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Jane had grown up self-reliant, as her mother had died of a brain tumor when Jane was only six, and her father, William Francis, left Chicago for Europe in a fit of self-doubt, wishing to learn far more. Death and pestilence in Chicago had frustrated all his efforts. When he returned, Jane, living with her aunt, was four years older. By now she’d been estranged from her father, which suited his needs, as he was a workaholic and as she was a painful reminder of Charlotte, her mother.
William had returned with plans for a serviceable system of sewers to rid Chicago of pestilence. He’d studied with Dr.
Xavier Bichat, the man who’d demonstrated that tissues and not organs were the seat of disease. A decisive step in the localized pathology movement. The concept of disease invading the solid parts of the body implied a revolution in medical theory and practice. But even now, 1893, many a medical professor clung to the mad notion that blood was the carrier as well as the starting point of disease—thus a lot of old fools calling themselves doctors still insisted on leeches and bleeding a patient to “remove bad blood.” When Jane had gone through medical school, she’d been taught that to combat disease, she must “treat the blood” either withdrawing it through venesection, or by purifying the
“life’s blood” with medicine.
Thanks to the new pathology, what men like Bichat and her father insisted upon challenged this classical, centuries-upon-centuries held notion. The French medical community also began the meaningful application of statistical techniques to clinical data. The value of postmortem records, vital statistical studies, and using clinical tests in the diagnosis of illness had been embraced by forward-thinking men and women. Her father’s return to Chicago to reacquaint himself with Jane was also to acquaint the established medical community with Bichat’s methods. With the acceptance of the localized concept of disease, and with modern surgery just coming into being in the second half of the century, surgeons began doing far more than setting fractures, treating CITY FOR RANSOM
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flesh wounds, abscesses, bladder stones, and hernias, as the idea of surgery as a last resort faded.
As far as Jane Francis-Tewes was concerned, this new belief in Bichat’s localized pathology of disease had, even more than the discovery of anesthesia, marked the turning point of modern surgery. It initiated the kind of surgery the now famous Dr. Christian Fenger performed daily at Cook County Hospital, where he also took charge of the dissection of the murdered and the victims of questionable deaths for the CPD as chief coroner. Working through Kohler, Jane as Tewes, had made it her business to get something on Dr.
Fenger, to blackmail him, so as to get a close look at the reports on the first two victims and a firsthand look at the next victim—who happened to be the Purvis boy.
She felt badly at having gotten Fenger’s cooperation in the manner she had. He’d come to see Dr. Tewes on Nathan Kohler’s urging, but even more out of desperation. He’d come with a brain full of racing circuitry and stress and recurrent headache and depression, and Dr. Tewes being who he is, could not be expected to disregard an opportunity to leverage a small favor from the infamous Dr. Fenger. One word of Fenger’s level of intense mental stress, and Cook County Hospital would put him out to pasture, as might the CPD.
It was not a thing she’d relished doing, as she respected and admired her one-time instructor in surgery, a brilliant man and a wonderful mentor, and her father’s friend. He’d been one of the few instructors she’d had this side of the At-lantic who had trained her as he might a man. Few men were as ahead of their time as Dr. Christian Fenger, and he so reminded her of her father, and Jane believed that his fine reputation brought more thousands to the operating table than did the use of ether and chloroform. She hated using him, but there seemed no other choice.
A noise came from without. Gabby had come home, and she was talking to someone. Jane Francis cursed under her breath. How often must she tell Gabby she simply must tell 88
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her friends that her doctor father can’t abide anyone in his clinic or his house as he had a morbid fear of the microbial world?
She peeked out to the next room, her forceps still in hand, to see Inspector Ransom standing in her parlor. “Jesus!” she gasped. The man stood nervously rocking on his heels, looking about, as Gabrielle explained, “But Father is not here.” Jane looked for some out. The bedroom window, but that was a drop into the bushes and neighbors already kept a prying eye on Tewes. Then she saw an apron hanging on the back of the door. She snatched it down and tied it on, and in an instant, stepped into the parlor and asked, “Can I be of any service? I’m the doctor’s caretaker, maid, fix-it person, and sister, Jane. Can I help you, sir?” “I’m looking for your . . . ahhh brother.” The bull shoved his weight from side to side. “I have a bone to pick with him.”
“I see. I’m sorry, sir, but he is not at home.”
“Then I’ll wait.”
“Aren’t you Inspector Ransom, sir?”
“Oh, oh, yes . . . Ransom. Sorry . . . thought I’d said so.”
He held up his inspector’s badge—a gold-plated shield.
“And I am Miss Ayers.”
“Really? Jane Erye like in the book?”
“No . . . no . . . A-Y-E-R-S . . . quite different. Jane Francis ahhh . . . Ayres.”
“So is there a convenient place for me to wait?”
“Outside perhaps . . .”
“Outside?”
Merielle-Polly is right about him, she thought. He is a bit thick-headed. “Yes, please, outside. We are two women in the house, and doctor would not be pleased if he returned to find us alone with you, sir. Only polite to wait outside.”
“Not in the study?”
“Sorry.”
“Not in the doctor’s office?”
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“No, sir, now please . . . outside. There’s an ample porch, a swing.”
Gabrielle erupted in a laugh she stifled.
Ransom frowned, placed on his bowler hat, gave a fleeting glance at the spinster sister, turned, and stepped through the door. From the door, Miss Jane Francis ‘Ayres’ shouted behind him, “I do hope it is not too important. If so, you might find doctor at Cook County. And if not there, Hanrahan’s on Archer near—” “I know the place.” Ransom tipped his hat at the woman.
Odd, he thought, how her eyes and those of young Gabby—who’d introduced herself as Dr. Tewes’s daughter—had looked so much alike, aunt and niece, but then rumor had it the child was adopted for usury by Tewes. Perhaps Jane was the actual mother?
The afternoon shadows were lengthening, and in the distance, a thick roiling cascade of clouds threatened to invade from the lake to Chicago’s downtown, the army of storm clouds forming like a regiment over skyscrapers in the distance, no doubt worrisome for the fairgoers and merchants.
Nature had no business cutting into profits, Ransom imagined on the lips of every Chicago merchant.
He stepped off the porch and into a thin, surprisingly chilly silver downpour, having decided to go in search of Dr.
Tewes at Hanrahan’s. Not likely he was at Cook County.
Most likely he told people that he was on staff at Cook County along with most all the luminaries of the medical profession in Chicago, and the thought made him laugh.
Imagine Tewes alongside a man like Christian Fenger.
“Hanrahan’s . . . far more likely.” The South Levee was the den of lowlife in the city. As a cop, he knew every section of town and its character, and the Levee maintained the deadliest reputation, even above Hair Trigger block. Called by many the Old Tenderloin district, the South Levee had become firmly entrenched twenty-odd years before any thought of a Columbian Exposition. Now there existed two South Levee districts—a new extension of the old reaching 90