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 worth 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-laughable. 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.
Cotter graduates Yale and 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. Jacob Cotter realizes the need to combine his stethoscope and his six guns is a reality of his medical practice.