The Mysterious Death of Jane Stanford (review)

What joy it must have been for Bob Cutler, a distinguished professor emeritus of neurology at Stanford University School of Medicine, to unearth the writings of those who lived with Jane Stanford, as well as those who were in contact with her at, and after, her death. This is superb investigative reporting, especially since it was accomplished almost one hundred years after the events. Particularly impressive in this small volume (108 pages of text and 52 more of careful notes and appendices) is the way Cutler describes the characters in this tragedy so well that one senses that he knew them—such as Bertha Berner (Mrs. Stanford's private secretary of twenty-one years) and Dr. F. Howard Humphries (a highly qualified physician who attended Mrs. Stanford in her last moments of life on Oahu).

Why was this account not spoken clearly at the time? One very impersonal reason is that communication between Hawaii and Palo Alto in 1905 was much more primitive and slow than that between Mars and Houston is today. Evidence found in Hawaii might become no more than a rumor when weeks needed to pass between its sending and its receipt in San Francisco.

After Leland Stanford Jr. had died of typhoid in Europe, Leland Stanford, the bereft father, elected to found a university in his son's memory. Two years after the first class was admitted to Leland Stanford Junior University in 1891, Mr. Stanford died. Jane Stanford became the "sole trustee" until 1903 when she relinquished control, only to be elected president of the Board of Trustees. Just prior to his death, Stanford and his wife had chosen the first president of the new university: David Starr Jordan, then president of the University of Indiana. Until Mrs. Stanford's death fourteen years later, it was observed that she and Jordan disagreed about many issues relevant to the operations of the University. Cutler takes us to their relationship dispassionately and clearly.

The overture to Jane Stanford's demise occurred in San Francisco on 14 January 1905, six weeks before she died: that evening, she drank a glass from a bottle of Poland Spring water; it was bitter, and she vomited. The residuum in the bottle was analyzed and found to contain "rodent poison" with strychnine and other impurities. Depressed and horrified that someone had tried to kill her, Jane soon set sail with a retinue to Hawaii. On 28 February, after a picnic not far from the Moana Hotel on Waikiki where the entourage was housed, she felt a need for sodium bicarbonate. She had brought a bottle from San Francisco, and had not previously used it; shortly after taking a spoonful of the bicarbonate, she died in tetanic spasm and hyperextension of the joints and spine, a pathognomonic clinical picture of strychnine poisoning. A Dr. Day described "the position of the feet; the ankle was in extreme extension, that is, the toes thrown down so that the arch of the foot was very much exaggerated and drawn inward toward the middle line" (p. 13). The NaHCO₃ was noted to have a bitter taste. At the autopsy, no abnormalities of the internal organs (especially the heart) were found, and the empty cardiac ventricles with cyanotic blood in the atria indicated that the heart was pumping at the time of respiratory arrest. Sure enough, there was pure strychnine (without impurities) detected amid the bicarbonate of soda.

All excellent research raises more questions than the data answer. Such is the case here. Who tried to poison Jane Stanford in San Francisco? Did the same person(s) succeed in Hawaii? Why did David Starr Jordan, after sailing to Hawaii to retrieve her body for the mausoleum in Palo Alto, declare clearly and often that Jane Stanford had died of natural causes (a "ruptured coronary aneurysm?") while disparaging the well-qualified physicians who watched over her death and performed a meticulous autopsy? Bob Cutler has woven the...