Thunderstruck by Erik Larson Read Free Book Online

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