Free The Resurrectionist by Matthew Guinn Page A

real?”
    Janice shrugs. “There is scattered evidence in the record of Skull and Crossbones surfacing in some years. It’s probably no more than an old boys’ club now, but the South Carolinian mentioned members trying to suppress Abraham Flexner’s report on the school at the beginning of the century.”
    â€œFrom what I know about Flexner, I can’t say I blame them.”
    â€œReally? His report to the Carnegie Foundation was epochal. He transformed medical education in this country.” Her eyes seem to light up talking about the man. “Abraham Flexner had a historian’s soul.”
    Jacob stares down at the grisly photograph. “God knows what he would have made of this.”
    Janice almost smiles. “I am an archivist, Doctor Thacker, which means I am a completist. What good is the historical record if it is not complete?”
    â€œI don’t see any good coming out of any of this, Janice. In fact, an incomplete record sounds pretty good right now.” Jacob sighs. “But I should have a file on it. Can I get copies of the photographs?”
    â€œYou have to sign them out.”
    â€œBut I’m not taking them anywhere.”
    Janice merely closes her eyes and shakes her head. With her eyes still closed, she reaches out to a wooden box on the table, pulls a form from it, and pushes it across the polished surface to Jacob.
    â€œI don’t remember this from last time.”
    â€œThe policy has changed.”
    Jacob looks at the form. It is nearly a page long, a triplicate carbon with copies beneath the original in canary and pink. “The whole thing?”
    â€œThe whole thing.”
    â€œThis could take a minute,” he says, and pulls his Waterman pen from his jacket pocket.
    â€œSome things do,” she says.
    She waits patiently until the form is completed, then takes it and the file folders from him, back toward her desk, moving soundlessly over the carpet.
    When he picks up the first of the ledgers he can see the need for the cotton gloves. It is bound in calfskin but fragile-looking, its pages yellowed and brittle with age. He tries to hold it carefully—not an easy task for a doctor, used to handling books like the Physician’s Desk Reference and the Guide to Internal Medicine as mechanics do Chilton manuals.
    He turns the pages slowly, following the faded ink from month to month. The script is delicate and precise, perhaps the hand of F. A. Johnston himself. Some of the expenditures are truly strange. A column labeled Poultry for most years, a $300 debit in 1857 for a gelding. Another column for Anat. specimens , the amounts paid out varying enough to make Jacob think the school sometimes found itself bargain cadavers one way or another. But most of it is pedestrian stuff, what he would find in this year’s report: maintenance costs, materia medica and laboratory supplies, columns of tuition dollars brought in and salaries paid out. On the page for August he finds the purchase of Nemo Johnston, slave: the notation of an $800 loan from the Bank of Columbia, $700 of it marked down to a Robert Drake, the remaining $100 listed under Sundries. In the next year’s ledger, Nemo merited a column of his own, with his own expenses. Eighty-five dollars for a house in Rosedale, $20 per quarter for “necessities.” Telling indeed: beginning with 1858, there is no expense column for cadavers.
    Jacob rubs his eyes as he scans through the stacked, open ledgers. It seems to him that the school’s finances fluctuated wildly in the old days, a year or two of bounty followed by quarters that showed the school nearly going under. He sees that the school began to pay Nemo Johnston a small salary in 1861, well before emancipation, and that the salary rose every year. He can imagine why. Slave or not, they needed to keep him happy. And quiet.
    He flips the pages back and forth, scanning each column again. He pauses over a page in