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The Long And Short Of It: The Harvard Medical School Murder

Just in time for Halloween: here’s a grisly murder story from the greater Boston area! It takes place in 1849 and 1850, with characters from high and low life, terrible mysteries, worse revelations, forensic and circumstantial evidence, and deeds so vile that people find it hard to believe the story, even today.

Below this line are some of my sources. If you want to go into this story with no prior knowledge of the case, stop reading this till you’re finished with the video. Otherwise:

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HERE BE SPOILERS

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Sources (incomplete list):
A wiki overview:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkman%E2%80%93Webster_murder_case
PBS article with a timeline I found very helpful:
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/murder-dr-parkman/
The Massachusetts Historical Society, blog post on the trial:
https://www.masshist.org/beehiveblog/2015/04/the-long-agony-is-over-the-trial-of-john-white-webster/
Harvard Countway Library, article on Dr. Nathan Cooley Keep’s dental evidence:
https://countway.harvard.edu/news/nathan-cooley-keep-parkman-webster-murder-trial
Scans of the full confession of murder:
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.hl0jxh&view=1up&seq=1
Ballad by Mary G. Doe on the events (that’s not a pseudonym, the author really was named Mary G. Doe — thanks to Dan Thurston for catching this):
https://parkmangenealogy.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/george-parkman-soliloquy.jpg