First and foremost, he wanted to know why it was that an assistant district attorney had taken a seat right next to the coroner. A district attorney meant that this wasn’t a simple meeting to clear up a few questions. A district attorney meant blood in the water. In the company of police and prosecutors, the words person or persons unknown were as much as a red flag to a bull. The coroner’s mind-set would be pivotal, and the coroner was an unknown.
Jack studied the man. He had very little to distinguish him beyond a mane of gray hair and an unruly beard. Together they hid almost every inch of skin, while pince-nez spectacles wedged between two lowering brows caught the sun and made it difficult to see the man’s eyes. Jack imagined, very briefly, a barber advancing on that wealth of hair with weapons at the ready.
Hawthorn introduced everyone in the room, starting with two stout, expensively dressed men, the physician Manderston, who had done the postmortem, and someone called Frank Heath, apparently Mrs. Campbell’s physician prior to Sophie. Manderston seemed half-asleep, while Heath was agitated and jumpy. He had nodded at Anna and Sophie with obvious reluctance and something far short of the courtesy professionals owed each other.
Then Hawthorn turned to his left. “And District Attorney Mayo has joined us.”
Conrad Belmont sat up straighter. “This is a simple inquiry, as I understood it. Why is the district attorney here, if I may inquire?”
“I asked him to join us,” the coroner said shortly. “And now I’d like to get started. This is a sad business before us, one that requires some examination before it can be settled. We’ll work backward, I think. Dr. Anna Savard, you were the last physician to treat the deceased. Can you provide some information on your background and training?”
Some of the nervous energy that Anna had been unable to completely govern seemed to disappear, now that the questioning had begun. She simply provided information: what and where and with whom she had studied, her exams and qualifications, hospitals and clinics where she had seen patients, her experiences as a surgeon, organizations that she belonged to, and finally she mentioned her time studying in Vienna, Berlin, and Birmingham, England.
Jack had heard all of this before, and so he concentrated on the faces of the men around the table. There was little to make out about the coroner’s mind-set, hidden as he was behind his beard. The clerks—three of them, Jack counted—wore identical blank expressions as they scratched away. John Mayo gave away only slightly more, but Heath’s and Manderston’s feelings about what they were hearing were plain to see. When Anna mentioned working in England with a Dr. Tait, Manderston sat up straight and pointed at her.
“Your name was familiar to me, and now I realize why. You tried to poach one of my patients. A Mrs. Drexel. You tried to get her to leave my care.”
Jack saw Anna’s brow crease in confusion, and then just as suddenly, clear. “You are mistaken,” she said calmly, but two red spots had appeared on her cheeks. “Dr. Tait referred Mr. Drexel to me, and he wrote asking me to consult on his wife’s case. I replied. I never heard from him again, and I never approached him or his wife. In fact, I suspected that letter to be one of Mr. Comstock’s falsifications designed to entrap doctors.”
Jack wondered if Anna and Sophie would be relieved to know for sure that the referral had not been one of Comstock’s tricks. Instead it had just been a man’s reluctance to let a woman physician treat his wife.
Manderston sat back, arms crossed on his chest. “So you say.”
Hawthorn rapped on the table with his fist. “Dr. Manderston, please remember why we are here. Whatever issues you have to discuss with Dr. Savard must wait. Now Dr. Savard Verhoeven, may we hear from you?”
Sophie’s description of her training and experience met with even less approval from Manderston and Heath, who had begun to shift in their chairs. A question from the coroner changed all that.
“Dr. Heath, you were Mrs. Campbell’s physician of record until recently. How long had you been treating her?”
“She was my patient from the time of her marriage when she first came to this city. I last saw her in February, when she was near to term on her last pregnancy.”
“But you didn’t attend that birth.”
“No,” Heath said. “I had to be out of town. Miss Savard—Mrs. Verhoeven agreed to go in my place.”
“Dr. Verhoeven,” Conrad corrected, his voice carrying sharply.
“Dr. Verhoeven,” Heath echoed with a sour twist of his mouth. “Dr. Verhoeven attended the birth. That was all it was supposed to be. I didn’t think she’d have the gall to steal my patient.”
Belmont said, “Dr. Heath is making unsubstantiated accusations. Unless he has evidence that Mrs. Campbell was somehow coerced into seeing Dr. Verhoeven?”
Heath frowned, but had nothing to say.
“As I thought,” Belmont said. “If I may ask a question, Dr. Heath. How did you find Mrs. Campbell when you last saw her?”
He seemed ready for this question. “She was healthy, no sign or indication of trouble.”
“And her state of mind?”
Now he did look surprised, as if he had never heard such a question before. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“It’s not an unreasonable question,” the coroner said.
“She seemed herself. Nothing out of the ordinary.”
Jack sat back and folded his hands across his midsection, ready to sit through what promised to be one of Belmont’s infamous wandering explorations, designed, it seemed to Jack, to extract information by artful prodding. Within a half hour he had Heath tripping over his own tongue, admitting that he didn’t know about Mrs. Campbell’s state of mind because he hadn’t asked her, and he hadn’t asked her because, well, he said, turning a hand, palm up, what difference did it make?
After a short silence the coroner turned to Sophie. “Dr. Verhoeven, you delivered Mrs. Campbell in March, as I understand it.”
Sophie agreed that she had.
“Did you see her after she gave birth in March?”
“Yes, I called on her two days later to make sure she was healing, and then she came to see me in my office some weeks ago.”
All heads came up abruptly.
“I don’t think I had that information,” said Hawthorn. “She came to see you in your office, for what reason?”
“She asked me to examine her.”
“Aha. And what were your findings?”
“She was a healthy young woman about a month postpartum. That is, she was physically healthy, but very melancholy and even despairing.”
“As is common after any birth,” Heath interjected.
“Not to this degree,” Sophie contradicted him.
Heath gave a dismissive wave of the hand.
The coroner said, “Did she give a reason for her state of mind?”
Sophie didn’t hesitate. “She believed herself to be with child, and she was terrified about another pregnancy so soon.”
“She said that exactly?”
“No,” Sophie said. “As I remember her words, she said, ‘I just can’t have another baby so soon, it will be the end of me.’”
Jack saw no surprise or even concern on the faces around the table, and for the first time got a sense of what Anna and Sophie meant when they talked about men’s willful blindness.
“Mrs. Campbell was with child.” The coroner was asking for confirmation of what he believed to be true, but Sophie was not so easily led.
“She may have been,” she said. “But it was too early to tell by examination.”
“She had an active imagination.” Heath ignored the sharp look that Sophie sent him, and Hawthorn seemed not to notice.
He said, “Did you operate on Mrs. Campbell, Dr. Savard?”
Conrad cleared his throat.
“Pardon me,” the coroner said. “Dr
. Verhoeven.”
“I did not,” Sophie said.
“Did she ask you for the name of someone who would perform an abortion?”
“She did not.”
“Did you volunteer names of such persons?”
“That is a leading question,” Conrad said. “Please rephrase, or I will instruct my client not to answer.”
“I’ll let it go for the moment. Dr. Savard, you did operate on Mrs. Campbell.”
“Yesterday,” Anna said. “Yes.”
“And previous to that?”
“I never saw Mrs. Campbell previous to her arrival at the New Amsterdam yesterday.”
“You’ve read Dr. Manderston’s report. Do you agree with his finding on the cause of death?”
Jack was glad that they had finally come to the heart of the matter. It seemed Anna was glad too, because she spoke in the calm, matter-of-fact voice she had used in her laboratory classroom. “I found Dr. Manderston’s observations to be similar to my own, but I don’t agree with his conclusion that an operation was carried out by person or persons unknown.”
Mayo leaned forward, his long nose twitching as if he had caught the scent of something interesting. “The operation was legal?”
“Don’t answer that until and unless District Attorney Mayo clarifies what he means by ‘operation,’” Belmont said.
Mayo inclined his head. “Would you say that Mrs. Campbell underwent an abortion?”
“I couldn’t say that with certainty,” Anna said. “It’s unclear to me whether she was pregnant in the first place.”
“You wouldn’t recognize pregnancy at this early stage upon opening the reproductive organs?”
“If the uterus had been intact, certainly. But the damage was extensive, and at least a day old.”
“Then let’s say it this way. Did she undergo an attempted abortion?”
Anna looked the man directly in the eye. “In my professional opinion, the procedure in question was meant to interrupt a pregnancy. If there was a pregnancy. When undertaken for that specific purpose, such operations are illegal. As you well know.”
Mayo was running a finger back and forth over the tabletop as if he had found something etched into the wood that he needed to understand. To Jack it looked like a mannerism developed to distract and disorient a witness, but he had misread Anna if he thought she was so easily unsettled.
Mayo said, “You have never performed this operation yourself?”
“Do not answer that,” Belmont said, sourly. “It’s not relevant to the case at hand.”
“I agree,” Hawthorn said. And: “Dr. Savard, on what point exactly do you disagree with Dr. Manderston’s findings?”
“I believe Dr. Manderston was incorrect when he wrote ‘person or persons unknown.’”
Mayo widened his eyes in mock distress. “You know who operated on Mrs. Campbell? If you had said so to start with, we wouldn’t be sitting here.”
Anna looked at Manderston for a long moment, then spoke to him directly. “In my opinion, Mrs. Campbell’s injuries were self-inflicted.”
Heath gave a startled laugh. “That is utterly ridiculous.”
“I would say patently impossible,” Manderston volunteered.
The coroner raised a brow in Manderston’s direction. “As I understand it, many women perform such operations on themselves, and often with success.”
“Not in this case,” said Manderston. “This was no simple scraping gone bad. The damage was considerable and the pain would have stopped her.”
The coroner looked at Anna. “Dr. Savard?”
“The pain might well stop a man,” Anna agreed.
Sophie said, “Desperate women are capable of even worse.”
Heath snorted openly. “In your extensive experience, I suppose you’ve seen worse?”
“I have,” Sophie said. “But then I work mostly with the poorest women, and desperation is the rule rather than the exception.” She looked from Manderston to Heath and back again. “You would have less experience of this kind at your hospital.”
“I was practicing medicine before you were born,” Heath said, his lip curling.
“Of course,” Sophie said. “But in the homes of the rich or in your own clinic.”
“Mrs. Campbell was my patient, if I may remind you.”
“And she left your care.”
“Because she knew I wouldn’t perform the operation she wanted.”
“Because she was terrified, and knew you didn’t care.”
“Coroner Hawthorn,” Heath barked. “I will not be spoken to this way by a—by a—” He coughed and sputtered as he pushed himself out of his chair.
“Sit down, Dr. Heath,” Hawthorn said. “We are almost finished here. I see no option but to convene a coroner’s jury to decide if this was an accidental suicide or a death following from malpractice.”
“Or both,” Manderston muttered loud enough to be heard throughout the room.
“We’ll meet on Monday,” Hawthorn went on, ignoring him.
Sophie rose immediately and leaned over to Anna, putting a hand on Jack’s shoulder to draw him into the conversation. “I must go down to Cap,” she said. “And get him home and into bed. Will you call later?”
“Not this evening,” Anna said. “You are in desperate need of rest, too, Sophie. Let’s let Conrad do his work, and we can talk over the weekend. We have until Monday to work out a strategy.”
They turned to look to the front of the room, where the attorneys and clerks and coroner were deep in conversation.
“What is that about, do you think?” Anna asked.
Jack said, “Belmont will be insisting on a second autopsy, and no doubt he’s arguing about the jurors. In other cases like these he would want as many doctors as he could get—”
He broke off, and Anna took up what he had been reluctant to say. “But not in our case. Not male physicians, at any rate, to sit in judgment of us.”
“Then who?” Sophie asked. “May we suggest names?”
“I think that you should,” Jack said. “Give them to Conrad as soon as possible, and let him steer things in that direction.”
“I’ll do that,” Anna said to Sophie. “You go on to Cap, and give him my love. Tell him Conrad has things well in hand.”
“I will,” Sophie said. “Though I don’t quite believe it myself.”
24
NEW YORK TIMES
Friday, May 25, 1883
EVENING EDITION
CORONER’S JURY TO EXAMINE TWO WOMEN PHYSICIANS IN CONNECTION WITH THE DEATH OF JANINE CAMPBELL
Just one day ago, while the rest of the city enjoyed the fireworks display that closed the ceremonies for the new East River Bridge, an autopsy was performed at the New Amsterdam Charity Hospital. The deceased, Mrs. Janine Campbell, a married lady of respectable family and mother of four small boys, died earlier yesterday. The postmortem examination revealed evidence of malpractice.
The physicians subpoenaed for questioning in connection with this case were Dr. Sophie Verhoeven, who attended Mrs. Campbell at the birth of her fourth son in March, and Dr. Anna Savard, the surgeon on duty when Mrs. Campbell arrived at the New Amsterdam yesterday.
The two lady physicians are distant cousins who grew up together on Waverly Place. Sophie Savard Verhoeven, a mulatto, was born in New Orleans and came to New York as an orphan in 1865. Both women are graduates of Woman’s Medical School and properly registered at Sanitary Headquarters.
Drs. Savard and Verhoeven met with Coroner Lorenzo Hawthorn at his offices this afternoon, accompanied by their attorney, Conrad Belmont, Esq., to answer questions arising from an autopsy performed by Dr. Donald Manderston of Women’s Hospital. Subsequent to that meeting Coroner Hawthorn announced he will convene a jury. Jurors will decide if Mrs. Campbell’s death can be attribu
ted to criminal malpractice on the part of one of the doctors who treated her. Such a finding would cause the doctors to be bound over to the grand jury to determine whether indictments are called for.
• • •
NEW YORK WORLD
Friday, May 25, 1883
EVENING EDITION
MULATTO BRIDE TO FACE CORONER’S JURY
As reported in the early morning edition of the Post, Sophie E. Savard, married this morning to Peter Verhoeven, Esq., the wealthy son of one of the city’s most noble families, has been instructed to appear before a coroner’s jury on Monday. The deceased is Mrs. Janine Campbell, a young woman who was in Dr. Savard Verhoeven’s care at the time of her death by malpractice. Also being questioned is Dr. Anna Savard, the last physician to treat the victim on the day of her death.
Accordingly Mr. and Mrs. Verhoeven have postponed their departure for Marseilles.
• • •
ANNA TOOK A cab to the Staten Island Ferry at the foot of Whitehall Street early Saturday morning, where Jack was waiting. He kissed her cheek and took her Gladstone bag and valise, bought tickets, and found seats quickly and without fuss. Anna, ill at ease and out of sorts after a poor night’s sleep, took exception. He seemed untouched by the events of the previous day, good and bad both. It set her teeth on edge.
When they had settled in for the journey Anna thought that he would raise the subject of the inquest, and was both relieved and irritated when he did not. Instead he talked of a letter from his mother and an ongoing rivalry between two sisters-in-law that had to do with what he called tomato gravy, Uncle Alfonso’s complaints about the utter lack of logic in the way English was spelled, and Oscar’s landlady’s dog who had produced six puppies in the middle of the night without uttering a sound. Or maybe, Jack suggested, Oscar’s consumption of beer had had something to do with his undisturbed sleep. Comforting, easy conversation that had nothing to do with death or postmortems or the Comstock Act. There was no talk of Sophie or Cap, and really, she reminded herself, hadn’t she just this morning wished to have a day she could spend with Jack alone?