed reform in order to establish a functioning discipline of legal medicine.
“Legal Medicine may be likened to a three-legged stool, the three legs being medicine, the law and the police,” she once said. “If any one of these is weak, the stool will collapse.”2
For medical examiners to replace coroners throughout the country, hundreds more men like Magrath would need to be trained. State lawmakers needed to be persuaded to abolish inquests and the office of coroner and adopt a medical examiner system. And states with medical examiners needed laws reformed to give them greater autonomy and independent authority, to put them in charge and protect them from political and public pressure.
The police were another essential component, Lee knew. A police officer was often the first to arrive at the scene of a death and sometimes the only person present. Those first few minutes at the scene could make or break an investigation, and law enforcement officers needed to be trained on how to avoid compromising a crime scene.
This, Lee decided, was the path she would take through the door Magrath had opened for her. She would spend the rest of her life developing the three-legged stool of legal medicine. But she would need to figure out a way to do so that would be acceptable for a woman of her social status and drawing upon the connections and resources that her upbringing had afforded. However it needed to happen, Lee, with her unbridled curiosity and exacting personality, would get it done.
April 30, 1931
During his early years as an instructor at Harvard Medical School, Magrath had been given a stipend of $250 annually from the university. During the Great War, for reasons that were never explained, that stipend ceased. Magrath continued with his lectures to medical students from Harvard, Tufts, and Boston University on an unpaid basis in addition to performing his duties as a medical examiner.3
In 1918, Magrath wrote a letter to Harvard’s medical school dean, Dr. Edward Bradford. Magrath pointed out that he had been teaching pathology at Harvard for twenty years, and the task of doing so had only increased in complexity and workload in recent years with the addition of legal medicine as an emerging discipline. Magrath had developed an entire systematic course on legal medicine for third-year students that had been well-attended in its inaugural year, which he planned to follow up with instruction in the morgue in the fourth year of medical school.
“The subject of legal medicine as I attempt to present it includes many matters relative to various branches of medicine for which one reason or another escape attention in the courses of instruction given therein,” Magrath wrote to Bradford, “matters of importance to the practitioner of medicine concerning which it should be certain that every man who received a degree from Harvard University should have some instruction.”
All of Magrath’s time and the material he acquired to teach medical students was coming out of his own pocket. “I…feel sure that you believe me entitled to some advance in academic rank and to compensation for my services,” he said.
Among his colleagues, Magrath wasn’t considered a typical medical school faculty member. He gave lectures and provided practical experience for medical students at the morgue, but he didn’t do research and had never published a paper for a scientific journal about his cases during his tenure as medical examiner.
There is no record that Magrath’s request for compensation was acted upon at the time, but he continued teaching and developing a curriculum to teach legal medicine in addition to his established pathology courses.
After becoming interested in legal medicine, Lee saw an opportunity to support Magrath and Harvard Medical School, both things close to her heart. Harvard, after all, was the alma mater of her brother and many other men close to her. Lee still felt affection for the university even though it had been beyond her grasp as a young woman.
In March 1931, Lee approached Harvard University president A. Lawrence Lowell with a proposal to commemorate Magrath’s twenty-fifth year as medical examiner. Lee wanted to give Harvard $4,500 a year, $3,000 of which was earmarked for the salary of a professor of legal medicine and the remaining $1,500 for honoraria and travel expenses for outside lecturers on the subject. “It is my desire that Dr. George Burgess Magrath shall occupy this professorship with the title of full professor, which I believe I am correct in assuming to be your intention in this matter,” she wrote to Lowell.4
Lee said that she intended to leave Harvard $250,000 in her will to support her initiative in perpetuity. “My intentions are to create a Department or Chair of Legal Medicine which will bear the name of Dr. George Burgess Magrath when it is proper,” she wrote. Lee’s gift included one key condition—that she serve as Magrath’s teaching assistant.
The university president responded to Lee’s proposal in a letter dated May 4, 1931. “Your wishes will be carried out and I look for there being a great benefit both to our Medical School and to the country,” Lowell wrote. “They touch the public interest at many points—medical, legal and social.”5
Lee asked for Lowell’s complicity in a ruse to convince Magrath to take a much-needed break with a European trip. Except for the times he was forced to seek treatment at Phillips House, it had been years since Magrath had been away from work for an extended period of time. A change in scenery might help curtail his drinking, too, which continued to be a problem.6 She asked Lowell to tell Magrath that through a fortuitous oversight, there were fellowship funds available to send the medical examiner to Europe for a period of unstructured study. Lee told Lowell that if Magrath accepted the offer, she would provide Harvard $3,000 to pay for his trip.
Magrath didn’t take the bait. “He really does not feel that he can get away until mid-summer,” Lowell reported back to Lee. “He has not, or pretends to have, any suspicion where the gift comes from.”7
The subterfuge to send Magrath on a trip to Europe was one of the many ways Lee took an interest in the well-being of her friend. In an era without the medical privacy concerns of today, Lee was kept informed about Magrath’s health and drinking habits by his personal physician, their mutual friend Dr. Roger I. Lee (no relation to Frances Glessner Lee), a prominent Boston internist who later served as president of the American Medical Association. She also set up a joint bank account with Magrath and kept the balance flush with thousands of dollars at his disposal should he ever need it.
Friends and acquaintances openly speculated on the close relationship between Lee and Magrath. At times Lee bordered on the coquettish, referring to herself in unpublished writing for Magrath as “Ye Saucy Scrybe,” and yet in correspondence between the two, they never used terms of endearment. Lee always called him Dr. Magrath, and to him, she was Mrs. Frances G. Lee.
The relationship between Lee and Magrath was based on mutual respect and common interests, particularly music and art and now legal medicine. While there was clearly great affection between Magrath and Lee, there is no evidence that their relationship was intimate. If Lee did carry a torch for Magrath, it certainly was unrequited. She may never have expressed the depth of the love she felt.
Her children grown, married, and with lives of their own, Lee divided her time between her cottage at The Rocks and Chicago. She visited the city frequently, traveling by train along with her secretary and a servant, to spend time with her aging parents. When in Chicago, Lee often stayed at the Palmer House hotel, a familiar locale once owned by an old family friend.
After a long illness, Lee’s mother, Frances Macbeth, died at eighty-four years of age in October 1932. John Jacob Glessner remained living in the Prairie Avenue home alone.
Around this time, Magrath introduced Lee to Ludvig Hektoen and Oscar Schultz, both of whom had been involved in the National Research Council report comparing coroner systems to medical examiner systems. The men were also active members in the Institute of Medicine of Chicago, a private organization dedicated to improving medical science and public health. The Institute of Medicine was engaged in efforts to abolish the coroner system in Chicago and replace it with medical examiners. Progress moved at a glacial pace, partly because of a requirement to amend the state constitution from which the coroner’s authority was drawn.
“I am not sure that our objective should be a change limited to Cook County, or to counties with a certain population, or to the entire state,” Schultz wrote in a letter to Lee. “Personally, I would prefer to advocate a state-wide examiner system.”8
Suggesting a change to the investigation of sudden and suspicious deaths invariably stirred controversy. Politicians were reluctant to give up what traditionally had been a local authority to the state. Undertakers, coroner physicians, and others with a stake in death investigation held their own opinions.
“Our fight is going to be a long and uphill one, because in most of the counties of the state the office [of coroner] is held to be of so little importance that the inertia against change is difficult to overcome,” Schultz wrote to Lee. “In Cook County the office has sufficient spoils to make the politicians desire to hold on to it. And the politicians, after all, are the ones who tell us what we shall or shall not have.”9
It became clear that winning over hearts and minds regarding the superiority of the medical examiner system would be a very slow process. Everybody wanted something, and their vested interests were often at odds. Creating change would require diplomacy and tact and a great deal of time.
Diplomacy and tact, Lee thought to herself. I’ve been doing that my whole life.
Lee was appointed to an advisory membership in the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on Medicolegal Problems. She asked Schultz for advice on arranging for an exhibit of the Massachusetts Medical Examiner’s Society at the annual meeting of the American Medical Association, which was based in Chicago. They shared a mission to bring awareness of medical examiners to wider audiences.10
Under the sponsorship of the Institute of Medicine, Schultz created a large exhibit for the Century of Progress International Exposition, the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933–34. Through text and images, the forty-foot display explained the curious history of the coroner system and challenged viewers to consider whether scenarios depicted in the images might be homicide, suicide, or accident. “Death demands scientific investigation,” the exhibit stated in block letters. Schultz’s exhibit marked the first time the discipline that would come to be known as forensic medicine was presented to a public audience.
Meanwhile, Lee’s self-directed education in legal medicine resulted in a massive collection of literature—books and medical journals from the historical to contemporary works and esoterica. Among her acquisitions were rare and valuable works, including the 1473 text of De Venenis by thirteenth-century Italian physician Petrus de Abano and the only complete set in the world of the nine-volume treatise completed in 1779 by German public health pioneer Johann Peter Frank. Lee’s collection included a 1512 printing of De Proprietatibus Rerum by Bartholomaeus Anglicus and a 1498 edition of Stultifera Navis by Sebastian Brant, both of which contained exceptional illustrations of postmortem examinations. She also sought crime-related curiosities, such as the original memoirs of Charles Guiteau, written in his own hand while awaiting execution for the assassination of President James Garfield.
By 1934, she had acquired a collection of about a thousand volumes. She intended to donate the entire collection to establish the George Burgess Magrath Library of Legal Medicine at Harvard Medical School, but Harvard had to create an appropriate place for the library first, and time was of the essence. Lee wanted several rooms on the third floor of Building E-1 allocated for the Department of Legal Medicine, with one room renovated with bookcases and furniture—and painted a color selected by Lee—for the library. She wanted everything finished in time for the dedication of the library and before she had surgery for an unknown ailment—possibly for breast cancer.
Fearing that her death may be imminent, Lee wanted to make sure that arrangements were in place to support the work she and Magrath had done. “I have this morning executed a new Will in which I have given to Harvard, one million dollars for the continuation of the Department of Legal Medicine,” she wrote to university president James Bryant Conant. “I think you indicated that I confess it is my hope that in my lifetime I may yet provide a bit more.”11
After much negotiation between the medical school dean and department chairmen—and the relocation of mice used for experimentation—four adjacent rooms on the third floor of Building E-1 were reserved for the Department of Legal Medicine. One room would be the library, another outfitted into a laboratory, and two rooms would be used for office space.
Dr. David Edsall, who was medical school dean at the time, wrote a letter to Dr. J. Howard Mueller, chairman of the Department of Bacteriology, explaining why rooms were being commandeered for the Department of Legal Medicine.
“The donor of money for Legal Medicine threatens to give more money—all told, quite a large amount—but more particularly wished to have definite arrangements made in a hurry as to what we should be willing to do before she went into a hospital for a major operation which she thought possibly might terminate her life,” Edsall said.12
Lee’s gift was predicated on her serving as curator for library—if she survived the operation—so she could continue to add to the collection as she saw appropriate. The orders from Conant on down were to defer to Lee in every way possible.
The new library contained all Lee’s rare volumes, as well as one of three complete sets in existence of the journal of the Massachusetts Medico-Legal Society and complete bound volumes of all European criminology and legal medicine periodicals. The Magrath Library of Legal Medicine was the largest of its kind in the world.
Conant was among the luminaries present when the library was dedicated on May 24, 1934.13 Magrath, hobbled by illness, was unable to attend.
“By his vigorous personality and the skillful discharge of his duties [Magrath] has played an important part in demonstrating the superiority of the system of medical examiners as compared with the old coroner system,” Conant said at the dedication.
The ancient office of coroner involved such a combination of legal and medical duties as to make it unsuitable for complex, modern conditions… The problems which confront the coroner or medical examiner are of such a nature as to require that all the resources of modern science be brought to bear upon them. The examination should be made by a skilled pathologist who can call to his assistance other experts in allied fields, if necessary. This is possible only if the medical aspects of the old coroner’s duties are put on a professional basis, as they have been under the Massachusetts system. Dr. Magrath, as one of the few men devoting all his time…and energy to this important work, has contributed much to building up a high standard for the profession. He has established traditions which affect not only the system in this state, but will serve to influence the practice throughout the country as the old coroner system is gradually superseded by the system of medical examiners.
Lee also spoke at the dedication. “For many years I have hoped that I might do something in my lifetime that should be of significant value to the community,” she said.
I was sincerely glad to find that my opportunity to serve lay here at Harvard Medical School. You are possibly all familiar with the objective in mind. My wish is to build up here a Department of Legal Medicine second to none other, but I firmly believe that its growth must be gradual in order to be sure. The plan is destined to be a manifold development, only a small part of which is as yet under way… I am grateful for this opportunity to pay a tribute to your colleague, my old-time friend Dr. Magrath, a man who practically created this profession, and whose life has been devoted to perfecting it.
