Dr. George Parkman (1790-1849)
Physician & of Murder Victim of 8 Walnut Street, Boston, Massachusetts
He was one of the largest owners of real estate in Boston and was estimated to be worth $750,000 in 1848. Despite his fortune, he studied medicine in Paris and London and on his return to Boston he served as physician to the poor and a regimental surgeon in the War of 1812, opening up his own houses during cholera and smallpox epidemics for the treatment of patients. Mrs Fanny Longfellow (wife of the poet and daughter of another of Boston's pre-war millionaires) described him as, "the lean doctor... the good-natured Don-Quixote" while Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. said that, "he abstained while others indulged, he walked while others rode, he worked while others slept". Parkman was murdered in November, 1839, and after a sensational trial known as the "Parkman-Webster Murder Case" Harvard Professor John White Webster was found guilty of his murder and was subsequently hanged. Parkman died unmarried.
