18 Tiny Deaths, page 15
Gonzales told Lee that an exhibit in the New York City Building was planned to portray the work of the medical examiner’s office. Another exhibit, which was still in the formative stage, was planned for the Public Health and Medicine Building to depict various aspects of crime prevention and crime detection.18 Lee relayed the information about the World’s Fair to Moritz in Edinburgh. “I am anxious that the great advertising possibilities in the New York Fair be taken advantage of for the benefit of legal medicine,” he replied.19
Moritz suggested that the exhibit planned for the Public Health and Medicine Building could include a series of panels illustrating common situations in which a medical examiner’s expertise was needed. Each panel would have a drawing—“calculated to be dramatic without being shocking,” Moritz said—and a short description of the hypothetical case, including:
1.An automobile accident involving two cars, the driver of one of which dies during the accident. Did the accident occur because of some incapacity on the part of the dead driver? Did that driver die because of disease or because of the accident?
2.Death from gunshot wound. Was it suicide or homicide?
3.Death from carbon monoxide poisoning. Was it suicide or accident predisposed by some disease or intoxication?
4.Found dead in the water. Was it accident or homicide?
5.Death in suspicious circumstances. Was it due to natural causes, poison, or unrecognized mechanical injury?
6.Unaccounted-for death. Was death predisposed to or caused by some accident or special type of injury sustained during employment?
There was little Moritz could do from overseas to help with the project. He asked Lee to look into an exhibit for the World’s Fair. “If you think that nothing will be done unless we do it, I think that we had better get busy despite the handicap of my being on this side of the Atlantic,” he told Lee.
Lee knew that public support was essential to changing laws and other improvements to bring about medical examiners throughout the country, and she recommended making outreach efforts to interest writers in legal medicine.
“She suggests various methods of events in the lay appreciation of the importance of the field of legal medicine, including getting the support of Courtney Riley Cooper, a professional writer, who might prepare an article for the Saturday Evening Post or some other journal in this field,” Burwell noted after a conversation with Lee.20
On a December afternoon in 1938, Magrath happened upon an old friend, Robert Fulton Blake, a fellow oarsman and 1899 graduate of Harvard. Blake informed Magrath that an elderly mutual friend of theirs had recently died of a sudden heart attack. Magrath was saddened but philosophical.
“That’s the way to go, when the time comes,” he said. “I wonder who will be next?”21
Within twenty-four hours, on December 11, 1938, Magrath died. He was sixty-eight years old.
Lee described the circumstances of his death to Moritz, who had only met with Magrath briefly before his departure for Europe. “Since you saw him, his health has been failing but he had not ceased his ordinary activities,” she wrote. “On the day of his death he was planning to go, as usual, to one of his musical rehearsals, and was stricken while in the bathtub,” Lee said. “Help came to him promptly. He complained of a violent headache over his eyes, soon lapsed into unconsciousness from which he did not rouse. It was only a matter of some eight hours. The post mortem findings proved cause of death to be cerebral hemorrhage.”22
Lee felt a deep loss by the death of Magrath, her mentor and dear friend. Magrath may have died not knowing the extent to which his comment about the beauty of the internal organs, all those years ago at Phillips House, inspired Lee. That trivial remark sparked a years-long peregrination, sending her on a mission to libraries and museums to study subjects from medicine to the esoteric and obscure.
“I read voraciously for weeks—nay, years—in more than a dozen libraries, besides accumulating a small but peculiarly effective library of my own,” she said. “I have worked in museums, have employed special photographers, have gathered material wherever it was to be found. It was necessary to study a little of everything—anatomy and physiology (neither one entirely strange to me), the history of medicine, many volumes on book making and book binding, on illuminated manuscripts and lettering, lives of the saints—books on art, on precious stones, on color, on symbolism, on music, on botany, on fish—accounts of savages, their beliefs and customs, histories of ancient religions and cultures—Egyptian, Assyrian, Chaldean, Babylonian, Greek, Roman—on up through the Middle Ages in Europe and the Indian civilizations in the Americas to the present time and place.”23
Over a period of several years, at the same time as she was establishing the Department of Legal Medicine, Lee also wrote a book. She produced an extraordinary four-hundred-page manuscript intended as a gift for Magrath—written, illustrated, and lettered in her own hand—titled An Anatomography in Picture, Verse and Music.24
Anatomography, Lee explained in an accompanying letter, was “a coined word of home minting, therefore presumably counterfeit” intended to mean “a graphic anatomy.” Her book was a tribute to the beauty of the human body, as expressed in verse and images.25
The book told a story through an epic poem, a series of quatrains in the meter of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, about “an Indian deity, without rhyme or reason, sent from the far West to punish the Indian God of the East Wind in Boston, where, meeting with treachery, he is murdered in the Public Garden and his body is taken to your Northern Mortuary,” she said in her letter. “His son comes to identify and claim the remains which are buried in due Indian style. They disappear, only to reappear again in part in the tanks at the Harvard Medical School, where they were gathered and described.”
Lee’s book was meant to be read in a particular way, not like an ordinary book. Each two-page spread was intended to be regarded together. The ideal method of reading her manuscript was to read the heading on the right-hand page, if there was one, then Shakespearean quotations on the left page. Next, the reader was directed to a marginal note and a corresponding quatrain. In her letter to Magrath, Lee said such marginal notes had been employed as a sort of index in ancient texts.
Just open up the abdomen and find
Contortions of Intestines, velvet lined
By sheathing, fan-shaped mesentery moored
In systematic chaos intertwined Ye Knotty
Problem
Dear lovely Lungs, all spotted blue and black,
Your dingy substance wrapped in pleural sac,
I could not live without you, and I strive
To guard you from pneumoniac attack Ye Aire Castles
The Tibia and Fibula take part
In lifting up the human head and heart.
Without them continuity is lost,
The head and feet would simply come apart Ye Connecting
Links
The Skin, of which we humans have so much
Is full of pores sebaceous glands and such,
Seductive, silken-smooth and softly sweet --
Oh man, confess! some Skin you love to touch! Ye Tactile
Tactics
Every organ and tissue in the human body was represented in Anatomography except for some vertebrae, the patella, the parathyroid gland, the adrenal glands, and the genitalia. The art Lee selected for her book was rich with symbolism, classical references, and images with particular significance to Magrath and herself.
“What training in draughtsmanship and design I have had came in childhood from our dear mutual friend Isaac Ellwood Scott, one of the gentlest and most loveable natures I have ever known,” she wrote. “I am sure you will recognize lines throughout these pages that could have been inspired only by him.”
She hired photographers to document aspects of Magrath’s life, such as the Union Boat Club on the Charles River, St. Botolph, and the refrigerator cabinets in the North Grove Street morgue to include in the book. Layers of meaning were hidden within every image. She chose certain foliage, flowers, and animals in her design elements, particularly fish, which she used as her “signature.” The seaweed illustrated on one page of her book, for example, is Chorda filum, commonly known as dead man’s rope. The oak leaves recurring through the manuscript represent strength and independence. Charon, the ferryman who transports the newly deceased across the rivers Styx and Acheron, is depicted, Lee said, because he was one of the earliest oarsmen. Disguised as flowers ornamenting one page are fingerprints—Magrath’s and her own.
The book’s end pages, beginning with the egg case of the Port Jackson shark (because Magrath was born in Jackson, Michigan) and a fish skeleton on the final end page, she explained, were meant to represent the beginning and the end, birth and death. On the whole, Lee’s manuscript is a reflection on the great mysteries of life and death, immortality, and the passage of the soul.
“Like everything else I have ever done, this was blundered into,” Lee wrote in her letter to Magrath explaining her manuscript. “It has been all-absorbing and intensely interesting work, and has led me down many heretofore untrodden paths.”
Lee’s mission—Anatomography, the Department of Legal Medicine, the rest of her life—was all a consequence of Magrath’s remark about the beauty of the human internal organs. “Perhaps it is well to say right here that this thought of yours, so casually expressed and so casually accepted, has been the little germ from which has grown your Department of Legal Medicine at the Harvard Medical School and the George Burgess Magrath Library of Legal Medicine,” she wrote.
Working on Anatomography had been therapeutic for Lee. She had been at a low point in her life. As though a veil were lifted, a light illuminated a path forward. Where it would lead, she had no way of knowing. But she had found a subject in which to sink her intellectual teeth and a renewed sense of purpose.
I think this book has been a regeneration in itself. It has brought health and happiness, a wider outlook and a broader comprehension, an increased ability to think and study. It has brought serenity and peace of mind to its maker. Do you not believe that your idea was truly a miraculous one? I know it was. And so let me acknowledge my debt of gratitude to you, first for the idea, second for bringing me, through it, many agreeable and happy contacts both new and renewed, and lastly and principally for the joy and inspiration that your spiritual presence has given me with every stroke of pen or brush. I confess it is with much trepidation that I lay before you my bit of nonsense—you with your accurate knowledge, perfect taste and meticulous attention to detail, yet there is no one who will give my work kinder treatment or who will be more indulgent in his judgement than you. But since it is the outgrowth of your own chance remark, and with the realization that the execution is far less worthy than the idea, I dare offer it to you in all humbleness and reverence, knowing you will enjoy the jest with me, and subscribe myself, with sincere esteem and genuine affection.
There is no evidence that Lee ever gave the Anatomography manuscript or the letter to Magrath. Maybe she felt the book was immoderate, or maybe she never finished working on it.
Lee persuaded Moritz to retain Parker Glass, a Massachusetts native who had been Magrath’s part-time secretary at the medical examiner’s office, to serve as his assistant at Harvard. To keep him employed during Moritz’s fellowship, Lee arranged for Glass to receive training at the Hickox Secretarial School, where he honed his skills in dictation, filing, and medical shorthand.
Glass felt a responsibility to continue Magrath’s work after his death. “Although our work for Doctor [Magrath], and what he started, will never be finished, what we took over last December will have been carried out to the best of our ability,” he wrote to Lee. “Even from my little share in the task, I find satisfaction. How much more you must find after all the years of protection you have given him.”26
Glass cleaned out Magrath’s old office at 274 Boylston Street. It was his idea to retain Magrath’s 181 license plate for Moritz’s automobile. Aside from being a desirable low number, the license plate held symbolic meaning for Lee, who had to use her influence to prevent the plate from going back into circulation.
“This was the official number and in his day all traffic stopped for it—not by instruction, but by courtesy,” Lee told Moritz. “Because of Dr. Magrath’s name and standing, I could get this number for you if you wish it. Miss Magrath, his sister, would like you to have it as her brother’s successor at the Medical School.”27
With the installation of a properly trained forensic pathologist in Moritz, Lee saw an opportunity to reform and modernize death investigation in Massachusetts by changing the law to give medical examiners independent authority. She summarized her thoughts in a letter to Sidney Burwell shortly after Magrath’s death. “It is a good time to start to revamp the Medical Examiner system in Massachusetts,” she wrote. “Massachusetts has always led in Medicolegal matters, but New York and Essex County, New Jersey are ahead of her now and even some of the mid-western states are coming to the front.”28
Lee suggested the creation of a state-wide system with a centralized medical examiner’s office in Boston where autopsies would be performed. The headquarters would also have a centralized toxicology and ballistic laboratory to serve investigations throughout the state. Lee declared that the medical examiner’s office should be located at Harvard and one person—ideally Moritz—appointed as chief medical examiner for the state, with two assistants and two associates.29
Having the medical examiner’s office in close affiliation with Harvard Medical School would solve the problem of providing a supply of bodies for students and fellows in the Department of Legal Medicine as well. Duties of the existing part-time medical examiners in various districts around the state would be unaltered. Their pay and activities would remain the same, but they would have free access to expertise in Boston.
It was perhaps not a perfect system, but it was a move in the right direction. More importantly, Lee’s plan navigated a path that minimized the ruffling of political feathers. “This need not be any more expensive than it is now, would occasion no loss of prestige, nor would it reduce the number of appointive offices for political purposes,” she said to Burwell.
Lee urged Burwell to join her in visiting Governor Leverett Saltonstall and Paul Dever, the attorney general, to push for a modern, state-wide medical examiner system. “Since legislation is required, it must be started now,” Lee said.
Burwell was disinclined to join the fight at that moment, and nothing resulted from Lee’s visionary proposal. Massachusetts didn’t adopt a statewide medical examiner system until 1983.30
Moritz’s fellowship tour included visits to England, Denmark, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, and Egypt. He gained firsthand legal medicine experience in Edinburgh, Glasgow, London, Paris, Marseille, Berlin, Hamburg, Bonn, Munich, Vienna, and Graz. Moritz was pleasantly surprised by what he learned at the Federal Institute in Cairo, Egypt. He expected to find poorly trained staff working under primitive conditions. Instead, he found a well-equipped centralized facility that conducted all the postmortem examinations in the kingdom. The facility was kept busy; Cairo was experiencing up to twenty-five homicides a day at the time.
“Poisoning is very common in Egypt,” he wrote in a report of his fellowship for the Rockefeller Foundation. “It is doubtful that there is any place in the world where as much toxicology is done as in this Institute.”31
Moritz summarized his experience at Cairo’s Federal Institute in a letter to Sidney Burwell. “I had a very interesting time in Egypt, and saw more things of the ‘believe it-or-not’ variety than I thought possible,” he said. “Crime is a flourishing industry along the Nile, and they have many original ideas as to its performance. With the exception of Denmark I know of no place where all branches of medico-legal activity are so highly organized and centralized in a federal department. The medico-legal experts are well trained, and their work compares favourably with the best I have seen.”32
Overall, from his survey of systems across Europe and Africa, Moritz discovered a wide range in quality of medicolegal practice. Some cities were quite good. Most systems were not.
“My experience to date, particularly that part of it acquired on the continent, is of value, not because of the good things that I have learned, but rather because I have learned of so many practices to be avoided,” Moritz wrote to Wolbach. “I feel that I have made a long journey and spent an inordinate amount of time to study organizations and methods that are fundamentally bad.”33
Lee managed the introduction of Moritz to her department at Harvard like a stage mother. She arranged for Moritz to deliver a series of lectures on legal medicine at Harvard almost immediately upon his return from Europe in September of 1939. She also urged a series of visits with Governor Saltonstall, Massachusetts State Police Commissioner Paul Kirk, and the head of the FBI laboratory in Washington, DC. Lee also held a dinner for Moritz at The Rocks in late September. She wanted him to speak on legal medicine for thirty to forty minutes after dinner. “I would like to have you make a little talk on legal medicine in general—what it is and why, what you have been doing in your two years abroad, what the needs in this country are, and what the prospects are at Harvard for fulfilling them,” she told Moritz. “There will be many doctors, some lawyers and probably some of the New Hampshire medical referees, and we have asked the local undertaker, deputy sheriff and chief of police,” she said. “It will be a chance for some missionary work, but as you know it mustn’t be too technical, nor, shall I say, too ‘gory.’”34
