Honora Kelly, later renamed Jane Toppan by her adoptive parents, endured a childhood so bizarre and tragic that it would be equally at home in either a Dickens novel or an episode of Black Mirror. She lost her mother as a child, so her father surrendered his daughters to the Boston Female Asylum before sewing his own eyelids shut. Toppan, a bratty but brilliant student turned effervescent nurse, was nicknamed "Jolly Jane" by her patients. Her only shortcoming as a nurse? All of her patients died.
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Nobody's perfect at their job, but some people don't even come close.
Yes, of course Jane was poisoning her patients. Her childhood memories looked like the video from The Ring. The odds against her turning out normal were astronomical. And no, she didn't kill them quickly. Jane toyed with her victims, administering alternating doses of morphine and atropine -- medicine's most potent downer and upper, respectively. She delighted in delivering her victims as close to death's door as possible via morphine, only to yank them back to life with a stimulating shot of atropine. Then, with the victim teetering between life and death, Jane joined them in bed, embraced them, and sometimes even stroked their hair as she injected the lethal dose.
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