Reason First: The Poisonous Physician

An electric chair took on another sinister figure in New York, this time in the year 1895. The punishment stemmed from a murderer named Robert Buchanan. This doctor had claimed that obvious pinprick pupils would erase any indication that someone had been poisoned.

This someone in question remained Mrs. Buchanan. The doctor had figured (wrongly) that the alkaloid atropine could be sufficient in hiding any traces of morphine poisoning.

During the trial, a cat died in the name of science and justice. Atropine saw its way into the cat’s eyes to test the theory. The occupants of the court witnessed no pinpricks in the cat’s pupils. Buchanan then spoke in court and his fate forever marred his life. After more than four hours in a day, the jury showed a guilty verdict. Dr. Robert Buchanan perished by way of electrocution in Sing Sing.

This tale of a doctor murdering his wife to get his hands on her $50,000 policy shows not greed but self-destruction. He, of course, silenced his bride but also killed himself spiritually and his actions led to his physical death.

A case like this will be studied for its forensics value but also, and more important, for its stance on morality. The depraved doctor saw no other way to reap the benefits after news of his wife’s vulgar nature as a madam of a brothel broke. This information caused his customer base, and therefore income, to plummet. In his head, Buchanan must’ve processed different ways to dispatch his wife.

He could have strangled her, pushed her down a flight of stairs, or hired someone to murder her. Maybe his funds remained low. It didn’t matter. For another terrible doctor, he possessed, again, no idea of “do no harm.” He was not selfish or ambitious but selfless and monstrous. His evil deeds resulted from the evasion of reality. This detachment from the real world caused Buchanan to behave in such an irrational way.

His worst act included concocting a plan to murder his wife. The planning, the knowledge of the atropine, all of these details coalesced into one disastrous and ugly whole. To consider even for a moment a method of destroying your wife and yourself should be just as chilling as any other heinous crime. Buchanan brought this upon himself because of his altruistic nature. He wanted to sacrifice his values for a lesser or the supposed nonvalue of his wife’s life and his own execution. His altruism became manifest when he thought about ending things with his wife. She should have been his highest value and no exhibition on her part of infidelity or any other reason to divorce her ever surfaced. And a divorce would have been appropriate, of course. But Buchanan didn’t want to earn the money, he wanted to grab it. Though he did not deserve it, he gladly took the inheritance. This action spells not reason or individualism but a scared little man too puny in ethics to take seriously life and living.

The doctor’s failure to see what a self-interested man full of virtues and truth didn’t register because of an inability, he knew fully what he was doing. Instead, it was his refusal to view his actions as wicked. In just a few steps, he remained an admirable physician and descended to a murderous monster.

To not only kill his wife but to go about it with a cavalier attitude with his new, make that remarried first wife, demonstrates the disgusting nature of Buchanan. His disturbing way of dealing with his “problems” created a beast that could not be tamed. While most people sensed that Mrs. Buchanan’s death was suspicious, it would take one of the first forensics based cases to show that Buchanan in fact murdered his wife. But it wouldn’t be the last court case of its kind and he would certainly not be the last to commit such a vicious crime.