Lifetime And Fortune

While it is clearly not my intention to review the history
of Chicago, it should not surprise the reader to find that a
considerable portion of the early material in the book relates to the city in which the author grew up. Few cities of this magnitude can boast of
at least fifteen miles of lake shoreline along with outstanding universities such as the University of Chicago, Northwestern, and the medical center of the University of Illinois. Chicagos medical past includes such pioneers of surgery as Nicholas Senn, Christian Fenger, and John B Murphy. In the 1920s, neurological surgery was developed in Chicago by Percival Bailey, Loyal Davis, and Paul C. Bucy. Dr. Davis, chief of surgery at Northwestern medical center, was for many years the editor-in-chief of Surgery Gynecology and Obstetrics, a premier journal of surgical literature in America.


Last but not least, the Chicago underworld was represented by John
Dillinger, Bugs Moran (whose gang was massacred on St. Valentines Day),
and the Mafia chief Alphonse Capone who, although responsible for
innumerable deaths, was finally imprisoned for income tax evasion in the late 1930s.