John White Webster (1793–1850), physician and educator, was born in Boston and spent his youth in Amesbury, Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard University in 1811 and completed a medical degree at that institution four years later. Webster continued his education at Guy’s Hospital in London and subsequently embarked on a scientific journey through Europe, assembling a large collection of minerals in the process. He returned to Boston and briefly practiced medicine before abandoning the profession in 1824 for the position of lecturer of chemistry, mineralogy, and geology at Harvard. In 1826 Webster became an adjunct professor. The following year he was promoted to the Erving professorship of chemistry and mineralogy, serving in that capacity until the end of his life. Webster was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Geological Society of London. He was a founder of the Linnaean Society of New England and a corresponding secretary of the American Geological Society. Webster’s publications included an 1821 book on São Miguel, an island in the Azores, A Manual of Chemistry (Boston, 1826), and American editions of European works on chemistry. In 1849 he quarreled with an acquaintance, George Parkman, who had first loaned him money and then discovered that the financially strapped Webster had borrowed a further sum from someone else using the same security. Parkman disappeared after going to meet him, and a janitor discovered what were believed to be his remains in Webster’s laboratory at Harvard. The following year Webster was convicted of murder and hanged (ANB description begins John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American National Biography, 1999, 24 vols. description ends ; DAB description begins Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, eds., Dictionary of American Biography, 1928–36, 20 vols. description ends ; Clifford Frondel, “The Geological Sciences at Harvard University from 1788 to 1850,” Earth Sciences History 7 [1988]: 15–8; Harvard Catalogue description begins Harvard University Quinquennial Catalogue of the Officers and Graduates, 1636–1925, 1925 description ends , 23, 128, 189, 713; DNA: RG 29, CS, Mass., Boston, 1820, 1850, Cambridge, 1830, 1840; George Bemis, Report of the Case of John W. Webster [1850]; Boston Daily Atlas, 31 Aug. 1850).

In an advertisement headed “Minerals and Fossils,” without naming either himself or a price Webster estimated that the collection “To be disposed of” consisted of from fifteen to twenty thousand specimens, including “all the simple Minerals of Great Britain, and most of those of Sweden, Russia, Germany, France, Italy, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and of America, together with numerous Geological specimens, embracing a complete suit[e] of Rocks from Fryburg; the series of the Paris, London, and Isle of Wight formations, volcanic substances and numerous petrifactions and organic remains.” Also included was a set of wooden models of crystals. Suggesting that the whole assemblage was “well worthy the attention of some public institution,” Webster directed inquiries to George Gibbs, of New York, Benjamin Silliman, of New Haven, and Frederick Hall, of Middlebury, Vermont (Boston Patriot & Daily Mercantile Advertiser, 28 Oct. 1819 [one word editorially corrected]; Washington Daily National Intelligencer, 16 Nov. 1819). Webster sold his collection to Harvard University for $4,000 in 1824 (Frondel, “Geological Sciences at Harvard University,” 17).