In the late 1870s, in the shadow of the Civil War, there was an incident in the small town of Henshaw, Missouri. A great tragedy occurred, and at the center of it all was the unexpected variable, the uncommon physician, one Victor Freestone.

Scholarship has not been kind to him. Until the last twenty years, when renewed interest in the topic led to reassessment of older material, most historians covering him worked off of Howard Dixon's distorted version of events from his 1902 book, Unnatural Phenomena in the Midwest, which paint the ordeal as a lurid revenge plot. The public are more familiar with the various pastiches of him in the 1940s and 50s, ones that whittle him down to a deranged surgeon or a serial amputator - a Negro causing problems by stepping out of line. Neither interpretation is accurate or fair. Our academies are more than willing to acknowledge wizardry, divine intervention, or inhuman engineering, but we turn to frightened superstition when something fantastic comes from a non-European origin. And there are connections that have been neglected by earlier historians. No one was willing to consider his connections to The Protean Experiments, or an earlier tragedy in the same town, or the unusual feats ascribed to his parents.

This website is a collection of materials of primary sources. Letters. Journals. Newspapers. Assembled into an order to provide a proper narrative.

Someone has to remember what happened properly.