Jacob Cotter survives the Civil War to finish Yale Medical School and confront two more battlefronts-one in Connecticut as a medical student and one in Texas as a surgeon. In 1868 Cotter is financially solvent for Yale from banking two-year's of bounty hunter money. Post-Civil War medicine is exciting. Cotter experiences advances in anesthesia and antisepsis enabling surgery and medicine truly saving lives. He finds pseudoscience-phrenology-laugh able. However, he must confront his siblings who disowned him after his father was killed in the war alongside him in 1864. His brother and sister want him dead.Surviving domestic violence and with Yale behind him, Cotter finds private practice in Endura Texas with a colleague being also under fire trying to establish the first hospital in the area. Cotter leaves one frying pan for another facing a ruthless land baron extorting and killing opposing citizenry. He also finds his father's murderer part of the lethal lot. Dr. Cotter now needs to combine his stethoscope and his sixguns to define human benevolence until he develops a sense of spirituality and a sense of family.