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His childhood progressed at a saunter, his days routine save for widely spaced moments of community excitement, such as the installation in 1866 of a toboggan slide and the fire in 1881 that destroyed Coldwater’s Armory Hall, the town’s only theater. The disaster prompted one of the town’s leading cigar-makers, Barton S. Tibbits, to build a striking new opera house, and soon Coldwater began drawing the likes of James Whitcomb Riley, who read his poetry from the stage, and an array of less high-brow entertainers, including the Haverly’s Minstrels with their “$10,000 Acting Dogs,” various traveling companies hell-bent on performing
Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
innumerable mind readers and mediums, and most memorably Duncan Clark’s Lady Minstrels and New Arabian Nights, described by the
Coldwater Republican
as “eight females, scantily dressed”; the
Courier
called it “the vilest show that ever appeared in Coldwater.”

    C RIPPEN ENROLLED IN THE U NIVERSITY of Michigan’s School of Homeopathy in 1882, when homeopathy was a mode of medicine that enjoyed great popularity among doctors and the public. The founder of homeopathy was a German physician named Samuel Hahnemann, whose name subsequently became applied to many hospitals around the United States. His treatise,
Organon of Rational Therapeutics,
first published in 1810, became the bible of homeopathy, positing that a doctor could cure a patient’s ills by using various medicines and techniques to conjure the same symptoms as those evoked by whatever disease or condition had assailed the patient. He distilled his beliefs to three words,
similia similibus currentur:
Like cures like.
    Crippen left the school in 1883 without graduating and sailed for London in hopes of continuing his medical education there. The English medical establishment greeted him with skepticism and disdain but did allow him to attend lectures and work as a kind of apprentice at certain hospitals, among them the Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem. An asylum for the insane, its name had shrunk through popular usage to Bedlam, which eventually entered dictionaries as a lowercase word used to describe scenes of chaos and confusion. It was here that Crippen felt most welcome, for the treatment of the insane was a realm in which few doctors cared to practice. Nothing cured madness. The most doctors could do was sedate resident lunatics to keep them from hurting themselves and others. In an environment where nothing worked, anything new that offered hope had to be considered.
    Crippen brought with him an array of skills and a knowledge of compounds that asylum officials saw as useful. As a homeopath, he knew the powers not just of ordinary opiates but also of poisons such as aconite, from the root of the plant monkshood; atropine, from belladonna (or deadly nightshade); and rhus toxin from poison ivy. In large doses each could prove fatal, but when administered in tiny amounts, typically in combination with other agents, such compounds could produce a useful palette of physical reactions that mimicked the symptoms of known diseases.
    At Bethlehem Hospital Crippen added a new drug to his basket, hydrobromide of hyoscine, derived from an herb of the nightshade family,
Hyoscyamus niger,
known more commonly as henbane. He used it there for the first time, though he long had known of the drug from his studies back home in America, where it was employed in asylums as a sedative to quell patients suffering delirium and mania, and to treat alcoholics suffering delirium tremens. Doctors injected the drug in tiny amounts of one-hundredth of a grain or less (a grain being a unit of measure based historically on the average weight of a single grain of wheat but subsequently set more precisely at 0.0648 grams or 0.002285 ounces). Crippen also knew that henbane was used commonly in ophthalmic treatments because of its power to dilate the pupils of the eye both in humans and animals, including cats, a property that