Two nineteenth-century women must find the courage to combat a celebrated surgeon’s syphilitic lies and obsessions.
2)The Antagonist
In this narrative nonfiction, Green Bay, Wisconsin’s “Great Imitator,” Dr. John R. Minahan, successfully hides his true self behind his narcissistic mask. He is the most powerful member of his nine-sibling clan that will dominate the city’s professional, business, and political arenas for sixty years. His goal is to achieve material success and manly peer recognition while crushing anyone who gets in his way. He is the attending physician and surgeon for the city’s only hospital, and he controls the doctors who can operate, creating many enemies. On the surface, he displays considerable charm and a keen sense of humor, attracting women. But behind closed doors, he physically and mentally abuses them. Since he rejects the suffocating autocracy of church and state, he easily lies and believes he is beyond the law. He thinks most women are immoral, and by default, they have contracted syphilis. He obsesses over that sexually transmitted disease, also called “The Great Imitator,” since it mimics other diseases and its bacterium is yet to be discovered. He uses those facts to destroy two women.
3)Breakout Title
The Great Imitator
The Great Imitator: A Powerful Surgeon, his Syphilitic Lies, and his Female Victims who Fought Back
The Crimes of Dr. Minahan
4)Comparable Titles in Narrative Nonfiction
As in Kate Moore’s two books, The Radium Girls (Sourcebooks, 2018) and The Woman They Could Not Silence (Sourcebooks, 2021), my book incites compassion and horror in the reader while blending historical, scientific, and personal female narratives. Each digs deep to expose wrongs that still resonate. That is evident based on the twenty-first-century memoirs, Know My Nameby Chanel Miller (Penguin Books, 2019) and A Beautiful, Terrible Thing by Jen Waite (Plume, 2017). Chanel’s sexual assault and Jen’s narcissistic abuse mirror those of my two nineteen-century female protagonists.
5)Hook Line:
The syphilis bacterium remains a mystery in 1893, and a powerful surgeon uses that fact to victimize two women, but as the science behind that disease advances, both women must find the courage to fight back.
6)Internal and Social Conflicts
There are two female protagonists in my book. The first is Mary Cenefelt, Dr. Minahan’s illiterate maid, and the second is Minahan’s college-educated wife, Mollie Bertles Minahan.
Internal conflicts for Minahan’s maid, Mary:
Mary deals with internal shame from two rapes by Minahan which she can’t report for fear of her life. She also deals with a resulting pregnancy and whether to abort her child or give it up for adoption. After Minahan savagely aborts Mary’s child without her consent her womb becomes infected, while Minahan claims her problem is syphilis. After struggling for four years, she finally fights back and takes Minahan to court three times.But all the while, she deals with many internal struggles as she must speak on the stand, time after time, about her humiliating rapes and heartbreaking abortion while suffering from PTSD symptoms.
Social conflict for Minahan’s maid, Mary:
In that era, even if Mary had initially reported her assaults, the following proof was required: she was a virgin, she immediately told a third party, evidence of physical injury, and evidence that she had resisted. Mary fears what the community, friends, and family will say when her claims come out in the press. As a virtuous woman, most believe Mary should have avoided rape in the first place, and she would be shunned when she gives her sexually explicit testimony demanded by the court. Those social conflicts anguish Mary at her three trials.
Internal conflict for Dr. J.R. Minahan’s wife, Mollie:
Mollie’s internal conflict revolves around some anonymous letters Minahan receives claiming she is “easy.” He believes she contracted syphilis prior to their marriage, but there is no way for Mollie to prove him wrong. Each of Mollie’s five pregnancies cause her constant internal turmoil. Three are miscarriages where Minahan claims she’s to blame because she is syphilitic. Even after delivering two healthy boys, Minahan continues to torment Mollie with his syphilitic accusations, impacting her physical and mental health. When she discovers he’s treating her boys with syphilitic drugs, Mollie finally realizes she must fight back to save not only herself but her sons.
Social Conflict for Dr. J.R. Minahan’s wife, Mollie:
As the narcissist’s victim, Mollie feels isolated, too ashamed and mortified to have her abusive experiences validated by friends, family, and society. Most women of that era consider divorce an “unmitigated evil,” a confession of failure. But when Mollie realizes divorce is the only option, even though her husband’s syphilitic claims about her will come out in the press, she financially can’t follow through. The feminist Victoria Woodhull said, “a woman’s ability to earn money is better protection against the tyranny and brutality of men than her ability to vote.” Before marrying Minahan, Mollie had that protection as a teacher, but only unmarried women could teach.
7)Settings – I have included a few from my book.
The cities of Green Bay and Fort Howard in 1893: The Civil War veterans had returned to the two thriving communities in 1865, the rail yards and wharves clogged with shingles and lumber. The buzz of steam and water-powered saws had been the sweet sound of money. Both cities had enjoyed a vibrant social life, much of it centered in their fourteen churches. But gin mills and “houses of ill-repute” had also flourished that catered to the sawyers, lumberjacks, and lake sailors. Three decades later, saloons and “disorderly houses,” where the much-feared “unmentionable diseases,” like syphilis, could be caught, continued to thrive. Green Bay had emerged as the region’s premier service and transportation hub, with a population of nearly 8000. Fort Howard conversely had developed into the Fox River Valley’s manufacturing center with hopes of surpassing Green Bay in size.
Dr. Minahan’s home: Heavy drapes encased the double-hung windows. Shelves of medical books lined one wall. A coal-burning stove ticked, its dirty scent stitched into the air. A candlestick telephone, a Green Bay status symbol, stood on a table beside a leather chair. Above it, a painting of a lion hung, its mane the color of Dr. Minahan’s hair.
Dr. Minahan’s private medical consultation room: Minahan’s private office’s focal point was an oak-framed leather chair one might find in a parlor. He would ask a female patient to sit down and lean back for a procedure like a pelvic examination. Her weight would extend the chair horizontally, and metal stirrups would pop out where he would secure her feet. A table held small instruments: a speculum, a probe, and a little curved knife to open boils. No others were required. Minahan conducted all patient surgeries at St. Vincent Hospital to provide a sterilized environment, anesthesia, and nursing care.
Washington Street: Horse manure and garbage scents oozed from puddles following a recent downpour. That weather had not stopped the Salvation Army. The women in their gray ribbon-tied bonnets and the men in their pillbox caps were out in force to wage war against hunger and sin. The idea that Minahan should be in their sights, not Mary, could have crossed her mind.
Mary’s hometown farming community of Cooperstown, Wisconsin, twenty-five miles south of Green Bay: The horses whinnied as Mary’s coach pulled up across from St. James Church. A tornado had recently torn off its roof, leaving the white steeple intact but destroying the house of worship’s interior. Even though it was under repair, the community still calculated the time of day by the tower’s bell that rang at noon and six. To Mary’s left was the Wanish General Store, owned by her brother-in-law, John, and her eldest sister, Catharine, where a surprise awaited around every corner. In the spice-scented store, the couple displayed provisions like flour, hardtack, and coffee on shelves. Candy was stored inside the glass counter at a youngster’s eye level. There were cigars for men and fabrics for women. There were lamps and utensils and even stoves for furnishing a kitchen. Near the front door, three farmers chewed tobacco by a spittoon. The store served as the local information center. After Sunday church service, families stocked up.
Minahan’s new home, the former St. Vincent Hospital: The large front room had been transformed into a Ladies Home Journal fashion plate. The front room’sArt Nouveau furnishings, purchased at Chicago’s Marshall Fields & Company, were upholstered in opulent velvet, tapestry, and leather fabrics. Massive pocket doors opened into a wallpapered dining room with a black walnut table. But the prime attraction was the host. Elegant in a black tailcoat, a white bib button-down shirt, wingtip collar, bow tie, and U-neck vest, Dr. Minahan welcomed Mollie, his pale-blue eyes zoning in on her.
The Minahan Building: The six-story Minahan Building, the finest and most imposing in the city, included eighty offices, first-floor retail space, two elevators, and an innovative “letter-shoot” where mail could be dropped from any floor and conveyed to a central ground-level box. Minahan had chosen the best grade of St. Louis pressed cream-color brick for the exterior, fancy-cut stone, and terra-cotta trimmings. Behind the 160-feet of sidewalk prism windows, Maes Haberdasher offered custom and ready-to-wear men’s clothing, and Kathryn O’Malley’s Beauty Parlor provided “hairdressing and removing moles, warts, and superfluous hair.” Additional first-floor tenants included a drug store, a buffet, and the weather bureau, which utilized the Minahan Building’s six-floor roof height for sending flag and light warnings to sailing crafts.
Mollie’s medical treatment center for rheumatism (although Minahan claims she has syphilis): The Mount Clemens, Michigan water, according to advertisements, cured rheumatism, syphilis, jaundice, obesity, polio, and liver problems. The city, aesthetically similar to Mackinac Island, had eleven bathhouses, luxurious hotels, and numerous boarding houses. Mollie checked into the Park Bath House and Hotel for treatment, considered the most exclusive, with spacious verandas, promenade halls, grand lobby, elevator, and private bathrooms. Each day an attendant pushed Mollie’s wheelchair from the hotel through a grand eighteen-foot-wide marble-floored hallway to the attached bathhouse. Mollie soaked in a dark, rotten-egg smelling tub of mineral water in her private bathing area, heated to about ninety-eight degrees. The water allegedly released toxins from her opened pores to soothe her pain. Afterward, she underwent a vigorous massage before being wrapped in heated towels and sent to the hotel’s solarium to relax or nap. The treatment’s entire course took about twenty-one sessions over the same number of days.
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1) Story Statement
Two nineteenth-century women must find the courage to combat a celebrated surgeon’s syphilitic lies and obsessions.
2) The Antagonist
In this narrative nonfiction, Green Bay, Wisconsin’s “Great Imitator,” Dr. John R. Minahan, successfully hides his true self behind his narcissistic mask. He is the most powerful member of his nine-sibling clan that will dominate the city’s professional, business, and political arenas for sixty years. His goal is to achieve material success and manly peer recognition while crushing anyone who gets in his way. He is the attending physician and surgeon for the city’s only hospital, and he controls the doctors who can operate, creating many enemies. On the surface, he displays considerable charm and a keen sense of humor, attracting women. But behind closed doors, he physically and mentally abuses them. Since he rejects the suffocating autocracy of church and state, he easily lies and believes he is beyond the law. He thinks most women are immoral, and by default, they have contracted syphilis. He obsesses over that sexually transmitted disease, also called “The Great Imitator,” since it mimics other diseases and its bacterium is yet to be discovered. He uses those facts to destroy two women.
3) Breakout Title
The Great Imitator
The Great Imitator: A Powerful Surgeon, his Syphilitic Lies, and his Female Victims who Fought Back
The Crimes of Dr. Minahan
4) Comparable Titles in Narrative Nonfiction
As in Kate Moore’s two books, The Radium Girls (Sourcebooks, 2018) and The Woman They Could Not Silence (Sourcebooks, 2021), my book incites compassion and horror in the reader while blending historical, scientific, and personal female narratives. Each digs deep to expose wrongs that still resonate. That is evident based on the twenty-first-century memoirs, Know My Name by Chanel Miller (Penguin Books, 2019) and A Beautiful, Terrible Thing by Jen Waite (Plume, 2017). Chanel’s sexual assault and Jen’s narcissistic abuse mirror those of my two nineteen-century female protagonists.
5) Hook Line:
The syphilis bacterium remains a mystery in 1893, and a powerful surgeon uses that fact to victimize two women, but as the science behind that disease advances, both women must find the courage to fight back.
6) Internal and Social Conflicts
There are two female protagonists in my book. The first is Mary Cenefelt, Dr. Minahan’s illiterate maid, and the second is Minahan’s college-educated wife, Mollie Bertles Minahan.
Internal conflicts for Minahan’s maid, Mary:
Mary deals with internal shame from two rapes by Minahan which she can’t report for fear of her life. She also deals with a resulting pregnancy and whether to abort her child or give it up for adoption. After Minahan savagely aborts Mary’s child without her consent her womb becomes infected, while Minahan claims her problem is syphilis. After struggling for four years, she finally fights back and takes Minahan to court three times. But all the while, she deals with many internal struggles as she must speak on the stand, time after time, about her humiliating rapes and heartbreaking abortion while suffering from PTSD symptoms.
Social conflict for Minahan’s maid, Mary:
In that era, even if Mary had initially reported her assaults, the following proof was required: she was a virgin, she immediately told a third party, evidence of physical injury, and evidence that she had resisted. Mary fears what the community, friends, and family will say when her claims come out in the press. As a virtuous woman, most believe Mary should have avoided rape in the first place, and she would be shunned when she gives her sexually explicit testimony demanded by the court. Those social conflicts anguish Mary at her three trials.
Internal conflict for Dr. J.R. Minahan’s wife, Mollie:
Mollie’s internal conflict revolves around some anonymous letters Minahan receives claiming she is “easy.” He believes she contracted syphilis prior to their marriage, but there is no way for Mollie to prove him wrong. Each of Mollie’s five pregnancies cause her constant internal turmoil. Three are miscarriages where Minahan claims she’s to blame because she is syphilitic. Even after delivering two healthy boys, Minahan continues to torment Mollie with his syphilitic accusations, impacting her physical and mental health. When she discovers he’s treating her boys with syphilitic drugs, Mollie finally realizes she must fight back to save not only herself but her sons.
Social Conflict for Dr. J.R. Minahan’s wife, Mollie:
As the narcissist’s victim, Mollie feels isolated, too ashamed and mortified to have her abusive experiences validated by friends, family, and society. Most women of that era consider divorce an “unmitigated evil,” a confession of failure. But when Mollie realizes divorce is the only option, even though her husband’s syphilitic claims about her will come out in the press, she financially can’t follow through. The feminist Victoria Woodhull said, “a woman’s ability to earn money is better protection against the tyranny and brutality of men than her ability to vote.” Before marrying Minahan, Mollie had that protection as a teacher, but only unmarried women could teach.
7) Settings – I have included a few from my book.
The cities of Green Bay and Fort Howard in 1893: The Civil War veterans had returned to the two thriving communities in 1865, the rail yards and wharves clogged with shingles and lumber. The buzz of steam and water-powered saws had been the sweet sound of money. Both cities had enjoyed a vibrant social life, much of it centered in their fourteen churches. But gin mills and “houses of ill-repute” had also flourished that catered to the sawyers, lumberjacks, and lake sailors. Three decades later, saloons and “disorderly houses,” where the much-feared “unmentionable diseases,” like syphilis, could be caught, continued to thrive. Green Bay had emerged as the region’s premier service and transportation hub, with a population of nearly 8000. Fort Howard conversely had developed into the Fox River Valley’s manufacturing center with hopes of surpassing Green Bay in size.
Dr. Minahan’s home: Heavy drapes encased the double-hung windows. Shelves of medical books lined one wall. A coal-burning stove ticked, its dirty scent stitched into the air. A candlestick telephone, a Green Bay status symbol, stood on a table beside a leather chair. Above it, a painting of a lion hung, its mane the color of Dr. Minahan’s hair.
Dr. Minahan’s private medical consultation room: Minahan’s private office’s focal point was an oak-framed leather chair one might find in a parlor. He would ask a female patient to sit down and lean back for a procedure like a pelvic examination. Her weight would extend the chair horizontally, and metal stirrups would pop out where he would secure her feet. A table held small instruments: a speculum, a probe, and a little curved knife to open boils. No others were required. Minahan conducted all patient surgeries at St. Vincent Hospital to provide a sterilized environment, anesthesia, and nursing care.
Washington Street: Horse manure and garbage scents oozed from puddles following a recent downpour. That weather had not stopped the Salvation Army. The women in their gray ribbon-tied bonnets and the men in their pillbox caps were out in force to wage war against hunger and sin. The idea that Minahan should be in their sights, not Mary, could have crossed her mind.
Mary’s hometown farming community of Cooperstown, Wisconsin, twenty-five miles south of Green Bay: The horses whinnied as Mary’s coach pulled up across from St. James Church. A tornado had recently torn off its roof, leaving the white steeple intact but destroying the house of worship’s interior. Even though it was under repair, the community still calculated the time of day by the tower’s bell that rang at noon and six. To Mary’s left was the Wanish General Store, owned by her brother-in-law, John, and her eldest sister, Catharine, where a surprise awaited around every corner. In the spice-scented store, the couple displayed provisions like flour, hardtack, and coffee on shelves. Candy was stored inside the glass counter at a youngster’s eye level. There were cigars for men and fabrics for women. There were lamps and utensils and even stoves for furnishing a kitchen. Near the front door, three farmers chewed tobacco by a spittoon. The store served as the local information center. After Sunday church service, families stocked up.
Minahan’s new home, the former St. Vincent Hospital: The large front room had been transformed into a Ladies Home Journal fashion plate. The front room’s Art Nouveau furnishings, purchased at Chicago’s Marshall Fields & Company, were upholstered in opulent velvet, tapestry, and leather fabrics. Massive pocket doors opened into a wallpapered dining room with a black walnut table. But the prime attraction was the host. Elegant in a black tailcoat, a white bib button-down shirt, wingtip collar, bow tie, and U-neck vest, Dr. Minahan welcomed Mollie, his pale-blue eyes zoning in on her.
The Minahan Building: The six-story Minahan Building, the finest and most imposing in the city, included eighty offices, first-floor retail space, two elevators, and an innovative “letter-shoot” where mail could be dropped from any floor and conveyed to a central ground-level box. Minahan had chosen the best grade of St. Louis pressed cream-color brick for the exterior, fancy-cut stone, and terra-cotta trimmings. Behind the 160-feet of sidewalk prism windows, Maes Haberdasher offered custom and ready-to-wear men’s clothing, and Kathryn O’Malley’s Beauty Parlor provided “hairdressing and removing moles, warts, and superfluous hair.” Additional first-floor tenants included a drug store, a buffet, and the weather bureau, which utilized the Minahan Building’s six-floor roof height for sending flag and light warnings to sailing crafts.
Mollie’s medical treatment center for rheumatism (although Minahan claims she has syphilis): The Mount Clemens, Michigan water, according to advertisements, cured rheumatism, syphilis, jaundice, obesity, polio, and liver problems. The city, aesthetically similar to Mackinac Island, had eleven bathhouses, luxurious hotels, and numerous boarding houses. Mollie checked into the Park Bath House and Hotel for treatment, considered the most exclusive, with spacious verandas, promenade halls, grand lobby, elevator, and private bathrooms. Each day an attendant pushed Mollie’s wheelchair from the hotel through a grand eighteen-foot-wide marble-floored hallway to the attached bathhouse. Mollie soaked in a dark, rotten-egg smelling tub of mineral water in her private bathing area, heated to about ninety-eight degrees. The water allegedly released toxins from her opened pores to soothe her pain. Afterward, she underwent a vigorous massage before being wrapped in heated towels and sent to the hotel’s solarium to relax or nap. The treatment’s entire course took about twenty-one sessions over the same number of days.