The plight of women in general and female doctors in particular hadn’t much changed even now in 1893—seven years before century’s end. They still hadn’t the vote, nor the confidence of the medical community men that they were worthy of professional training. The man’s world within the man’s world was the male bastion of medicine and surgery.
Her father had been the exception to the rule, encouraging her curious spirit, despite the medical establishment’s barri-ers. To make a living as a female surgeon in 1893 proved difficult to impossible. The few women Jane knew who actually got work only did so as doctor’s assistants or midwives, and even these only in the loneliest outposts of the West where anyone knowing anything about medicine was prized.
Now Jane, acting as Dr. James Tewes, had enrolled her child at Northwestern University Medical, and in the meantime, Gabby was an indispensable secretary and accountant.
For long years now Gabby had gone through stages: not understanding to enjoying the charade to, at age eighteen, questioning her mother’s actions on grounds of ethics.
They’d arrived in Chicago at the outbreak of Haymarket, when the papers were filled with those arrested and on trial for killing seven policemen. Jane paid little heed to the papers then, set on her new stratagem and determined on success. A lot of fliers had been printed and circulated since 1886, but her patience had paid off.
She’d had a patient today under her touch who’d reminded her how fragile was her ruse. A strange young fellow she’d seen at the train station, assisting the photographer.
Denton was his name and he’d commented how lithe and CITY FOR RANSOM
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sweet the doctor’s fingers had felt over his scalp. He’d almost fallen asleep in the chair as Jane probed the calming centers just behind each ear where a bit of pressure and rhythmic action could put a grown man to sleep. She’d curtailed the diagnosis and provided him with some particulars of his condition—after gleaning some anecdotal information about what precisely had been troubling him, where his aches and pains lie, and how long he’d been suffering. Denton happily allowed Tewes to place “his” hand on the area of his abdomen where the real complaint might be diagnosed.
Before it was over, Dr. Tewes told Denton, “Sir, your mental malaise has a quite physical and banal cause—”
“Really?”
“A hernia from lifting that huge tripod.”
“What do you propose?”
“Find other work.”
“But I wish to learn photography from the best.”
“I can give you an elixir for the pulled muscle, but you really must see a surgeon like Dr. Fenger.”
“A surgeon! But I fear going under the knife.”
“It is a simple procedure.” She could perform the surgery herself, but to do so would end her ruse as a man. Any new surgeon coming to Chicago was instantly spotlighted by the medical establishment, his credentials gruelingly questioned. And not without good reason. Many a cruel hoax was perpetrated in the name of surgery these days.
She now sat at her elaborate makeup mirror. The bright lights were the same as those any actress required for makeup. In a sense, she’d become the consummate actress.
She began wiping away the makeup. Gabby would soon be home, and office hours were over. She gave a moment’s feeling of pride in Gabby. The promise of children, to see one’s love come radiant, full-bloom, and for her to become Jane’s closest, dearest friend . . . all a blessing. My greatest accomplishment, she thought. Gabby, along with her professional success, pleased her greatly.
This new direction Jane’d taken—getting work in police 84
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circles as some sort of mentalist—this her father would condemn completely, wholly, royally as far too risky and nervy, a fool’s show of bravado. How ultimate was this, she silently asked herself of the subject . . . to step into the world of police detection in this guise and walk out with not a one of them recognizing a ruse? How wicked to pull it off before the disturbed eyes of Inspector Ransom, and he once a childhood sweetheart? They had gone to the same schools together in those far ago early years of their lives in the Prairie City.
As a child, she’d loved him unreservedly. But what’d he become? Jane knew well that reputation, however blown out of proportion, was based on a core reality. Perhaps he didn’t beat people he arrested with quite the gusto or vigor depicted in the lurid street tales, but he did engender fear in all who thought Ransom interested in talking to them. He seemed also desperately lonely—hence Polly-Merielle, who’d confided far more in Dr. Tewes than Jane’d wished.
Polly, addicted to a need deeply imbedded, had in fact begun a heavy petting session with Dr. Tewes, who blocked her overtures and had insisted on a purely professional relationship. Taken aback, Polly actually showed signs of rehabilitation after all sexual advances had been refused.
Jane now stepped to her bed and pulled forth a black valise, one that’d been her father’s. She spread out the tools of her buried trade—most of her father’s surgical instruments. She ritualistically handled each surgical instrument in turn. She did so swearing to her image in the mirror, “One day . . . one day I’ll again hang out a shingle as Dr. Jane Francis—Surgeon.” Some day when Chicago— and the rest of the world—might accept a female surgeon without reservation. In the meantime, poor Gabby’d had to memorize a pack of lies associated with being the daughter of Dr. Tewes as Dr. Tewes’s “wife” had died giving birth to Gabrielle. It proved increasingly maddening for the child.
Perhaps we should’ve stayed in Paris was a phrase that’d become a mantra. So often did she say this to Gabby as a CITY FOR RANSOM
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child that Gabby had made up a lyrical song around the phrase. Perhaps . . . oh, perhaps . . . we Pariii . . . we Pariii.
Perhaps.
For now, she remained the mysterious Doctor Tewes.
“What would Father say about all this waste of talent?” she asked the empty room.
She heard his resonant bass voice now saying, “Take heart, Jane.”
Her father’d had to deal with his own generation and problems endemic to it . . . or rather epidemic to it. Ailments like malaria, typhoid fever, and digestive malaise when Chicago had been Fort Dearborn. The military base, finally unnecessary, evacuated in 1836, four years after the Black Hawk War but not the threat of disease. And so Dr. William Francis stayed on and started a private practice. How crude medicine and surgery were then. The diseases that laid men low in those days—all across the continent—such as pneumonia and “graveyard” malarial fevers, sometimes called miasmatic fevers wiped out 80 percent of one Illinois county in the 1820s. Attacks from these fever diseases continued almost unabated for decades after. Her father had once told her that in each case where a doctor could not determine the cause of the disease, he invoked the word malaise.
In Chicago, cholera and small pox inspired the greatest dread. Even rumor of such pestilence roused officials to pay heed to her father and other medical men to make sanitary reforms, appropriate money for the neglected Board of Health, and to enact laws designed to reduce the incidence of fever diseases. No one else in the country believed Chicago a safe place for his wallet, but worse yet, no one on the continent believed it a place for one’s good health. No sewage system worthy of the name existed before 1851.
Garbage and refuse continued to be tossed willy-nilly into the Chicago River or allowed to accumulate in filthy alleyways. Drinking water came either from shallow wells or from the lakeshore. Her father had himself succumbed to pneumonia during a ravaging epidemic.