18 Tiny Deaths, page 13
January 26, 1935
Magrath introduced Lee by letter to Dr. Alan Gregg, director of the Medical Sciences Division of the Rockefeller Foundation. Gregg oversaw a broad portfolio of research and pilot projects in the areas of public health, psychiatry, basic sciences, and medical education. He had been involved in the construction of the Institute of Pathology at Western Reserve University, an early modern European-model pathology facility in the United States.14 The Institute of Pathology, which served all the affiliated hospitals in the Cleveland area and the university’s School of Dentistry, developed into prominence under the directorship of groundbreaking experimental pathologist Dr. Howard T. Karsner.
Lee asked Gregg about developments in legal medicine since the Rockefeller Foundation funded Schultz’s survey almost a decade earlier for the National Research Council. How much progress had been made in the recommendations listed in the report?
None at all, Gregg admitted. The report was gathering dust in a file drawer. Not a single major jurisdiction in the country had adopted the medical examiner system since then.
Lee sought Gregg’s assistance in developing a fellowship program to train doctors to specialize in legal medicine, much as the Rockefeller Foundation had done with fellowship programs in psychiatry and other areas of medicine.15
If medical examiner systems were to be adopted more broadly across the country, there had to be many more young medical men trained in legal medicine, Lee told Gregg. But no medical school on this side of the Atlantic had a fellowship program in legal medicine. With the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, Harvard’s Department of Legal Medicine would address this urgent lack of manpower. Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio were eager for the development of legal medicine and would change from the coroner system if there were adequately trained personnel available, Lee told Gregg.
Lee shared a proposal she had written, titled “Skeleton Plan for Department of Legal Medicine.” An entire field of study was fully formed in her nine typed pages—faculty to lecture to third-year medical students, a fellowship program to train specialists in legal medicine, and courses for coroners, coroners’ physicians, and medical examiners. It outlined a complete academic department involved in education, research, and public service—well beyond the scope of the resources that had so far been established for legal medicine at Harvard. The department would have a toxicologist with a well-furnished laboratory, a photography and X-ray unit, and a library with an extensive collection of books, photographs, and instructional material.16
“It is sketched on rather broad lines, but in some places I have been able to go into detail, while in others I am still fairly indefinite,” Lee wrote Gregg of her plan. “Of course, as I learn more, some changes will occur.” Lee said that she was willing to endow $250,000 to Harvard to establish a Department of Legal Medicine—a factory to produce forensic pathologists to work as medical examiners.
What Lee was suggesting was nothing less than creating an entirely new field of medical practice from the ground up. The ultimate goal of Lee’s vision was to develop the department into an Institute of Legal Medicine to conduct all forensic death investigations in Massachusetts and serve as a resource for police departments across the country.
“Told her we were interested in doing something in this field and said that we laid particular emphasis on getting good young men to go into the field as a career and getting training for it,” Gregg dictated for his diary.17
Lee said that she could “induce Dr. Magrath to take such a beginner,” a young doctor with an inclination toward legal medicine to train in a fellowship program, according to Gregg, and that she could present any difficult task to Magrath and, if given time, could convince him of it. She intended to develop a program and work with Magrath as long as he was able to serve.
Gregg added another brief note to his diary after his initial meeting with Lee: “Would like a bibliography of legal medicine.” Lee would, in fact, turn out to be a relentless and obsessive book collector, constantly asking friends and acquaintances and even the FBI for lists of books on criminology, medicine, forensics, ballistics, and other related subjects.
Lee was a force to be reckoned with, and Gregg was impressed by her determination. “Mrs. Lee bids fair to be the Lucretia Mott of legal medicine,” he wrote in a memo to his assistant after a visit. “The next time she comes I want you to see her to get the full flavor of her practical and pertinacious mind.”18
In 1932, New York University announced the formation of a new Department of Legal Medicine in the medical school catalog. Dr. Charles Norris, the head of laboratories at Bellevue and chief medical examiner for New York City, served as chairman of the department until his death from heart failure in 1935. Other faculty included the renowned toxicologist Alexander Gettler, Milton Helpern, and Harrison Stanford Martland, the medical examiner from Newark.19 Members of the NYU faculty provided undergraduate courses to medical students and postgraduate courses in forensic medicine, pathology, toxicology, and serology.
The Rockefeller Foundation could have chosen to develop a fellowship program at the Department of Legal Medicine at New York University, but the foundation believed in investing its resources based on where the funds would have the best chance of success and the widest impact. Largely because of Lee’s financial support and personal involvement, the Rockefeller Foundation chose Harvard over New York University. Ultimately, NYU developed its legal medicine program anyway, but Lee’s influence ensured that the earliest incarnation of the field came out of Harvard.
Around the time she was discussing the establishment of the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard, Lee made gifts to her daughters, Frances Martin and Martha Batchelder, of 350 shares each of International Harvester preferred stock in 1934. The stock dividends would provide the women an income of about $2,450 annually, worth about $44,000 today. Lee had been providing her daughters the same amount in cash for many years but thought that giving them capital would provide greater financial security. Recalling her own divorce, Lee understood the importance of women having an independent source of income.20
“Many years ago in my young married life, my father made your Uncle George and me similar gifts,” Lee wrote to her daughters, “and while the income which you will receive will be no more than you have been having, I know from experience the comfort it is to possess your capital yourself. It is with pride and happiness and love that I transfer to you this part of my capital.”
In 1934, Martin and her husband adopted a baby girl, Suzanne. Within months, the thirty-two-year-old Frances Martin contracted pneumonia and died on June 19, 1935.
By the time Magrath was named a professor of legal medicine in 1932, his liver had become cirrhotic, scarred from repeated insults. Whether the cirrhosis was a consequence of alcoholism, occupational infection with a hepatitis virus, or chronic exposure to formaldehyde is debatable. One of the important functions of the liver is removing impurities from the blood. When the liver fails, ammonia and other waste products build up in the bloodstream. People suffering from liver failure often feel fatigued and may become confused or disoriented. Since the liver is also involved in the production of blood-clotting factors, cirrhosis increases the risk of bruising and bleeding.
Others noted a change in Magrath’s physical appearance. In his early sixties, he appeared a much older man. He walked with an unsteady gait, his skin seeming to hang on his body. Dr. Roger Lee, the internist, kept Lee informed about Magrath’s health.
“George seemed very pleasant. After the first, this sort of false heartiness disappeared and we had a very pleasant talk,” he wrote to Lee. “At present he makes a very good appearance, but I think there is a good deal of weakness behind that appearance.”21
The doctor was trying to manage Magrath’s irregular schedule and frequent use of alcohol, prescribing him the barbiturate amytal to help him sleep at night. “Our reports about George are that he still maintains his nocturnal habits and he does not seem very different,” he told Lee on another occasion.22
Lee’s financial generosity to her family extended to Magrath, even eclipsing the joint back account she had opened and kept stocked with funds for him. After Magrath’s retirement, Lee bought him a Packard, a substantially larger and more comfortable automobile than the Model T, Suffolk Sue, that had served him so many years. She also paid the fees to store Magrath’s automobile in a garage.
In the fall of 1935, deteriorating health forced Magrath to resign as medical examiner. He continued with his teaching activities at Harvard as long as he was able and remained involved in choral groups and rowing organizations.
Magrath’s pension from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts provided him $2,250 a year, while the pension available to him from Harvard for his years of service amounted to less than $150 a year. Lee told the medical school dean, Dr. Sidney Burwell, that $2,400 a year was not enough for Magrath to live on. Burwell spoke with Magrath and agreed that Magrath needed another $100 a month to support his customary lifestyle.23 Lee proposed that she would provide $600 a year if Harvard matched it, with her portion paid to Magrath through the university “without bringing her into the picture,” Burwell wrote in a memorandum of the conversation.24 “I think some action should be taken in the case of a man who has really devoted a lot of time to the University since he was first taken on as a teacher in 1898 and who has received a substantial salary for only a few years,” Burwell wrote.25 Harvard agreed to the unusual pension arrangement, with Lee secretly helping to support Magrath.
With Magrath spending more time at Harvard, Lee’s Department of Legal Medicine needed more office space. She had her eye on several offices on the third floor of Building E-1, rooms that were being used by the Department of Pharmacology, chaired by the distinguished physician Dr. Reid Hunt, one of the pioneers of American pharmacology.
In particular, Lee wanted room 307, which she said would be an entirely satisfactory study for Magrath and leave room for his laboratory work next door in room 306. Lee asked the medical school dean if arrangements could be made for her to have it. Hunt wasn’t having any of it and wasn’t about to give up any of his space for such a dubious endeavor.
“A Medico-legal Library is somewhat of a joke unless it is desired to make a collection of old books to show what absurd views have been held as to poisons,” Hunt wrote to the dean. “I have no doubt that Dr. Magrath has an interesting collection of case records, some of which would probably be of considerable interest; but he does not seem to have published anything on them. I do not remember of seeing any publications from him for about 25 years and he gives only six lectures a year to the students.”26
Room 307, in particular, was out of the question. Hunt refused to give it up. That room held records related to the U.S. Pharmacopeia and some laboratory equipment used for cannabis testing, which had to be done in a quiet, isolated place.
That answer did not sit well with Lee, who took her appeal to James Bryant Conant, the president of Harvard University. “I am loath to ask for (room 307) because you have been so very kind about granting my previous requests,” she wrote to Conant, “but we really need the room.”27
Conant wrote Lee a letter informing her that room 307 was regretfully not available. Lee let Conant’s response stew for almost three months, then composed a short note:
“Since receiving your letter…which was naturally in the nature of a disappointment, I have been thinking very hard about your decision not to grant the use of room 307 to the Department of Legal Medicine,” she said. “The more I think about it the more inclined I am to wonder if you would not care to reconsider.”28
Lee pointed out that Hunt reached the mandatory retirement age in two years, so the space would become available soon anyway. In the meantime, there were empty rooms across the hall Hunt could use to store the material he presently had in room 307.
“Therefore,” Lee concluded, “I do not feel that I can let our decision pass without a protest, and a request that you give this problem a little further study.”
Lee got room 307 for the Department of Legal Medicine. Once again, she used her wealth and influence to achieve her goal of advancing the study of legal medicine.
May 16, 1935
Lee paid a social call on John Edgar Hoover, the youthful director of the recently renamed Federal Bureau of Investigation, in order to bring the discipline of legal medicine to his attention.
The FBI is a descendant of the National Bureau of Criminal Identification, a centralized collection of photographs and bertillonage data established in 1896. Initially based in Chicago, the NBCI, also known as the National Bureau of Identification, was relocated to Washington, DC, in 1902. The database didn’t include fingerprints until the NCBI was absorbed by the Bureau of Investigation, a unit of the U.S. Department of Justice, in 1924.29
For most of J. Edgar Hoover’s tenure, the FBI was primarily involved in enforcing Prohibition laws, eradicating organized crime, and investigating bank robberies. The agency’s mission changed dramatically in March 1932 when the twenty-month-old son of aviator Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, was kidnapped from their New Jersey home. Lindbergh, who had flown solo across the Atlantic, was one of the most famous men in America.
In response to the abduction and murder of Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., Congress passed the Federal Kidnapping Act, giving the Bureau of Investigation authority over the investigation of kidnappings.30 Forensic evidence discovered by the FBI—tool marks on a plank of wood used in a homemade ladder found at the crime scene—was instrumental in convicting the alleged kidnapper, Bruno Richard Hauptmann.
The scientific expertise acquired in the investigation of the Lindbergh baby abduction and murder was the basis for the agency’s Technical Laboratory, established about six months after the kidnapping. Now officially known as the FBI Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory, it was not the first crime lab in the country. That distinction belongs to the Los Angeles Police Department, where a crime lab was formed in 1923.
Bearing a letter of introduction from Magrath, Lee charmed her way into a meeting with Hoover on the afternoon of May 16, 1935. At the time of Lee’s visit, Hoover was involved in starting up a national police training center, the forerunner of the FBI National Academy. Hoover was not particularly receptive to the opinions of women. When he became director of the Bureau of Investigation in 1924, he fired all the female agents and prohibited hiring them for those positions.31
Nonetheless, Hoover met with Lee after she toured the building and had her fingerprints taken for the agency’s civil identification files. According to a memorandum written by H. H. Clegg, assistant director for the investigations division, Lee described her plans for a Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard and encouraged Hoover to train FBI special agents in forensic medicine, correctly pointing out that the agency’s expertise was lacking in the area of the medical aspects of investigations. She mentioned the National Research Council report and said that the agency could fill a role as a national resource for legal medicine.32
Lee pointed out that the FBI lacked expertise in legal medicine, which could be critical in investigations involving a suspicious or violent death. In an effort to establish a collaborative relationship, Lee let Hoover know that legal medicine expertise was available in Boston to assist the FBI with investigations involving fatalities. “She indicated that she would desire some help and advice from time to time,” Clegg wrote.
L. C. Schilder, in charge of the agency’s fingerprint division, wrote a memorandum for what would become a file the FBI maintained on Lee. “This lady is interested in the establishment of a Department of Legal Medicine in connection with the Harvard Medical School,” Schilder wrote in his memo. “She impressed me as being most intelligent, alert, and aggressive and I believe that she will apply herself to her plans very energetically.”33
Lee’s father, John Jacob Glessner, died one week short of his ninety-third birthday on January 20, 1936.
The Glessners were one of the last residential holdouts as their beloved Prairie Avenue neighborhood was enveloped by commercial buildings. In 1924, the couple deeded their home to the American Institute of Architects, with the condition that the Glessners could remain in the house for the remainder of their lives. The deed also included a stipulation that a photograph of H. H. Richardson remain permanently in the library of the house.34
On April 7, 1936, Lee and her sister-in-law, Alice Glessner, hosted a reunion of the Monday Morning Reading Class for one last visit to the landmark residence before its ownership was transferred to the American Institute of Architects. The Chicago Tribune’s society page noted the passing of a group that, a generation earlier, “was considered one of the most exclusive and fashionable in Chicago.”35
Within months of receiving the Glessner home, the American Institute of Architects learned that remodeling the house for the organization’s purposes would cost $10,000 to $25,000. The sum could not be raised, and the architects voted to return the property to the Glessner estate. Eventually, the women donated the residence to the Armour Institute of Technology for use as a vocational aptitude testing center.36
After his retirement as medical examiner, Magrath wanted to turn his attention to the papers and records he had collected over the course of the three decades of his career as medical examiner, including high-profile cases such as the Sacco and Vanzetti investigation. Perhaps, at last, he would have time to publish about his work. He hoped to write a book. The obstacle in his way was Dr. William Brickley, Magrath’s successor as medical examiner for the Northern District of Suffolk County. Brickley was of the opinion that the official records belonged to the medical examiner’s office and were not Magrath’s personal property.
