Gracefully Insane (39 page)

I found the following entry in the August 15, 1960, edition of the patient-edited newsletter, “Around and About McLean”: “There’s a real treat in store for us next Tuesday night at the P.A.A. [Patient Activities Association] get-together at 7:30. Miss Joan Baez will entertain, singing ballads and accompanying herself on the guitar. This will be a return engagement for Miss Baez, who has played twice recently at Codman and once before at P.A.A.”

McLean’s current literature emphasizes that this isn’t your grandfather’s shock therapy: “Although ECT was introduced in the 1930s, its therapeutic use today is very different from what is portrayed as ‘shock treatment’ in books and films. ECT, in fact, is a safe, effective procedure provided by highly skilled professionals” and so on and so forth.

Actually, an excellent copy of the McLean portrait greets visitors when they enter the administration building. A patient attacked and damaged the original in the 1960s; restored, it now hangs in the office of Dr. Bruce Cohen, McLean’s president and psychiatrist-in-chief.

Warren was the first doctor to use ether successfully, but he did not discover it. A quarrel over credit for the discovery of ether’s anesthetic properties supposedly sent one of the claimants, Dr. Charles Jackson, to McLean. The story goes as follows: Jackson believed that his former lodger, an entrepreneur named William Morton, had stolen the anesthesia idea from him. Legend has it that when Jackson happened across Morton’s gravestone in Mount Auburn Cemetery and saw him credited as the “inventor and revealer” of anesthesia, he suffered a mental breakdown and was sent to McLean. “Jackson’s face no longer looked human, and the cries he uttered were unlike human cries,” one writer recounted. “The creature that cried and thrashed with its limbs in Mount Auburn Cemetery was unchained madness.” Actor Julius Tannen
(continued from page 38)
depicted Jackson dancing maniacally on Morton’s grave in the 1944 movie account of the ether controversy,
The Great Moment.
Because anesthesia was one of the world’s most important medical discoveries, the ether wars rage on. Two medical historians, Dr. Richard Patterson and Richard Wolfe, now argue that Jackson
was
unfairly denied credit for pioneering the use of ether as anesthesia and that it was Morton’s supporters who spread false accounts of Jackson’s dipsomania and lunacy. In the twentieth century, Jackson’s family jawboned McLean’s Franklin Wood into furnishing them with a summary of their forebear’s medical record. (Jackson had conducted some ether experiments at McLean to see if the gas calmed severely disturbed patients. Those experiments failed, but after his breakdown, the grateful trustees allowed him to live as a “guest” at the asylum for seven years until his death in 1880.) Even though Jackson’s death certificate cited the cause of death as “insanity,” Wood reported that Jackson had suffered a stroke, followed by aphasia, causing loss of speech and memory. “There is nothing in this record that would indicate in any way that Dr. Jackson was intemperate in the use of alcohol or that he was a ‘raving maniac,’” Wood wrote.

Sheldon lives in the collective memory of medical history as the theoretician of “constitutional medicine,” which argued that physique and posture provided clues to temperament and intelligence. It was thanks to Sheldon that incoming freshmen at Harvard and Yale were photographed nude from the 1940s through the early 1960s, by way of testing his since-discredited hypotheses.

Stanley had attempted to unionize the ranch workers on his New Mexico spread, to no avail. The McLean doctors record that “the patient had been so far interested in Socialism as to have given some money, surreptitiously, to the ‘Cause.’”

Krafft-Ebing was famous for his textbook
Psychopathia Sexualis;
both he and the equally prominent Magnan believed that insanity was brought on by hereditary degeneration, a detail probably unknown to Nettie.

Riven Rock
is the name of a 1998 novel by T. Coraghessan Boyle that dramatizes Stanley’s and Katharine’s plight during his lengthy California exile.