Thunderstruck (5 page)

C
RIPPEN ENROLLED IN THE
U
NIVERSITY
of Michigan’s School of Homeopathy in 1882, when homeopathy was a mode of medicine that enjoyed great popularity among doctors and the public. The founder of homeopathy was a German physician named Samuel Hahnemann, whose name subsequently became applied to many hospitals around the United States. His treatise,
Organon of Rational Therapeutics,
first published in 1810, became the bible of homeopathy, positing that a doctor could cure a patient’s ills by using various medicines and techniques to conjure the same symptoms as those evoked by whatever disease or condition had assailed the patient. He distilled his beliefs to three words,
similia similibus currentur:
Like cures like.

Crippen left the school in 1883 without graduating and sailed for London in hopes of continuing his medical education there. The English medical establishment greeted him with skepticism and disdain but did allow him to attend lectures and work as a kind of apprentice at certain hospitals, among them the Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem. An asylum for the insane, its name had shrunk through popular usage to Bedlam, which eventually entered dictionaries as a lowercase word used to describe scenes of chaos and confusion. It was here that Crippen felt most welcome, for the treatment of the insane was a realm in which few doctors cared to practice. Nothing cured madness. The most doctors could do was sedate resident lunatics to keep them from hurting themselves and others. In an environment where nothing worked, anything new that offered hope had to be considered.

Crippen brought with him an array of skills and a knowledge of compounds that asylum officials saw as useful. As a homeopath, he knew the powers not just of ordinary opiates but also of poisons such as aconite, from the root of the plant monkshood; atropine, from belladonna (or deadly nightshade); and rhus toxin from poison ivy. In large doses each could prove fatal, but when administered in tiny amounts, typically in combination with other agents, such compounds could produce a useful palette of physical reactions that mimicked the symptoms of known diseases.

At Bethlehem Hospital Crippen added a new drug to his basket, hydrobromide of hyoscine, derived from an herb of the nightshade family,
Hyoscyamus niger,
known more commonly as henbane. He used it there for the first time, though he long had known of the drug from his studies back home in America, where it was employed in asylums as a sedative to quell patients suffering delirium and mania, and to treat alcoholics suffering delirium tremens. Doctors injected the drug in tiny amounts of one-hundredth of a grain or less (a grain being a unit of measure based historically on the average weight of a single grain of wheat but subsequently set more precisely at 0.0648 grams or 0.002285 ounces). Crippen also knew that henbane was used commonly in ophthalmic treatments because of its power to dilate the pupils of the eye both in humans and animals, including cats, a property that would prove particularly important to Crippen’s future. Any miscalculation would have been dangerous. Just a quarter-grain—that is, 0.0162 grams or 0.0005712 ounces—was likely to prove fatal.

Crippen did not stay long in London. Overall he had found his reception to be as chilly as the city’s climate. He returned to the United States and enrolled in medical school at Cleveland Homeopathic Hospital. He studied surgery but said, later, that his training was purely theoretical—that he had never really operated on patients, alive or dead. Later he had occasion to insist, “I have never performed a postmortem examination in my life.”

T
HE CITY OF
C
OLDWATER
expected much from Crippen. He was not a man’s man, like his uncles Lorenzo and General Fisk, but rather the cerebral sort, and medicine seemed a good career for him to pursue. The local papers tracked his travels; on March 21, 1884, the
Coldwater Courier
noted “Hawley Crippen, son of Myron Crippen, is in the city.” He had returned for the funeral of his grandmother, Mrs. Philo Crippen, who had died a few days earlier. Supposedly, if improbably, her last words had been, “Blessed hope of a glorious immortality.” An item in the next day’s paper noted that Hawley Crippen “graduates at the Medical College of Cleveland next week.”

After graduation Crippen opened a homeopathic practice in Detroit, but two years later he moved to New York to study ocular medicine at the New York Ophthalmic Hospital, a homeopathic institution at Third Avenue and Twenty-third Street. A few decades earlier the hospital had undergone a traumatic shift from allopathic medicine—where doctors sought to cure disease by conjuring symptoms
opposite
to those suffered by patients—to homeopathy, in the process jettisoning all its surgeons by giving them “permanent leave of absence.” Under the new protocol and guided by a new cadre of physicians, “the success of the institution was as remarkable as its previous failure had been,” according to
History of Homeopathy,
published in 1905 by a devotee, Dr. William Harvey King. One of the most important of the school’s new leaders had the unfortunate surname Deady. School records show that Crippen graduated in 1887, one of the few students to do so each year. Wrote King, “The real worth of the hospital is measured by the good accomplished in the relief of suffering humanity rather than by the number of graduates who receive its coveted diploma.”

Now in his mid-twenties, Crippen began an internship at the Hahnemann Hospital in New York, and there he met a student nurse named Charlotte Jane Bell, who had come to America from Dublin. Soon the
Coldwater Courier
had some exciting news: Shortly before Christmas 1887, Hawley Harvey Crippen had gotten married.

He and Charlotte left New York for San Diego, where Crippen opened an office. The two reveled in the absence of winter and in the blue clarity of the coast. Crippen’s parents, Myron and Andresse, by now had moved from Coldwater to Los Angeles, a day’s train ride north. Charlotte became pregnant and on August 19, 1889, gave birth to a son, Otto. Crippen and family moved again, this time to Salt Lake City, where Charlotte again became pregnant. In January 1892, shortly before this baby’s expected arrival, Charlotte died suddenly, the cause attributed to apoplexy. Crippen sent Otto, now a toddler, to Los Angeles to live with his grandfather and grandmother, then himself fled back to New York. It was then that he joined the practice of Dr. Jeffrey, and took lodging in the doctor’s house, and met the woman who was to alter the course and character of his life.

T
HEIR MARRIAGE BARELY UNDER WAY,
Crippen and Cora moved from New York to St. Louis, where Crippen became an eye doctor in the office of an optician. They did not stay long in St. Louis. The city lacked the boisterous glory of New York and had little to offer a woman intent on a life in the world’s embrace. No doubt at Cora’s urging, the couple moved back to New York.

Cora’s “female complaint” now worsened. There was pain and bleeding. She saw a doctor, who told her the problem lay in her ovaries. He recommended removal by surgery: an ovariectomy. Crippen had misgivings. He had seen enough surgeries and their results to know that while surgical skills had advanced greatly since the barbaric practices of the Civil War, an operation was not something to be done on a whim. Though progress with disinfectants had reduced the incidence of catastrophic infection and though improvements in anesthetics had made the whole process endurable, surgery remained a dangerous undertaking. But Cora’s discomfort was too great. She agreed to have the operation.

Soon afterward Cora paid a visit to her sister, Mrs. Teresa Hunn, at her home on Long Island, and showed her the scar. It was still “fresh,” a seam of angry red skin. During a subsequent visit Mrs. Hunn saw the scar again. It was still sufficiently impressive to score itself into Mrs. Hunn’s memory, so that even years later she was able to detail its appearance: “it was healed much better than it was the first time I saw it. It would be about 4 or 5 inches long and about 1 inch wide, but I could not quite exactly say. It was more a cream colour than the rest of her skin, and paler looking. The outside, near the flesh, was paler than the centre of the scar.” One detail Mrs. Hunn failed to note was whether the operation had required the removal of Cora’s navel, a procedure that commonly accompanied such surgery.

The operation meant that Cora would never bear children, which became for her a source of grief. A close friend, Mrs. Adeline Harrison, later would say, “There was only one little shadow in their lives of which I was aware. They both were passionately fond of children, and she was childless.” Whether Crippen truly shared his wife’s longing is open to debate, however, given that he had sent his own son to live in Los Angeles and did not now bring him back.

One of Cora’s half-sisters, Mrs. Louise Mills, said that her sister “craved motherhood” and that the lack of children cast a shadow over their marriage. “When I visited them four years ago they appeared to be perfectly happy,” she reported, except that Cora “would bemoan the fact that she had no child. I fear that in the latter part of her married life she became more and more lonesome.”

In a letter to another of her half-sisters, Cora wrote, “I love babies. I am certain that a baby makes a great deal of difference in a family. In fact, it is not complete without a baby. So I envy you. Oh, I tell you, it makes a great deal of difference when it is your own.”

P
RESSURES ACCUMULATED
. A
FTER RECOVERING
from her surgery, Cora threw herself into her singing lessons, which Crippen was glad to pay for. He liked seeing his young wife happy. In May 1893 the nation slid into a deep depression—the Panic of ’93—and the demand for Crippen’s medical expertise plummeted. He paid for Cora’s music lessons as long as he could but soon was compelled to tell her the lessons had to cease, at least for a while. They moved to less expensive rooms. As their income dwindled, they moved again, and again, until at last they found themselves forced to make a decision that Cora at the time of her marriage to the young and prosperous-seeming Dr. Crippen never imagined she would have to face. She should have been on stage by now, living well in an apartment in Manhattan or for that matter in London, Paris, or Rome. Instead she and the doctor found themselves not just back in Brooklyn, a discouraging condition in itself, but having to surrender to an even more humiliating state of affairs. They moved in with Fritz Mersinger, Cora’s stepfather.