Free Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman by John Morris

exercised restraint over his daughter. John Williams’s mother, the eldest of twelve children herself, was used to being obeyed. John and Lizzie loved their parents unconditionally, and both parents adored their children, influenced them greatly, and were eager to do what they thought was best for them; this undoubtedly included advising them on suitable marriage partners.
    Richard Hughes would most certainly have recognised the characteristic of strong single-mindedness he shared with John Williams, the man who was now courting his daughter. On 13 January 1872, Hughes proposed Dr John Williams as a member of his Talbot Lodge of the United Grand Lodge of the Ancient Free and Accepted Masons of England in Swansea (number 1323), and if the impressive wedding ceremony he would eventually put on for the couple on 2 April 1872 was anything to go by, he clearly ignored the almost ten-year age difference and approved of his new son-in-law.
    During the courtship period of John Williams and Lizzie Hughes’s it is probable that she visited him in his Craddock Street practice where she could have observed him during surgical operations . He might have shown her how to operate, isolate and remove a diseased organ swiftly, though there is no actual evidence that he did.
    Speed of operating was essential, prior to the development of effective anaesthetics, because a patient undergoing surgery would experience the most unimaginable pain, no matter what method might be employed in the effort to alleviate it. The finest surgeons were measured by the speed at which they could operate and remove a diseased organ or infected limb quickly, rather than those who took more time to ensure perfection in their work. Pain was said to be God’s punishment for the wicked, and a purefying trial for the good. For a woman in labour, it was ‘a spiritual experience to be welcomed, since it would transform her into a self-sacrificing mother’. The practitioner, upon entering the operating room, often brought with him two bottles of whisky; one for the patient to ease the pain and, when that failed, the other for the doctor to help him bear his patient’s terrible screams.
    It was not until the mid-1880s that anaesthetic began to become commonly used in surgical operations. The early pioneer Humphrey Davy (1778-1829) used nitrous oxide (laughing gas), a gaseous compound which patients inhaled to relieve the pain of an operation, but its effects were unreliable. Later, an American dentist, William Morton (1819-68), used ether, based on sulphuric acid and alcohol, but it was flammable, with a tendency to irritate the lungs. When, in 1853, Queen Victoria was given chloroform, developed by Professor James Simpson, for the birth of Prince Leopold in 1853 and again for the birth of Princess Beatrice in 1857, the practice of using anaesthetic became more popular, though the procedure involved some risk because the patient could easily die from an overdose.
    It was only after the development of effective anaesthetics that the speed of surgery became less important than the quality of the surgical operation itself, though it was not until the early twentieth century that anaesthesia became more truly reliable and safer.
    However, the doctors to whom John Williams had bound himself for five years from 1859, Dr Michael and Dr Davies, were of the old, pre-anaesthesia school, and the techniques they taught him were based on speed, rather than the slower and more meticulous surgery that he would come to learn and practice later.
    But, human nature being what it is, it seems likely that if and when Dr John Williams demonstrated his surgical skills to his wife, his intention was to impress her by the speed at which he could perform a procedure, as much as by the skilful nature of his work.
    In 1872, after Dr Williams’s appointment as assistant obstetric physician at University College Hospital (this time with pay), and during the years that followed, his wife may have