the famous pioneer bacteriologists Drs. Isaac Danforth and Robert Koch paved the way for Christian Fenger’s inspiring and educational medical demonstrations—demonstrations that Jane’s father had insisted she see at age fourteen and fifteen. Fenger’s fascination in the evolving neurological sciences and neuropsychiatry, an infant science only hinted at in individual case reports, came out of an interest in neurosurgery. It was this area that a young Jane found fascinating—what explained the mind of humankind? To encourage her, Fenger insisted she take home copies of
Her father had seen to it that she study German and French so that she could read journals and reports coming out of Europe. But when it came time for her to complete her studies under Dr. Fenger at the Rush Medical College of Chicago, she found all medical reference libraries in the city inadequate to the task. In Chicago, no more than two sets of the great German yearbook, Schmidt’s
This and a general lack of concern for developments in Europe, especially with regard to neurosciences, sent her off to Washington, D.C., to complete her dissertation for her Ph.D., but even in Washington, the competition to gain ac-104
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cess to such journals proved impossible. This led her abroad to finish her studies toward her medical degree.
However, she failed to heed her own internal advice against getting emotionally involved with a silver- tongued Frenchman with a probing eye and a soft caress. Francois Tewes derailed her up-till-now obsessive love affair with medicine. She found herself alone in France and pregnant.
Still, determined to finish what little remained to accomplish her medical degree while hiding her pregnancy, she forged on to Germany, where she gained acceptance as a doctor.
Her having had to leave Chicago due to a lack of books had outraged Dr. Fenger, who had, since her father’s death, become like a father to her, certainly a benefactor. She believed him secretly in love with her, but their age difference prevented him ever to broach the subject, and the sad creases about his eyes had only increased and deepened with each day. Seeing her off for D.C., he looked stricken there at the train station. She could only imagine how he felt when she’d wired him that being unsuccessful in Washington, she’d booked passage for France and eventually Germany. Using his recommendation, which she still cherished, she felt certain that a major medical facility in Paris or Berlin would accept and attach her, a woman, to a medical program in which she could attain her final goal—to practice surgery and eventually neurosurgery. However, such a position never materialized.
These memories flooded in alongside the moment here in the surgical theater. Jane had learned only recently that after she’d left Dr. Fenger’s care and Chicago, that Christian had spearheaded a campaign to create a ten- thousand-volume surgical-medical library to be housed in the Newberry Library in the heart of the city. Later, in 1890, the John Crerar Library was founded by the wealthy railroad magnate, willing two million dollars to launch
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no more promising medical students would have to leave America for Europe.
Christian had loved her, had taken her under his wing, but he’d lost her to the same intolerance she faced daily as a woman in medicine. She’d stopped corresponding on learning of the pregnancy. And when she saw him nowadays, she saw the depth of his hurt smoldering as coals in a hearth. As much as it pained them both, Jane still could not tell him of her return, or her deception, not now . . . perhaps never.
Fenger absolutely hated Dr. J. Phineas Tewes almost as much as he’d loved Jane Francis. And since Gabrielle looked so much like her in her youth, Jane had sent her to the rival school instead, out to Northwestern where Gabrielle had known the murdered boy—Cliffton—only too briefly. It’d been Gabrielle who’d been with Cliffton the night he died, and Gabby had pleaded with her mother that they go to the train station and offer him a place to sleep so that he’d not be in that cold and lonely place by himself without a dime.
They’d argued, and then came the middle-of-the-night call from Nathan Kohler saying, “Our opportunity for your experiment has come.”
She learned that a garroted body had been discovered at the train station. She’d prayed it would not be Purvis—and she feared that if it were and Gabby learned of it, she would never forgive her mother.
Chief Nathan Kohler was the only one in authority who knew that she and Tewes were one and the same. She’d confessed it to him when he’d detected her utter discomfort in having to follow him into the stationhouse men’s room during their discussion over allowing Tewes access to the crime scene and victim. She’d lost composure as Kohler and others used the wall-length trough urinal.
Nathan Kohler had read her well and had cruelly turned her scam on herself, threatening exposure if she failed him.
At least Dr. Tewes had gotten into the crime scene even if it was as Nathan’s spy. So much drama in the horrid wake of 106
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the garroter. She sadly imagined the night of magic the victim and her Gabrielle had had at the world’s fair, and how the boy had depleted his last dime on Gabby to please her with ice cream and carved animals.
And now the boy was a specimen for a room full of medical students to see what fire did to flesh and how an autopsy
Dr. Fenger proved his usual able genius, making the autopsy look easy. He somehow remained above it all while his hands worked busily over the body as an artist’s hands might paint in oils.
Fenger’s appointment to Cook County had indeed marked the coming of age of pathological specialization in Chicago in 1878, and now it was fifteen years later, and he showed no sign of slowing down, not superficially anyway. But Jane—as Tewes—knew better.
Christian Fenger had come to Tewes out of a sense of desperation, having tried Spiritualism atop his Catholic upbringing, had even attempted the new fad of graveyard seances in a failing hope of reaching out to his dead parents, and he’d sunk to the level of looking for solace in the bottle, in various drugs such as opium and heroine, and finally searching for that elusive answer to all he sought in the arms of a series of philosophizing prostitutes. Something to do with having struck his father during an argument, and the elder Fenger dying of a heart attack hours later, and Christian, late in life, had become obsessed with making amends.
Fenger had seen the guru of phrenology several times before breaking down and detailing the depth and longevity of his search for this personal Holy Grail, and the salvation of a tortured soul he showed to no one.
As she watched his deft hands now from the gallery, she wondered what kind of surgery he’d seen during the Civil War as a field surgeon. He’d never spoken of it, not to her or her father. He’d come for dinner in those days, the only time she’d ever seen him relaxed, smiling, laughing. Most of the CITY FOR RANSOM
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time, he complained of a morgue sorely lacking in rudimen-tary supplies and elementary equipment—from microscopes and alcohol to specimen jars and burners. He was ever searching for benefactors to improve the circumstances for all medicine in Chicago, and today there was seldom a medical professional who’d not learned from this man who read and spoke some twelve languages so that he could keep abreast of all medical breakthroughs the world over.
The autopsy and teaching session came to an abrupt end.
Fenger, exhausted but daring not show it, looked his age when he turned to find Dr. Tewes watching over his shoulder from the gallery.
Their eyes met.
