The Mysterious Death of Jane Stanford (review)

Jane Leland Stanford was the "mother" of the university that she and Leland Stanford Sr. had created in 1885 to honor their late teenage son. Sen. Leland Stanford had been a moving force behind the Central Pacific Railroad when it joined the Union Pacific Railroad at Promontory Summit, Utah, in 1869, thus bridging the continental United States, and amassed wealth vast enough to build a university. Together the Stanfords traveled to Bloomington, Indiana, in 1891 to hire David Starr Jordan as Stanford University's founding president.

Jordan, born in 1851 on a farm in upstate New York, became a teacher and then studied at Cornell, graduating in 1872 with an M. Sc. in botany. He was also elected the class poet, and had earlier been class president. After teaching natural science at Lombard University in Illinois, he took summer courses and became a marine biologist and an ichthyologist, and then, after one year's further study, became an M. D. at Indiana Medical College. By 1875, he was a professor of biology at Butler University. Four years later he became professor of natural history at Indiana University, then little more than a high school for Bloomington, and five years' later—at thirty-four years of age—he became the university's president. After becoming president of Stanford, Jordan became an active anti-imperialist and an ardent advocate of the peaceful resolution of international disputes, an opponent of the arms race, and an active advisor to Edwin Ginn, a publisher and the founder of the World Peace Foundation.

Jane Stanford died unexpectedly at the age of eighty in Honolulu in early 1905. Cutler demonstrates that she was indeed poisoned by strychnine, as the testimony of the physicians summoned to her side and an autopsy revealed. His elegant, medically informed, forensic examination of the case details how she consumed a teaspoon or so of medicinal bicarbonate of soda spiked with strychnine. She quickly fell into spasm, summoned help, and then became rigid in spine and jaw (typical of strychnine poisoning). A few weeks before, there had been an unsuccessful attempt in San Francisco to poison her by putting a weaker mixture of one of the poisonous alkaloids (used in commercial rodenticides) into a bottle of mineral water from Maine.

That much is straightforward. But the primary intention of this book is to describe the extraordinary and successful cover-up managed by Jordan. He steamed to Honolulu, produced a young physician who cast severe doubt on the poisoning hypothesis, deprecated the knowledge and training of the several more senior physicians who had observed Jane Stanford's death, dismissed the implications of the autopsy, and, with the cooperation of Stanford's family lawyer and a member of the Stanford Board of Trustees, fabricated a tale of her demise. He persuaded the Stanford community, the San Francisco police, and the San Francisco press to believe that Jane Stanford died naturally from a heart complaint, or a rupture of the coronary artery. Jordan maintained the lie to his death.

Cutler does not explain how Jordan, admittedly a nonpracticing medical doctor as well as an ichthyologist, managed to gull Stanford and San Francisco. He is more concerned to set the medical record straight, which he does, and briefly to imply that Jordan, an imperious and devious man, may have wanted Jane Stanford out of the way before she persuaded the trustees to dismiss him. She was still upset about Jordan blaming her for the firing of an outspoken, left-leaning, professor of economics at the beginning of the century. She believed, as did President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard University, that Jordan was autocratic, and was abusing his power.

Cutler may have felt that he had too little firm evidence to indict Jordan, and Bertha Berner, Stanford's personal secretary and long-time traveling companion, of conspiracy to murder. But his excellent diagnosis of the...