“Sarah Hackett Stevenson took him and the status quo on.”
“Now there was a hell of a woman.”
“Your greatest advocate, Jane.”
“Aside from you, but true enough, she kept me on my game.”
“The first seat in the AMA ever occupied by a woman.
Courageous lady.”
“A student of Darwin and Huxley at the famous South Kensington Science School in London.”
With gnashing teeth, he shook his head. “Has she returned to Europe?”
“Not quite. She’s removed to Springfield. Point is for all the eyes women’ve opened, the problems persist.”
“I’m not blind, but this is a societal problem, dear, and it persists in all areas of commerce and business—not just medicine.” Fenger lifted his drink for a sip.
She drank a second Amaretto.
He shook his head, gathering his thoughts. “I recall once we got a cadaver in, and the man, kind enough to leave his body for scientific study, had one stipulation else his body goes to the earth.”
“Let me guess. Rush Medical must preserve the body from any and all indignities. Meaning no female medical student could work over him.”
“Even in death, a man remains modest.” He held up a finger. “Look, Jane, Sarah Stevenson graduated from the Woman’s Hospital Medical College, an outgrowth of a hospital established in 1865 by—”
“Mary H. Thompson, a hospital for indigent women and children—”
“—which only last year became a department of—”
“I know, Gabby is studying at the Thompson School at Northwestern University now, but as I said, she’s having CITY FOR RANSOM
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similar problems as any woman in medicine has for the past sixty years! Mary Thompson herself finished for her degree during that one-year experiment for the Chicago Medical College, the same year three other women were stranded in their studies. Now it’s 1893 and soon it’ll be 1900, Christian, and you want me to believe things have improved?” “By degrees, yes.”
“Degrees?”
“Women are now admitted into competition for internships at Cook County Hospital and Asylum.”
“And how many of those internships’ve gone to women at your precious medical facility?”
“The numbers improve each year, I assure you. Hopefully, by the turn of the century coeducation in medicine will be an accepted reality.”
“Do you know what happened to my reality, sir, when I was no longer at ease at Rush, made to feel that way by the male students?”
“You disappeared.”
“Not entirely, no. I first wound up at the Hahnemann Medical College.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“That place occupying several rooms over a drugstore?
On South Clark?”
“The one that prospered last during the Civil War, yes.”
He bit back a show of anger.
“Not long there, I moved on to the Bennett College of Eclectic Medicine and Surgery, where the systematic teaching of pathology and bacteriology has only now begun. I got some smattering of laboratory work in chemistry, a bland education in surgery, histology and nothing of physiology.” “Little wonder you ran to Europe, but you might’ve come to me first. Why didn’t you?”
“Pride perhaps . . . anger . . . the anger of youth.” She failed to say she feared he’d fallen in love with her.
“Ahhh . . . fire of stubborn youth,” he replied.
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ROBERT W. WALKER
“I’ve no regrets of going abroad. I returned with a medical degree and my Gabrielle.”
“A good thing, I’m sure.”
“Look, Doctor, you ask that I deal with reality now.
“It’s ethically wrong, Jane.”
“And you? How do you deal with reality? You torture yourself for countless years?”
A brief stunned look as if struck by a sudden pain and Fenger calmly replied, “Me . . . me and reality . . . how do I deal with it?”
“Your hands’re in it each day.”
“While I find beauty in the human body, I also find suffering. Yes, I suppose I do recreate this thing we call reality in my work every day . . .”
“Yes, in order to do what you do.”
“. . . in order to remain standing and doing surgery for eighteen, twenty, thirty hours at a stretch at times.”
“Like when Haymarket happened, the Great Fire?”
“Haymarket, yes, and as a much younger man, the fire.
Actually the Great Fire benefited my reputation. Soon after, I was teaching at Rush and practicing at Cook County at age thirty-seven.”
“You patched up Ransom when he was hurt in the bombing at Haymarket, didn’t you?”
“Everyone was called to help.”
“And you saved Alastair Ransom’s life.”
“Any doctor would’ve done what I—”
“No, sir. I looked at the hospital record.”
“Really now?”
“Another doctor had written him off, and even then, you understood how ninety percent of wound infection occurred, so you took sanitary steps to see to it that he did not lose his leg or his life for that matter. You were so far advanced over the other men practicing medicine then.”
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“He proved a strong patient.”
She half smiled at the characterization. “Being bull-headed may’ve saved him in some situations, but you saved him that day. It’s what you do, Dr. Fenger, what sets you apart.”
“Please . . . being set apart is a lonely proposition.”
“Regardless, you . . . you save lives amid all this circus—this passing parade of angels and demons in this . . . this—”
“This floating opera we call Chicago?”
“Precisely.” Jane stood and bid him good night, taking her leave.
CHAPTER 14
Later the same night
Jane gasped, startled to find Alastair Ransom on Dr. Tewes’s doorstep, wearily smoking. In a cornice window, she saw Gabby staring from behind curtains, that damnable pistol—an ancient old breach- loading Sharp’s longer than Gabby’s forearm—poised. Jane had removed the firing cap, rendering the thing useless
