Jack the Ripper: The Hand of a Woman

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 maintained an interest in the surgical operations her husband performed in his private practice. She may have observed closely as he carried out the many abdominal operations that his specialisation demanded; the hysterectomy, noting how he divided the abdomen, lifted the viscera, the intestines, and then located and cut away the uterus. At other times he might have shown her how he managed complications affecting the fallopian tubes, and then again how diseased ovaries should be excised. Perhaps she watched him abort a baby, and learned what became of the small foetus after it was taken from its mother’s body. Such images would doubtless come back to haunt her in the years ahead.
    It might have been at such times that Lizzie learned aspects of surgical technique. And what she learned she would always remember: which of the razor-sharp knives was best suited for the task at hand, where the incisions were to be made, how to locate a specific organ, and remove it from the body.
    Before the wedding took place, Dr John Williams, like his father-in -law before him, also seized his opportunity. With the prospect of the Hughes family fortune beckoning, there was nothing to stop him from returning to the city that poverty and the cessation of financial support from his mother had forced him to leave.
    The South Wales Chronicle of 3 April 1872 reported: “The neighbourhood of Landore, Morriston and the country round about was the scene on Tuesday last of almost unparalleled animation and excitement, consequent on the marriage of Miss M.E.A. Hughes, only child of Richard Hughes, Esq., of Ynystawe, the respected managing partner of The Landore Steel and Tinplate Works, to John Williams, Esq., M.D., who for some years has been practising in this town with distinguished success as a physician and has recently been elected under the circumstances of a particularly gratifying character to the honourable position of a place on the staff of University College Hospital, London.”
    So was it love, cold-blooded ambition or perhaps his domineering mother, which persuaded Dr John Williams, at thirty-one years of age, to marry a wealthy young heiress almost ten years his junior and less than two months after her twenty-second birthday? Or was it that he needed a wife to inspire confidence in his female patients? Conceivably it was something of each: Ruth Evans noted Dr Williams’s comment about his new bride, as they were about to leave for their honeymoon in Europe, that, “Lizzie looked better than ever in travelling dress”.
    Of the four brothers in the Williams household, only John married and so only he would be likely to father a legitimate child. When Eleanor Williams told her son that he was expected to father a child he undoubtedly assumed that he would. There was no reason of which he was aware why he and his healthy young bride should not soon become proud parents, in accordance with his mother’s wishes.
    Richard Hughes’s generosity towards his daughter now also extended to his son-in-law. After making several trips to view suitable properties in London with Lizzie’s father in tow, they eventually settled on a large Georgian townhouse in the fashionable West End: 28 Harley Street, one of the most famous streets in Britain and much favoured by the medical profession. Hughes paid the princely sum of £250 for the residue of the lease which ended eleven years later, and the fixtures, furniture and effects for a further £693.18. This was at a time when a cottage in Wales, suitable for a labourer in one of the many tinplate works in and around Swansea, could be bought for as little as £20.
    On 23 July 1872, John and Lizzie Williams left Swansea’s polluted industrial valley and moved into their fine London home. The young doctor was on the threshold of what would become a remarkable and successful medical career; Lizzie, at just twenty-two years of age, must have looked forward with considerable excitement to what the