[3] In 1824, Webster was appointed a lecturer of chemistry, mineralogy, and geology at the Harvard Medical College, and three years later he was promoted to the Erving professorship.

Edward Everett Hale reminisced about the student-based Davy Club at Harvard: "Dr. Webster... gave us the most good-natured and kindly assistance.

"[7] Many anecdotes suggest his class-room demonstrations were livened by pyrotechnic drama, although on one occasion the President of Harvard warned that some of them were dangerous if an accident occurred.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow attested to his macabre streak in an anecdote relating how at one dinner at the Webster home, the host amazed his guests by lowering the lights, fitting a noose around his own neck, and lolling his head forward, tongue protruding, over a bowl of blazing chemicals, to give a ghastly imitation of a man being hanged.

After a lengthy trial, where, under current Massachusetts law, Webster could not testify in his own defense, the jury was instructed by the principal judge, a close relative of the victim, that they "Must come back with a guilty verdict.

The most important factor about the case is that a great body of documentary testimony was either not used by Webster's lawyers or was denied admission into his defense.

The Parkman–Webster murder case was dramatized in the CBS radio program Crime Classics on July 13, 1953, in the episode entitled "The Terrible Deed of John White Webster".

The case was also discussed at length in the first episode of television programme Catching History's Criminals: The Forensics Story,[17] focussing on identity.

The case was also the subject of one of the 'Famous Trials' series of books edited by George Dilnot (qv) and published in England by Geoffrey Bles in 1928.