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' Contemporary Commuhity Health Series

To ”Tom” and “Andy”

84 URBAN E METCALF

him that Rodbird thought troublesome, and wished to get him
in the basement, and I believe spoke to the officers on the sub-
ject, but not succeeding in the first instance he had the artifice to
empty another patient’ s night bowl in Coates' shoes, and
shewed that to Dr. Munro and Mr. Wallett, who had him re-
moved to the basement: 0 what a scoundrell the best proof I can
give of the existing abuses is the continuance of such servants in
the establishment for any length of time, Rodbird has been there
six years. William Stockley, Samuel Breeze, and U. Kantlin three
patients in Rodbird’s gallery had their flannel waistcoats and
draws withheld from them during last winter, whether it rests
with Mr. Humby the steward, or Rodbird the keeper, I cannot
pretend to say, be that as it may, an investigation is loudly called
for.

Blackburn, keeper of the third gallery.

This man possesses an improper control over the officers, and
no doubt stands high in the estimation of some governors, I will
endeavour to unmask him. In the Old House there was a pa-
tient of the name of Fowler, who one morning was put in the
bath by Blackburn, who ordered a patient then bathing, to hold
him down, he did so, and the consequence was the death of
Fowler, and though this was known to the then officers it was
hushed up; shameful! Likewise a patient named Popplestone, I
believe he came from Cornwall, during a severe winter was so
long chained in his room that the iron round his leg literally eat
into his flesh, in this dreadful state he lay unattended, until
Blackburn became accidentally acquainted with his situation,
the lock was clogged with dirt so that he Blackburn, was obliged
to borrow an awl of Truelock to clear it; a short time afterwards
Popplestone’s leg rotted off and he died. in the house, this
should have been sufficient to provoke an investigation, but it
was hushed up; shameful neglect!

New House

The case of Kemp, a patient now in the house, a man of good
education, and who has lived in respectable circumstances, who

The Interior of Bethlehem Hospital 85

has not only the misfortune of being disordered, but of being
poor; on his admittance he was put in Blackbum’s gallery, but
not suiting him, he contrived to get him removed into the base-
ment by the following means: he (Blackburn) complained to Dr.
Tothill (Kemp's physician,) that he of a night made so much
noise that he disturbed the other patients and prevented their
recovery and got other patients to corroborate his assertion, for
this he was removed into the basement, but I know if he had
money, or been a good cleaner all would have been well, and he
might have remained there, as there are patients who make far
more noise now in his gallery; the villian without any provoca-
tion had the cruelty to say to Kemp, had I a dog like you I would
hang him. Another patient named Harris, for the trifling offence
of wanting to remain in his room a little longer one morning
than usual, was dragged by Blackburn, assisted by Allen, the
basement keeper, from No. 18, to Blackbum’s room, and there
beaten by them unmercifully; when he came out his head was
streaming with blood, and Allen in his civil way wished him
good morning.

The case of Morris; this man had some pills to take, which he
contrived to secrete in his waistcoat pocket, this Blackburn dis-
covered, and by the assistance of Allen, they got him to his room
and there beat him so dreadfully for ten minutes as to leave him
totally incapable of moving for some time, Rodbird was looking
out to give them notice of the approach of any of the officers;
they are three villians. A man by the name of Baccus, nearly
eighty years of age, was this summer admitted into the house;
one very hot day he had laid down in the green yard, another
patient named Lloyd, very much disordered, trod on the middle
of his body purposely, this Blackburn the keeper encouraged by
laughing, and Lloyd would have repeated it, but something
diverted his attention: Baccus is since dead.

Coles, a patient of Blackburn's, one day, for refusing to take
his physic, was by Blackburn and Rodbird beat and dashed

violently against the wall several times, in the presence of the

steward, though from the general tenor of this man's conduct it
is probable a little persuasion would have been sufficient to
induce him to take the medicine quietly, Coles is since put upon
the long list, and is now in the upper gallery.

86 URBANE METCALF

This keeper has held his situation seven years and from his
attention to his business out of the hospital and the care of his
birds and his cage making, and his being so much out, his place
is ahnost a sinecure; as to his being out that cannot be without
the steward’s permission which is too often the case, I will give
one instance, this summer the day that Allen the basement
keeper was married to a woman keeper, Blackburn was out the
whole day, which was Tuesday, the following Thursday after the
Committee had left sitting; he again asked the steward to let him
go out, but was refused on account of his having five new
patients in that day; the next day he went out; I will allow that
his gallery is kept very clean, but how is it done? by rousing his
patients by five o'clock in a morning, to get all in order that he
may attend to his private concerns, which are by far greater
objects of solicitude with him than his public duties.

Dowie, keeper of the second gallery.

He has a patient named Clarke, not long since being very
much disordered, it was thought necessary to handcuff him;
this man was in the habit of picking grass, putting it in his
pocket; one day in the green yard, Dowie in my hearing told a
patient of the name of Locke if he saw him do amiss to give him
a blow or two, Clarke moving to another part of the yard
avoided Lock’s notice, who seeing another patient act as he
thought improperly gave him several violent blows.

Some time ago, Dowie had a patient by trade a tailor who
earned money by working for the servants, this man not finding
the house allowance sufficient paid Dowie 5s. per week, to let
him have as much as he could eat, this would have been fair if
Dowie had disposed of what belonged to himself, but instead of
that he robbed the other patients of part of their allowance; what
honesty!

Mr. Sutherland, a patient under Dowie’s care was occasional-
ly visited by his sister, they were too poor to see Dowie, and the
consequence was the following act of inhumanity; one Monday
morning while conversing with her brother she fainted (I be-
lieve from privation,) we who were in the room afforded her

- every assistance to recover her, Dowie came in and very rudely

The Interior of Bethlehem Hospital 87

said ”I don't know why you come here at all, you never bring
anything, I dare say you have come without your breakfast,”
the manner of expressing these words was sufficient to mark
the brutality of his disposition.

Allen and Goose, basement keepers.

From being in the upper gallery, I was necessarily precluded
from obtaining a knowledge of the abuses practised by the
keepers of the basement, but from the ready assistance Allen
gave Blackburn and others in ill-using their patients, it is fair to
conclude that his own fared no better; Goose by nature is un-
qualified for maltreating the patients personally, but he posses-
ses all the appetites of a tyrant, and what nature has denied him
in bodily strength he makes up by petty artifice to discomfort
the patients under his charge, and rewards himself by pilfering.

And I believe that there is not more humanity or regularity
exercised in the criminal part; if I had spent a month in it I
should have known more, but this I know, that two of the
keeper, Hooper and Webster have been in Allen's room for two
hours together at cards, and little Goose's employment at the
time was to look out that none of the officers surprised them,
and of course Wooten the other keeper was in the criminal part
by himself.

With respect to the green yard, I humbly think, it never, when
the patients are in it, ought to be without a keeper, which very
frequently is the case; there is a number of loose stones which
any patient may throw at each other, the danger of their remain-
ing is obvious, where there are so many persons who are dis-
ordered.

It is well known to those of the establishment that I had an
opportunity part of my time of seeing the women's green yard,
and I know that there are great irregularities and neglect in the
management of the women's side, if elegant dressing and keep-
ing gay company are qualifications for a matron of Bethlehem
Hospital, the present one is well qualified.

There is now in Bethlehem Hospital a young lady named
Clarke, (daughter of Alderman Clarke, Chamberlain of the City
of London, and treasurer of Bethlehem,) who is a private patient to

88 URBANE METCALF

the matron; from my heart I declare I am not actuated or in-
fluenced by malice, I disclaim all intentions of wounding the
feelings of the worthy Alderman, but I do think that a greater
abuse cannot exist than the permission extended to the servants
of the institution, to take in private patients, setting aside the
injustice of making a public establishment subservient to private
interest; they cannot if they are occupied by the care of private
persons devote their time to the exercise of those duties they are
hired to discharge. During the last summer, Miss Clarke and the
matron went to Worthing, and were absent for a fortnight; Miss
Clarke's liberty is indisputable, but surely the matron ought not
to absent herself, at any time, it is a gross violation of her duty,
and calls for the severest reproof if not a total dismissal.

Mr. Wallett, the resident apothecary, whose pleasant manners
we before noticed, frequently has it in his power to exercise the
natural humanity of his disposition; his kindness never sleeps,
or if it should dose now and then, it is too sensative to resist the
touch of gold: The following circumstance speaks for itself; three
patients came into the criminal part during the last summer, one
of them the French gentleman who cut the catholic priest; this
person was fortunately too rich to be thought mischievous, and
on that account was permitted to walk in the back garden for
some time every afternoon with a private attendant; the crime
for which this patient was tried, was an attempt to murder,
surely the person to whose charge he was committed should
have felt it his duty to watch him more narrowly, it ought to
have been remembered that the perturbed state of mind which
doubtless this patient was in, might have occasioned serious
mischief, but every fear vanishes before gold, gold makes the
coward brave, and madman sane, or if Mr. Wallett has so far
forgotten his experience in these matters as to suffer such a
patient to use his own discretion may we not say, ”surely the
affairs of the world are at a fine pass when the fool is desired to
take care of the madman.”

Truelock having discovered some of the malpractices of
Simons, Blackburn, and Dowie, servants of the establishment,
obtained their permission to leave the house when he pleased, I
saw him myself in Hadland’s shop, corner of Fetter Lane, Hol-

L born, and supposed he was entirely discharged, Truelock told

The Interior of Bethlehem Hospital 89

me Simmons let him out because he, Simmons, sold the meat
and coals which should have been appropriated to the use of
the patients; this honest servant has been 16 years in the estab-
lishment: Blackburn was fearful of exposure with respect to his
treatment of poor Popplestone, whose case has already been
detailed: Dowie in taking in some stores at the old establish-
ment, made free with a bundle of flannel Waistcoats, one dozen
in number; Truelock perceived him in the act, and Dowie to
bribe him into silence promised to wink at his leaving the house
when he had the key. These honest men still hold their situa-
tions!

Mr. Vickery the cutter, has it in his power to defraud the
patients in many instances, and he never suffers an opportunity
to pass without gratifying his disposition to pilfering, this cutter
cuts down the allowances to some purpose, for instance, there
are two hundred patients in the house, and supposing he re-
strains his theft to one ounce per head, in the meat he takes 36 lb.
per week as his own perquisites, bread in proportion; these
perquisites he sells and manages to live comfortably by depriv-
ing the patients of part of the food intended for their suste-
nance.

Vinegar is allowed by the establishment, but excepting Rod-
bird's gallery, I believe it is sold by the keepers for their benefit,
and many other comforts which are intended for the patients,
by the villainy of these wretches is appropriated to their own
use. If the patients received the governors allowances in quality
and quantity, there situation would be considerably mended,
and there would be no cause of complaint.

In each of the galleries the keepers pick out one of their pa-
tients whose strength fits him for the situation of bully, and
when it is not convenient to be at the patients themselves, they
cause him to do it, this is a great abuse.

Another existing evil is the prevention of patients friends
from seeing them, when it is their pleasure to say he is so much
disordered that they cannot possibly bring him to the visiting
room, there is now in Dowie’s gallery one Owen, whose mother
has informed me that she was not permitted to see him during
16 weeks, from no other cause than to gratify the cruel disposi-
tion of the keeper. I have suffered confinement in the establish-

90 URBANE METCALF

ment, and am fully acquainted with the practices of the keepers,
and advise such persons as have friends confined to insist on
seeing them, if they leave any thing it is a matter of chance
whether it is given them, the porter takes what he pleases in the
first instance, and the keeper the remainder in the last, but the
patient invariably comes off with short commons. It is impos-
sible under the existing circumstances that the governors
committee should arrive at the knowledge of the various abuses
practised by casual examinations of persons whom they meet in
different parts of the building, the steward and officers have
men on each gallery whom they bribe, for the purpose of deceiv-
ing those gentlemen who benevolently use their exertions to
discover the malpractices carried on in our public institutions, it
is only by sheer accident that a solitary case now and then comes
before the public, which by threatning an exposure, procures an
amelioration in the condition of those persons confined through
indisposition.

It would extend far beyond the limits of this little work to
pourtray the villainies practised by the Jacks in office, bribery is
common to them all; cruelty is common to them all; villainy is
common to them all; in short every thing is common but virtue,
which is so uncommon they take care to lock it up as a rarity.
Like other establishments this appears to be erected too much
for the purpose of making lucrative places; the apartments
appropriated to the use of the officers are elegant in the ex-
treme, every thing which luxury can covet is at their command;
they eat, they fatten, while the poor creatures under their
charge are left to all the miseries which confinement and priva-
tion can inflict; good God; in England, in this country, so famed
for its munificence, surely the miseries of the wretched inmates
of this humane institution are totally unknown to the exalted
characters who support it, they should not sleep till the abuses
are altogether removed; their supiness is the villain’s security,
their activity alone can prevent the new establishment falling a
prey to the miseries and cruelties which disgraced Old Beth-
lehem.

About the end of August last I mentioned most of those
abuses to the physicians, apothecary, and steward, who treated
them with indifference and neglect, and to three gentlemen

The Interior of Bethlehem Hospital 91

who visited the house on the first Thursday in September, who I
rather think belonged to the Committee of the House of Com-
mons, I attempted to acquaint them with the cruelties and
abuses practised, Mr Humby was with them, who said I was a
troublesome discontented person, but Mr. Humby knew I
attempted to speak the truth, to which he is no friend, as it
would probably soon un-steward him if spoken to his superiors;
for this attempt I was confined to my room by Dr. Tothi1l’s
orders till the 20th of October, 1818, the day I was discharged,
during that time they refused my friends admittance to see me,
though they applied several times; I was at a loss to discover by
whose authority Mr. Humby acted; I know his cruel and in-
human disposition too well to suppose he would wait for any
when he had his victim within his power; I fully appreciate the
kindness of my friends in coming to visit me in my confine-
ment, they are people who earn their livelihood by labour, and if
Mr. Humby from experience could form an idea of ”honest in-
dustry” he surely would not have caused them to lose day after
day when on their first visit he might have informed them the
time I should be liberated, for I am too well acquainted with this
”knot of villains” to suppose their conduct in confining me was
not a stretch of deliberated cruelty. The institution in itself is an
honor to humanity, and purged of the villains who oppress its
unfortunate inmates would reflect a lustre on the individuals
who support it by their fortunes. Our country has been famed
throughout the world for the splendour of her charitable institu-
tions, remedy their abuses her fame will be just; at present,
however laudable the intentions of its supporters may be, the
unfortunate who are compelled to claim their protection finds
virtuous establishments prostituted to vicious purposes by
wretches whose least crime is a total abuse of humanity.

1838 and 1840'-Eh

A Narrative of the Treatment Experienced by a
Gentleman, During a State of Mental
Derangement; Designed to Explain the Causes and
the Nature of Insanity, and to Expose the
Injudicious Conduct Pursued Towards Many
Unfortunate Sufierers Under That Calamity,

by John Perceval

John Perceval (1803-1876) was the fifth son of six sons and six daugh-
ters in an English family of some distinction. His father was prime
minister until 1812 when he was assassinated in the House of Com-
mons by a madman. Perceval’s early career was in the military. He
served for a time in Portugal without seeing battle. In 1830 he re-
signed his commission and entered Oxford. Soon after, he traveled to
Scotland to witness a particular evangelical revival known as the
”Row Heresy,” whose members sought communion with God
through submission to spontaneous impulse. They often spoke in
spontaneous gibberish that they believed to be a mystically received
language of the Pelew Islands. Perceval passed some days on the
fringes of this group and began himself yielding up to impulse, but
his behavior was even too spontaneous for his fellow Row evangeli-
cals. He left for Dublin, a spiritually charged man. There he yielded to

the enticements of a prostitute and eventually underwent treatment

for syphilis. Shortly thereafter, spontaneous impulses began to take
over. Perceval saw visions and heard voices that told him to do
strange, often contradictory things. His behavior was erratic enough
that a ”lunatic doctor” was called in. The doctor had him strapped
down to his bed, hand and foot, and gave him broth and medicine. A
few days later Perceval’s brother arrived and took him back to En-
gland, to a private madhouse near Bristol run by a Dr. Fox. Perceval
was an inmate of that madhouse during the most severe phase of his
madness, from January 1831 to May 1832, and then was taken to Mr.
C. N ewington’s private madhouse in Sussex where he remained until
early 1834. Soon after his release, he married and in 1835 went to Paris
where he began writing about his experiences as a patient, publishing

92

A Narrative of the Treatment Experienced by a Gentleman 93

two volumes in 1838 and 1840 of A Narrative of the Treatment Experienced
by a Gentleman, During a State of Mental Derangement.‘

A few pages into the first volume Perceval apologizes for the ”ir-
regularity and abruptness of style, and change of manner,” whereby a
loosely chronological narrative is interspersed with analysis, opinion,
and tirade. The second volume is further complicated by a seemingly
random selection of diary entries and letters. The disorganization
may have to do in part with Perceval’s difficulty in recalling this
obviously painful material, with simple impatience and lack of edit-
ing, and perhaps in part—as one authority believes—with the result
of a schizophrenic process? Nonetheless, the disorganization is to be
found only on a larger scale; on the smaller scale, sentences and
paragraphs almost always possess a coherence of thought and clarity
of style.

The purpose of the Narrative seems to be very clearly stated in a
preface to the second volume: to refonn the laws regarding the
alleged mad, the management of asylums, and the treatment of pa-
tients by their relatives.3 To achieve its purpose, as a work of protest
and part of a campaign for reform, Perceval’s Narrative operates on
the principle of empathy. Early in volume I, the author asks readers to
put themselves in the place of the mad person: ”In the name of
humanity, then, in the name of modesty, in the name of wisdom, I
intreat you to place yourselves in the position of those whose suffer-
ings I describe.” With unusual candor, Perceval proceeds to describe
his experiences as a madman, his point of view, his often naive and

‘Additional biographical information is taken from Bateson’s introduction to Percev-
al’s Narrative and MacAlpine and Hunter, ”]ohn Thomas Perceval.”

2Macalpine and Hunter, ”]ohn Thomas Perceval,” p. 394.

3Taking these statements at face value we must conclude that Perceval’s Narrative is
above all a serious work of protest, another call for reform. The intensity and persis-
tence of Perceval’s post-patient career as a reformer ought to reinforce that conception.
In 1838 Perceval worked for the freedom of Richard Paternoster, patient in a Kensington
madhouse, later author of the protest work, The Madhouse System (1841). In 1839 he
tried, without success, to introduce reform legislation in Parliament, and began his
twenty-year letter-writing campaign for reform. In 1841 he became interested in the
case of Dr. Pearce, a patient in the criminal section of Bethlehem, and ten years later
published Dr. Pearce’s Poems. By a Prisoner in Bethlehem to raise funds for the ensurance
of Dr. Pearce’s comfort in Bethlehem. In 1844 and 1855 Perceval wrote and published
two short accounts of the unjust treatment of patients. In 1845 he and a group of
acquaintances founded the Alleged Lunatic’s Friend Society; he became honorary
secretary in the following year. In 1859 and 1860 he and other members of the society
appeared before an investigative parliamentary committee, where he described himself
as ”the attomey-general of all Her Majesty's madmen.” See ibid., p. 394.

Contents

1436

Acknowledgments
Introduction
The Book of Margery Kempe

1677, 1678 The Diary of Christoph Haizmann

1714

1739

1774

1816
1818

The Life of the Reverend Mr. George Trosse: Written by Himself,
and Published Posthumously According to His Order in 1714

The London-Citizen Exceedingly Injured; Or, A British Inquisi-
tion Display’d, in an Account of the LInparallel’d Case of a
Citizen of London, Bookseller to the Late Queen, Who Was in a
Most Unjust and Arbitrary Manner Sent on the 23rd of March
Last, 1738, by One Robert Wightman, a Mere Stranger, to a
Private Madhouse, by Alexander Cruden

One More Proof of the Iniquitous Abuse of Private Madhouses,
by Samuel Bruckshaw

Memoir of the Early Life of William Cowper, Esq.
The Interior of Bethlehem Hospital, by Urbane Metcalf

1838 and 1840 A Narrative of the Treatment Experienced by a Gentle-

1849

1868

man, During a State of Mental Derangement; Designed to
Explain the Causes and the Nature of Insanity, and to Expose
the Injudicious Conduct Pursued Towards Many Unfortunate
Sufferers Under That Calamity, by John Perceval

Five Months in the New-York State Lunatic Asylum, Anony-
mous

The Prisoner's Hidden Life, or Insane Asylums Unveiled: As
Demonstrated by the Report of the Investigating Committee of

39

57

74

92

108

94 JOHN PERCEVAL

confused awareness, and his own errors in response to his keepers,
as well as their errors in response to him.

Without digressing from a mad perspective, he describes in careful
detail the physical abuse that took place in Dr. Fox's madhouse:
beatings, excessive restraints, forced cold baths, and forced medical
treatment. Without leaving a mad perspective, he also depicts the
constant psychological abuse, the treatment of himself ”as if I were a
piece of furniture, an image of wood, incapable of desire or will as
well as judgment.” He was treated with a complete disregard for his
social status, seldom introduced to people, needlessly confused by
the absence of simple explanation and direction, spoken to
condescendingly, humiliated by lack of attention to his ordinary daily
needs, never consulted in decisions affecting him, and given no
warning before medical treatment and no explanation after.

In the preface to volume II, Perceval lists as his third purpose for
writing the book ”to teach the wretched and affectionate relations of a
deranged person, what may be his necessities, and how to conduct
themselves toward him, so that they may avoid the errors which were
unfortunately committed by the author’ s own family.” In actuality
one final result of the work, one other intention, may have been the
destructive exposure of his family. In spite of his occasional insistence
on love and serious concern for the welfare of his family, Perceval
often bitterly condemns them. Not only does he repeat his reasons for
feeling ill-treated by his mother and family, he even publishes and
comments on personal letters between himself and his mother and
other family members. The Narrative becomes at times a blunt
weapon in a family feud, wielded by Perceval to embarrass and
humiliate his mother and the rest of his family.

The full title of Perceval’s Narrative suggests still another purpose:
”to explain the causes and the nature of insanity.” Completely inter-
woven with descriptions of Perceval’s external experiences and his
contact with other persons, places, and situations, the book gives an
immensely lucid description of the ephemeral dreamlike current of
his abnonnal perceptions. Perceval must have felt his work was also
important as a rare documentary look into the interior of a mad per-
son's mind, a contribution to early psychiatry. Especially in volume II,
where the narrative is much more digressive, there are frequent gra-
tuitous self-analyses that seem wholly irrelevant to the purpose of
protest.

At times his self-analyses and theories seem a little absurd, but
other times he often strikingly anticipates modern psychiatry. At one

A Narrative of the Treatment Experienced by a Gentleman 95

point Perceval describes in unmistakable terms what Freud would
later call ”the, psychopathology of everyday life," and in the same
passage he anticipates Freud's theory of the unconscious:

Now all or nearly all the phenomena which I have narrated, strange as
they may appear, are to some degree or other familiar to all men. . . .
For instance, the power of a spirit to control the utterance is daily
experienced, though not remarked, in what we call a slip of the tongue.
. . . The degree of error is not the same, but the phenomenon is the
same—the organs of speech are made use of without the volition or
rather intention of the person speaking. This is remarkable, because it
would prove the residence in the temple of the body, of two distinct
powers, or agents, or wills.

Approximately one hundred and twenty years after its original
publication, Perceval’s Narrative was republished as a ”psychiatric
autobiography,” valued for its wealth of clear, careful psychological
detail, and edited and introduced by Gregory Bateson. Bateson has
left out much of the protest material in his edition and in an introduc-
tion presents an interesting interpretation of Perceval’s illness.
However, Bateson sometimes presents conjecture as if it were fact. He
suggests that the contradictory voices Perceval hears echo the contra-
dictory ”double-bind” communications of his parents during his child-
hood, while in reality we know nothing of Perceval’s childhood.

As the voices become quieter and less threatening during the
process of Perceval’s madness, Bateson says that a spontaneous
self-healing transition from ”double-bind” hallucination to ”freedom
of choice” hallucination is occurring. But certainly the process and
meaning of Perceval’s madness cannot be so easily circumscribed.
Like a dream, it can be analyzed by a variety of systems, yet it re-
mains only partly comprehensible, retaining an edge of the fantastic
and the mysterious.

The first two excerpts were taken from the narrative portions of
volume I where Perceval recounts his stay at Dr. Fox's private mad-
house near Bristol. Those excerpts describe hallucinations, distorted
perceptions and delusions, and the perverseness of madhouse treat-
ment. Perceval is confused and helpless. He has little sense of where
he is, who he is, or who his attendants and fellow patients are. In-
stead of helping to orient him the entire system of management
seems designed to confuse him even more and to humiliate him in
the bargain. The last excerpt is an effective tirade about the problems
and abuses that concerned him most. He was frequently struck by

96 JOHN PERCEVAL

attendants, but he was much more upset by being spoken to conde-
scendingly, as if he were a child.

WE TURNED to the left through some gates by a porter’ s lodge, a
few miles on the road to London, and we drove up to a door of a
house on the right hand side; we alighted, and I was ushered
into a small room on the left hand side of the passage, and
shortly after a young man came in, and then an old man, a very
old man. I do not recollect being introduced to either. My
brother went out and came in again. A man servant came and
occupied himself in taking away the portmanteaus, and in
laying the cloth for my dinner, he afterwards waited on me; He
had a black coat on, and my spirits told me his name was
ZACHARY GIBBS. All was in a mystery to me; only I understood
that on certain conditions I was to go home, which was all I
desired, whilst on certain other conditions I was to be left here.
The spirits told me this.

After the meat, a raspberry tartlet or two were brought to
table; they appeared to be very large, clean, and beautiful, and I
was told they were sent to me from heavenly places; that I was
to refuse them; that they were sent to try me; that if I refused
them I should be doing my duty, and my brother would take me
to E——. The same humour came on me to eat them all the
quicker, under the idea that they had given me nothing but
slops and physic for a fortnight or more, and now, if they are
such fools as to bring me up into heavenly places, I'll make the
best of it. My brother again went out, and I did not see him
enter any more; this pained me exceedingly; I thought he would
at least have bid me adieu; but the spirits told me that he was so
disgusted at seeing me eating the tarts, when he knew that if I
could only have refused one I should have been allowed by the
Almighty to return to my mother and family, and that I knew it,
that he had resolved to leave me without bidding adieu, and
had given me up into the hands of the Almighty. I imagine now
that his abrupt departure was preconcerted for fear of any
opposition on my part.

Well, my brother went, and I was left amongst strangers.

A Narrative of the Treatment Experienced by a Gentleman 97

If I had had any introduction to Dr. F. at least I was uncon-
scious of it. I was left to account for my position in that asylum,
for I was in Dr. F.’s asylum, to the working of my own, and be it
recollected, a lunatic imagination?

My spirits told me that I was in the house of an old friend of
my father's, where certain duties were expected of me, that I
knew what those duties were, but I pretended ignorance be-
cause I was afraid of the malice and persecution of the world in
performing them. I persisted nevertheless in inwardly maintain-
ing my ignorance and in divining what could be the meaning of
these words. What ensued the evening my brother went away I
do not recollect. I went to bed in a small, narrow, disconsolate
looking room with stuccoed floor, over part of which was a
carpet, bare white walls, a fire place and fire in the corner, on
the right hand side by the window: the window opposite the
door, the sill about the height of a man's waist, white window
blinds, a table, a wash-hand-stand and a few chairs: on the left
hand side, two beds, occupying more than one third the
breadth of the room, the one nearest the window with white
bed hangings on a slight iron frame, the other nearer the door,
made on the floor or very low: on this my attendant slept.

I was put to bed with my arms fastened. Either that night or
the next, the heavy leathern cases were taken off my arms, to
my great delight, and replaced by a straight waistcoat. The night
brought to me my usual torments, but I slept during part of it
sounder and better than before. In the morning I recollect
observing a book of manuscript prayers, and a prayer book or
bible bound in blue morocco; the impression on my feelings was
very dreary, and as if I had been imprisoned for a crime or for
debt; but I was occupied as usual with the agony of mind occa-
sioned by the incomprehensible commands, injunctions, in-
sinuations, threats, taunts, insults, sarcasms, and pathetic
appeals of the voices round me. Soon after I awoke, Zachary
Gibbs made his appearance with a basin of tea and some bread
and butter cut in small square pieces, about the size of those
prepared for the holy sacrament. He staid in my room by my
bed side, whilst I eat my breakfast.  

I was not now aware that I was lunatic, nor did I admit this
idea until the end of the year. I knew that I was prevented from
discharging my duties to my Creator and to mankind, by some

98 JOHN PERCEVAL

misunderstanding on my part; for which, on the authority of
my spiritual accusers, I considered that I was wilfully guilty;
racking my mind at the same time to divine their meaning. I
imagined now that I was placed in this new position as a place
of trial, that it might be seen whether I would persist in my
malignant, or cowardly, or sluggish disobedience to the last. I
imagined at the same time, that I was placed here ’’to be taught of
the spirits,” that is, (for they all spoke in different keys, tones,
and measures, imitating usually the voices of relations or
friends,) to learn what was the nature of each spirit that spoke to
me, whether a spirit of fun, of humour, of sincerity, of honesty,
of honour, of hypocrisy, of perfect obedience, or whatnot, and
to acquire knowledge to answer to the suggestions or argu-
ments of each, as they in turn addressed me, or to choose which
I would obey.

For instance, whilst eating my breakfast, different spirits
assailed me, trying me. One said, eat a piece of bread for my
sake, &c., &c.; another at the same time would say, refuse it for
my sake, or, refuse that piece for my sake and take that; others, in
like manner, would direct me to take or refuse my tea. I could
seldom refuse one, without disobeying the other; and to add to
my disturbance of mind, at these unusual phenomena, and at
the grief of mind—and at times alarm, I appeared to feel at
disobeying any, Zachary Gibbs stood by my bed-side observing
me in a new character. I understood that he was now no longer
Zachary Gibbs, but a spiritual body called HERMINET HERBERT, the
personification, in fact, of that spirit which had attended me in
Dublin, so intimately united with my Saviour; indeed in my
mind almost identified with Jesus.

I understood that as a seal to the infonnation I now received
from my spirits, he had put on a nankeen jacket, in order by
that colour to remind me of the dream, in which the Holy
Ghost, who was his mother, had appeared to me, promising
never to desert me. That he knew all my thoughts, and all I was
inspired to do, and could not be deceived. He had come to aid
me; but that at the same time, to prove my faith, that he would
act as if he were a man in plain circumstances, if he saw I
doubted.

Whilst therefore I was hesitating about each morsel I put into

A Narrative of the Treatment Experienced by a Gentleman 99

my mouth, he stood by, encouraging me to eat, and pressing me
to finish my breakfast, or he would leave me and come back,
saying, ”What! have’nt you done yet?” Persuaded that he knew
and commanded what was going on in my mind, I did not
believe his encouragements sincere; but intended also to try me.
I could not stand the ridicule I met with from my spirits, or to
which I exposed myself in reality: I forced my conscience,
wounding my spirits; teased, tormented, twitted, frightened, at
times I was made to dupe my spirits by humor. Thus, it
appeared to me that, whilst standing on the very threshold of
heaven, eternal hell yawned at my feet; through my stupidity
and impatience.

For about three mornings, my breakfast was brought to me in
this manner; after breakfast, I was dressed, and for two or three
days taken down to a small square parlour, with two windows
opposite the entrance, looking over some leads into a court,
thence over a garden to a flat country terminated by hills, about
two or three miles off. The windows had iron Venetian blinds
before them; looking through them, I saw snow on the leads; I
was still under the impression that this was the effect of a dismal
winter sent upon my country for my disobedience. There was a
round mirror between the windows; in the left-hand side of the
room, an iron fire-place with a fire in it. At the bottom of the
grate, over the arch under which the cinders fall, a hideous face
and mouth appeared moulded in the iron. At the end of the
year, when I examined it again, I saw my eyes also had been
deluded, unless the grate had been changed, for the ornament
was a basket of flowers, not a face. Besides this, there was a
horsehair sofa opposite the windows, against the wall; some
chairs and a table; also a table against the wall in the centre of
the room.

When I came into the room, there was a mild old rheumatic
man there, who had on a white apron. He was of low stature,
and in countenance resembling my father very strongly. My
spirits informed me it was my father, who had been raised from
the dead, in order, if possible, to assist in saving my soul. He
was also in a spiritual body. Every thing in short, had been done
to save me by quickening my affections, in order to overcome
my torpor, and ingratitude, and fear of man. The chairs in the

100 JOHN PERCEVAL

room, resembling those I had seen when a child in my father’ s
dining-room; the very trees in the distance, resembling others in
the prospect round my mother’ s house; almost all that I saw had
been brought by the Almighty power, or infinite goodness of the
Lord, and placed around me to quicken my feelings! If a man
can imagine realizing these ideas, in any degree, awake, he may
imagine what were my sufferings.

I asked now what I was to do. There was a newspaper lying
on the table, but I could not read it, because, before I had been
taken unwell in Dublin, when looking for guidance from the
Holy Spirit, I had been diverted from reading the papers, except
here and there, as if it were unwholesome to the mind. I
thought it ungrateful now to have recourse to them for amuse-
ment, and for that reason, or ”by that reply,” in the language of
my invisible companions, I decided my resolution, without
quite satisfying them.

What was I to do? I was told it was necessary to do something
”to keep my heart to my head, and my head to my heart,” to
prevent ”my going into a wrong state of mind,” phrases used to
me. I was told, at length, to ”waltz round the table, and see
what I should see.” I did that—nothing came of it. My atten-
dant requested me to be quiet; at last, my dinner was brought. I
had, if I recollect accurately, two dinners in this room—one was
of a kind of forced meat; the other had bacon with it: both meals
were very light, and although I did not refuse them, I recollect
feeling that I could have eaten something more substantial, and
also being nauseated at the forced meat  bacon, which, I
considered, could not be exactly wholesome for me.

My dinner in this room was served on a tray, with a napkin,
silver forks, decanters, &c. &c., and in these- respects, such as
was fitting for a gentleman.

Unfortunately, the second day I think after my entrance into
this asylum, having no books, no occupation, nothing to do but
to look out of window, or read the newspaper, I was again
excited by my spirits to waltz round the room; in doing this, or
at a future period, I caught the reflection of my countenance in
the mirror, I was shocked and stood still; my countenance
looked round and unmeaning: I cried to myself, ”Ichabod! my
glory has departed from me,” then I said to myself, what a

A Narrative of the Treatment Experienced by a Gentleman 101

hypocrite I look like! So far I was in a right state of mind; but the
next thought was, ”how shall I set about to destroy my hypoc-
risy;” then I became again lunatic. Then I resumed my Waltzing,
and being directed to do so, I took hold of my old attendant to
waltz with him; but at last, deeming that absurd, and finding
him refuse, the spirits said, ”then wrestle with him if you will.”
I asked him to wrestle; he refused. I understood this was to try
me if I was sincere; I seized him to force him to wrestle; he
became alarmed; an old patient in the asylum passing by the
door, hearing a struggle, entered, and assisted in putting me
into a straight waistcoat: I was forced down on the sofa. He
apologized to me for it many months after, saying it was in the
afternoon, when all the other assistants were out walking with
their respective patients.

Thus commenced my second ruin; and the history of an awful
course of sufferings and cruelties, which terminated in my re-
covery from my delusions about the beginning of the next year,
and was followed by my confinement as a madman, for nearly
two years in a sound state of mind; because I entered into dis-
pute with my family on their conduct to me, and the nature of
my treatment, determined to bring them to account at law, for
the warning of others, and to satisfy myexcited sense of wrong.
I can no longer, after arriving at this period of my trials, call Dr.
F—’s house by any other name than that it deserves, mad-house,
for to call that, or any like that, an asylum, is cruel mockery and
revolting duplicity!

I have already stated, that when I came to this house, I did
not know that I was insane. And my insanity appears to me to
have differed in one respect from that of many other patients;
that I was not actuated by impression or feeling, but misled by
audible inspiration, or visible, rather than sensible guidance of my
limbs. To the voices I heard, and to these guidances, I surren-
dered up my judgment, or what remained to me of judgment,
fearing that I should be disobeying the word of God, if I did not
do so. When I first came to Dr. F-—’s madhouse, my health was
somewhat restored, my mind somewhat confirmed; yet my
attendant infonned me at the close of the year, I looked so ill
when my brother left me, that he thought I could not live. I was
like a child in thought and will, so far as my feeling were

102 JOHN PERCEVAL

directed to those around me. I knew no malice, no vice. I im-
agined that they loved me, and were all deeply interested in the
salvation of my soul, and I imagined too that I loved them
dearly. Yet I wrestled with the keepers, and offered to do so with
others, and struck many hard blows; sometimes, as one in-
formed me, making it difficult for three strong men to control
me, yet whenever I did this, I was commanded to do so. I was
told that they knew I was commanded, that they wished me to
do so, to prove my faith and courage, but that they were com-
manded to prove both till they were satisfied of my sincerity. I
may safely say, that for nine entire months, if not for the whole
of the period of my confinement in Dr. F—’s charge, I never
spoke, hardly acted, and hardly thought, but by inspiration or
guidance, and yet I suppose that never was there any one who
so completely contradicted the will of the Almighty, or the de-
sires of those around him, and I could not help laughing now at
the delusions which made me constantly choose that conduct
which was most disagreeable and terrifying to my doctor and
his keepers, as in the reality the most agreeable to them, if I
were not overcome by a sense of the cruel state of abandonment
and exposure to their malice and ignorance in which I was left.

After being fastened in the straight waistcoat, I was taken
down stairs to a long saloon or parlour, to the left of the little
parlour I had been as yet confined to, and on the ground floor.
There was a long table in the middle of the room, allowing space
to pass round it, a fire on the left hand side, and a glass bow
window and door at the further end. I was fastened in a niche
on a painted wooden seat between the fire and the glass win-
dow, in the curve in the wall forming the bow at the end of the
room; another niche opposite to me was occupied by a trem-
bling grey headed old man; there were several other strange
looking personages on the chairs about the room, and passing
occasionally through the glass window door which looked out
in the same direction as the windows of the room I had quitted,
into a small court yard. I think I hear the door jarring now, as
they slammed it to and fro. I marvelled at my position; my
spirits told me that I was now in a mad-house, and I was told
that it only remained for me to pray for the inmates, that they
might be restored to their senses, and that they should be re-

A Narrative of the Treatment Experienced by a Gentleman 103

stored, but that I must then forego certain advantages. I
attempted to pray, though I did not quite believe that I was in a
mad-house, being unconscious of my own melancholy state, or
imagining that I was placed there for convenience, not from
necessity. There was an appearance of wretchedness and dis-
order amongst my associates, and I felt happy to be taken up to
my bed-room after tea had been served in the evening.

The next morning my breakfast was brought to me as before
in bed. I was dressed up stairs, and Herminet Herbert con-
ducted me down to the seat I occupied the night before. There
was an appearance of more cleanliness, order, and composure
in the persons of the wretched individuals around me. Now I
was told by my spirits that my prayer had been heard, that they
had been restored to a sound state of mind, that they were in
consequence among the redeemed of the Lord and knew that I
had prayed for them, that they had in their turn desired to be
allowed to remain with me one year as guides to me, and as a
species of jury, to wait until I became obedient to the Almighty,
and to judge me whether I was sincere in my difficulties or not;
this delusion lasted for more than six months with this differ-
ence, that sometimes I conceived it my duty to recognize in their
persons, relations, and friends, sometimes ministers and
officers of the king.

31- 3(- 3(-

The next morning after my entrance into the lunatics’ com-
mon room, I observed three men, apparently servants or atten-
dants of the gentlemen there. One was Herminet Herbert,
whom in a black coat I was to address as Zachary Gibbs, and
who I was afterwards told, on seeing him in a blue coat, was
Samuel Hobbs; but under all these appearances he was one and
the same Jesus. I used to call him Herminet Herbert, the simple
and Jesus Christ. He was a short, active, fair, witty, clever man.
The other was a tall, spare, aqufline nosed gawky man, from
Devonshire, like a groom. The voices told me to call him at
times Herminet Herbert Scott, at times, Sincerity; at times,
Marshall; that was his name. The third was a stout, jovial, power-
ful man, like a labourer. The voices told me he was Herminet
Herbert, the simple, God Almighty, and that I was to call him
SIMPLICITY; his name was Poole. Besides this, a very stout,

X

1869

1903
1908
1909

1910

Contents

the Legislature of Illinois. Together with Mrs. Packard’s Coad-
jutor’s Testimony, by Elizabeth Parsons Ware Packard

The Trial of Ebenezer Haskell, in Lunacy, and His Acquittal
Before I udge Brewster, in November, 1868, together with a Brief
Sketch of the Mode of Treatment of Lunatics in Different Asy-
lums in this Country and in England, with Illustrations, In-
cluding a Copy of Hogarth’s Celebrated Painting of a Scene in
Old Bedlam, in London, 1635

Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, by Daniel Paul Schreber
A Mind That Pound Itself, by Clifford Beers

The Maniac: A Realistic Study of Madness from the Maniac’s
Point of View, by E. Thelmar

Legally Dead, Experiences During Seven teen Weeks’ Detention
in a Private Asylum, by Marcia Hamilcar

1918, 1919 The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky

1938
1944
1945
1946
1952
1955
1964
1965
1975
1976

The Witnesses, by Thomas Hennell

Brainstorm, by Carlton Brown

I Question, Anonymous

The Snake Pit, by Mary Jane Ward

Wisdom, Madness and Polly, by John Custance

Voices Calling, by Lisa Wiley

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, by Joanne Greenberg
Beyond All Reason, by Morag Coate

The Eden Express, by Mark Vonnegut

Insanity Inside Out, by Kenneth Donaldson

Epilogue

Appendix 1: Ancient and Medieval Visions of Madness
Appendix H: Contemporary Models of Madness
Bibliography

123

130
136
161

176

187
194
203
214
229
238
256
271
284
296
312
327
336
341
348
353

104 JOHN PERCEVAL -

powerful dark man, like a coach-man, with a very small voice
and gentle manners, was occasionally occupied in attending on
me and other patients. I called him by order Herminet Herbert
the Holy Ghost, or Kill-all. I understood these were incarnations
or manifestations of the Trinity. A stout benevolent old gentle-
man, a lunatic, who was dressed in a suit of blue, and had been
handsome, was I was informed, the Lord Jehovah, supremely
omnipotent, the trinity in unity, who had taken upon himself
the form of an old writing master who used to teach me when a
child, and whose name was Waldony, by which name, and by
that of Benevolence, I was at times desired to address him.
Likewise I understood Herminet Herbert Scott, or Marshall, to
be a favourite servant of my Father’ s, who had lived in our
family at Hampstead, and had been raised from the dead with
my father and my eldest sister to attend on me. And Herminet
Herbert the simple, or Samuel Hobbs, I was told had lived in my
mother’ s family after my father’ s death, and had been very fond
of me and my brothers, and familiar with us; that my brothers
had known at the time that he was Jesus, but that I had not; that
during an illness I had had when young, he had wrestled with
me in the school-room, it being necessary for my health, and he
had come now in hopes of winning me to wrestle with him
again, which was continually enjoined to me for the salvation of
my soul, and the keeping me in a right state of mind. Several
persons about the asylum, I was told, were my father, Dr. F., a
Dr. L., and two aged keepers, one of whoml called Honesty;
the other, my real father, because he most resembled him. Now,
when I did not recognize any of these facts or any of these
people, I was told it was on account of my ingratitude and my
cowardice. That I feared to acknowledge objects as they were,
because then I knew I must prepare to endure my awful tor-
ments.

Now all these persons, and each person around me, wore a
triple character, according to each of which I was in turns to
address them. Samuel Hobbs, for example, was at times to be
worshipped in the character of Jesus, at times to be treated
familiarly as Herminet Herbert, a spiritual body, at times to be
dealt with as plain Samuel Hobbs. The stout old patient was at
times knelt to as the Lord Jehovah; at times he was Mr.

A Narrative of the Treatment Experienced by a Gentleman 105

Waldony, a spiritual body; at times a gentleman. So with the
rest: and these changes took place so instantaneously, that I was
completely puzzled as to my deportment towards them. I saw
individuals and members of the family of Dr. F—, approach me
in great beauty, and in obedience to a voice, my inclinations
sprang forward to salute them, when in an instant, their appear-
ance changed, and another command made me hesitate and
draw back. In the same manner, when books, pencils, pens, or
any occupation was presented to me, I turned from one page
and one object, to another, and back again, usually ending in a
fit of exasperation and inward indignation, against the guidance
that so perplexed me.
31- 36 3!-

Now with regard to my treatment, I have to make at first two
general observations, which apply, I am afraid, too extensively
to every system of management yet employed towards persons
in my condition. First, the suspicion and the fact of my being
incapable of reasoning correctly, or deranged in understanding,
justified apparently every person who came near me, in dealing
with me also in a manner contrary to reason and contrary to
nature. These are strong words; but in the minutest instances I
can, alas! prove them true. Secondly, my being likely to attack
the rights of others gave these individuals license, in every re-
spect, to trample upon mine. My being incapable of feeling, and
of defending myself, was construed into a reason for giving full
play to this license. Instead of my understanding being ad-
dressed and enlightened, and of my path being made as clear
and plain as possible, in consideration of my confusion, I was
committed, in really difficult and mysterious circumstances,
calculated of themselves to confound my mind, even if in a sane
state, to unknown and untried hands; and I was placed
amongst strangers, without introduction, explanation, or ex-
hortation. Instead of great scrupulousness being observed in
depriving me of any liberty or privilege, and of the exercise of so
much choice and judgment as might be conceded to me with
safety;—on the just ground, that for the safety of society my
most valuable rights were already taken away, on every occa-
sion, in every dispute, in every argument, the assumed premise
immediately acted upon was, that I was to yield, my desires

106 JOHN PERCEVAL

were to be set aside, my few remaining privileges to be in-
fringed upon, for the convenience of others. Yet I was in a state
of mind not likely to acknowledge even the justice of my con-
finement, and in a state ofdefencelessness calculated to make
me suspicious, and jealous of any further invasion of my natural
and social rights; but this was a matter that never entered into
their consideration.

Against this system of downright oppression, enforced with
sycophantish adulation and affected pity by the doctor, adopted
blindly by the credulity of relations, and submitted to by the
patients with meek stupidity, or vainly resisted by natural but
hopeless violence, I had to fight my way for two years, wringing
from my friends a gradual but tardy assent to the most urgent
expostulations: not from the physicians; their law is the same for
all qualities and dispositions, and their maxim to clutch and
hold fast.

The first step adopted towards me by my friend, Captain-
—, in Dublin, was injudicious and indelicate. If I had been
incoherent, I had hitherto only rendered myself ridiculous; and
if, by one act, I had run the risk of injuring my person, it was
also evident that I had relinquished my purpose at the request
of his family. I trace my ruin to the particular trials, to the sur-
prise, the confusion, the puzzle, which the sudden intrusion of
a keeper brought upon me. But at that time, unfortunately, I did
not consider my dignity so much as my relationship to the
Almighty, as his redeemed servant, bound in gratitude, and
from self-abasement, to exercise forbearance and humility. If it
be replied, My ruin might have been brought about another
way; I answer, I do not know what might have been, but I know
what did take place.

The first symptoms of my derangement were, that I gazed
silently on the medical men who came to me, and resolutely
persisted in acts apparently dangerous. No doubt there were
also symptoms of bodily fever. But from that moment to the end
of my confinement, men acted as though my body, soul, and
spirit were fairly given up to their control, to work their mischief
and folly upon. My silence, I suppose, gave consent. I mean,
that I was never told, such and such things we are going to do;
we think it advisable to administer such and such medicine, in

A Narrative of the Treatment Experienced by a Gentleman 107

this or that manner; I was never asked, Do you want any thing!
do you wish for, prefer any thing? have you any objection to this
or to that? I was fastened down in bed; a meagre diet was
ordered for me; this and medicine forced down my throat, or in
the contrary direction; my will, my wishes, my repugnances,
my habits, my delicacy, my inclinations, my necessities, were
not once consulted, I may say, thought of. I did not find the
respect paid usually even to a child.

1849'?-

Pive Months in the New-York State Lunatic
Asylum, Anonymous

In colonial America and well into the nineteenth century many mad
people were kept and cared for at home. Families who could afford to
might hire a physician. Unfortunately, home care was never an assur-
ance against ignorant treatment or abuse. Mad people who were con-
fused, violent, or difficult might be chained or locked up in the cellar,
outhouse, or attic by their families. In 1849 reformer Dorothea Dix
described one extreme instance of such family ”care.” An Illinois
woman had kept her brother locked up in a rough, open pen, approx-
imately eight feet square. Every one or two weeks she would clean
the area by having neighbors tie him down while they threw buckets
of water into the pen. One winter the man's feet froze, crippling him.
Still, the woman refused to send her brother to an institution, saying,
”We had rather take care of him, than leave  to strangers, because
we are kinder, and treat him much better than they would.” 1

Mad people without families were not likely to be much better off.
In colonial times, welfare was strictly the responsibility of the local
community. Sometimes, the results of this welfare were reasonable
acts of charity. In 1721, for example, New York City voted to give a
woman "commonly called Mad Sew” the following assistance: ”a
good pair of Shoes 8: Stockings & other Necessary Warm Clothing.
She being Very Old Poor 8: Non Compos Mentis & an Object of Char-
ity.” Providence, Rhode Island, in 1655 voted to pay a man named
Pike fifteen shillings and promised further financial assistance of up
to ten pounds or more ”for helpe in this his sad condition of his wife's
distraction.” New Haven in 1645 paid their town marshal to care for
the Goodwife Lampson ”so far forth as her husband is not able to do
it.” And for at least a decade after 1607 the town of Braintree, Mas-
sachusetts, paid for the boarding out of Abigail Neal into the homes of
several physicians, hoping to cure her madness (pp. 47-50).

Often local governments simply placed their indigent mad in jail.
Sometimes they built special cells. In 1789 a court at Upland, Pennsyl-
vania, made the following order:

‘As quoted by Deutsch, The Mentally 111 in America, p. 167. Hereafter cited in the text.
108

Five Months in the New-York State Lunatic Asylum 109

Jan Vorelissen, of Amesland, Complayning to ye Court that his son Erik
is bereft of his natural] Senses and is turned quyt madd and yt, he being
a poore man is not able to maintaine him; Ordered: yt three or four
persons bee hired to build a little block-house at Amesland for to put in
the said madman.

Braintree, Massachusetts, voted in 1689 ”That Samuel Speere should
build a little house 7 foote long & 5 foote wide 8: set it by his house to
secure his Sister good wife Witty being distracted & provide for her.”
The New York State legislature in 1824 learned that the town of Dan-
ville had built a small house in the public square ”for the express
purpose of containing" an indigent mad person. And in the 1840s
Dorothea Dix told of the way a small Rhode Island town had chosen
to care for Abram Simmons, a mad pauper. The town had constructed
a stone vault, some six to eight feet square, with an iron door and no
window or ventilation. Simmons slept on wet straw thrown across an
iron bed frame, covered only by two quilts. Frost coated the inside
walls in winter, and Simmons’ outer quilt was so wet and frosted it
resembled a sheet of ice (pp. 42, 43, 125, 169).

Because local responsibility for welfare also meant local expense,
the usual result was community resistance to welfare. In a report
made in 1686 Governor Dongan of New York colony described the
situation in these terms: ”every Town and County are obliged to
maintain their own poor, which makes them bee soe careful that noe
Vagabonds, Beggars, nor Idle Persons are suffered to live here” (p.
44).

Early American communities were able to ”bee soe careful” in a
number of ways. By maintaining strict settlement laws they could
deny residence to potential welfare cases. Strangers arriving in town
were immediately scrutinized to determine their financial status;
sometimes they had to furnish bond in order to remain. Usually a
newcomer would not be an accepted member of a town until a re-
spectable residency of three months to a year had been maintained. If
at some time during that probationary period the person's financial
welfare seemed to be precarious, he or she would be ”wamed out” of
town. A historian of Roxbury, Massachusetts, notes that until the end
of the eighteenth century ”Indian stragglers and crazy persons” were
frequently asked to leave town. Even persons who once held posi-
tions of high respectability might be subjected to this treatment. In
1742 Boston voted to warn out a former chaplain who had become ”in
a Distracted Condition & very likely to be a Town Charge” (p. 45). In
some colonies a person faced a public whipping if he or she should

110 ANONYMOUS

dare to return. In New York, according to a law of 1721, the penalty for
returning was thirty-six lashes on the bare back for a man and twenty-
five for a woman.

Continuing well into the nineteenth century, local governments
would ”bee soe careful” about potential welfare cases by ”dumping”
them—that is, transporting them in the dark of night to another
town. An official of Franklin, New York, described one instance of the
cruel dumping of an indigent mad person. An elderly stranger travel-
ing through Franklin became ill and ”partially deranged." Incoher-
ent, he was unable to tell anyone who he was or where he was from.
Franklin town officials decided he was probably from the town of
New Berlin so they dumped him in New Berlin. New Berlin did not
want him and took the case to court. Eventually the old man was
returned to Franklin. Finally, the fathers of Franklin decided he must
be from Williamstown, Massachusetts, so they took him across the
state border in the middle of the night and left him in the streets of
Williamstown (p. 124).“

Rural communities often took care of potential welfare cases by
auctioning them off as farm labor. Usually the town would pay for the
care of the pauper to the lowest bidder, but occasionally the indigent
person appeared to be a good enough prospect for labor that a farmer
would actually pay the town to take him in. Sometimes families were
torn apart at the auction block. According to the town records of
Gardner, Massachusetts, such was the fate of the Upton family in
1789:

Oliver Upton and wife bid off by Simon Gates, at ten shillings per
week. Oldest child bid off by Simon Gates, at one shilling per week.
Second child bid off by John Heywood at ten pence per week. Third
child bid off by Andrew Beard, at one shilling, two pence per week.
Fourth child bid off by Ebenezer Bolton, at one shilling, nine pence per
week. (P. 119)

For more than half a century after the American Revolution this bid-
ding-out system was the dominant form of welfare throughout the
nation.

One result of these practices was that some indigent persons,
including the mad, simply wandered. An order of the General
Assembly of Connecticut Colony in 1756 described one such drifter,
”a strolling woman that has been sometime wandering from town to
town, calling herself Susannah Roberts of Pennsylvania, who is so
disordered in her reason and understanding that she passeth from
place to place naked, without any regard for the laws and rules of

Five Months in the New-York State Lunatic Asylum 111

decency.” The assembly instructed the town of Wallingford to clothe
this Susannah Roberts and to put her under the care of ”some dis-
creet person that she may labour for her support” (p. 46).

In America, as in Europe, the earliest establishments housing the
indigent mad were simply catchall institutions for the needy. In
France the hépitaux généraux were founded early in the seventeenth
century for this purpose, while the workhouse emerged in England
somewhat later. The American counterpart was the ”almshouse" or
”poorhouse,” which began in the late seventeenth century, but was
not in general use until the end of colonial times. Like the hépitaux
généraux and the English workhouse, the American poorhouse even-
tually developed separate facilities for mad people, but the treatment
was solely custodial.

The first poorhouse in America was built in Boston in 1662. As early
as 1791 Delaware made mandatory the erection of a poorhouse in each
county. But it was during the 1820s that for a brief time the poorhouse
was seen as a panacea for the problems of the poor. In 1820 the
Massachusetts legislature created a committee to carry out the first
statewide study of the existing patterns of indigent relief. The com-
mittee presented its findings in 1821 and strongly recommended the
establishment of a system of county-run poorhouses. The legislature
quickly followed that recommendation. In 1800 Massachusetts had
only thirty-five poorhouses within its borders. Mostly as a result of
the 1821 recommendation the number by 1830 had more than tripled.
After a similar statewide survey in 1824 the New York state legislature
mandated that each county build and maintain its own poorhouse.
Other states soon followed the leads of Massachusetts and New York.
According to the idealized visions of the decade the poorhouse sys-
tem would give the needy food, shelter, dignity, and occupational
skills, and would give the taxpayer the cheapest form of relief—a sort
of nineteenth-century WPA.

In some instances these early poorhouses fulfilled the hopes of the
1820s. Many actually had infirmaries to care for the sick and the mad,
and in some cases these infirmaries evolved into great hospitals. New
York's Bellevue, the Philadelphia General Hospital, and the New
Orleans Charity Hospital all began as poorhouse infirmaries. In
general, however, the experiment was a failure. It had perhaps been
doomed from the beginning for two reasons: constant increases in
population assured perpetual overcrowding, and the heterogeneity
of the poorhouse inmates brought about disorganization, confu-
sion of goals, and inadequate treatment.

112 ANONYMOUS

By the 1840s and through the rest of century one of the principal
goals of the various refonn movements became the transfer of mad
people from their wards in the poorhouse to the wards of the public
asylums. In 1890 this was mandated by law in New York. But still, in
1926, a national survey showed that mad inmates were kept—some-
times under vile conditions-in many poorhouses throughout the
country. As late as 1933 one midwestem poorhouse chained its mad
inmates to trees during the day.

A few hospitals and asylums were opened between 1752 and 1830.
In theory these were a radical change from the poorhouse: the differ-

’ ence lay in the goal of therapy, treatment, and cure. In practice, un-

fortunately, the difference was not always so great. But even at the
very worst, when these new institutions degenerated to mere places
of confinement, the existence of the therapeutic ideal held at least a
promise for the future.

In 1750 Benjamin Franklin and a group of prominent Philadelphia
Quakers proposed the creation of the first public American hospital,
to be called Pennsylvania Hospital. Two years later two patients, one
of them mad, were taken into temporary quarters while the perma-
nent edifice of Pennsylvania Hospital was under construction. The
following blacksmith’s bill to the hospital may give us some idea of
what the new building was to be like: ’’John Cresson, blacksmith,
against ye hospital 1 pair of handcuffs, 2 legg locks, 2 large rings and 2
large staples, 5 links and 2 swifells for legg chains" (p. 61). By 1756 the
building was finished and patients began moving in. Upon admission
mental patients were bled, purged, shaved to the scalp, and then
given a cell in the basement where they were chained by the waist or
ankle to the walls. The basement cells were about ten feet square, half
underground, and unheated. They were constructed of solid stone
walls with a barred window at one end and a heavy door at the other;
through an opening in the door, food and other necessities might be
passed. The patients were often restrained with handcuffs, ankle-
irons, chains, and a form of straitjacket known as the ”madd-Shir .”
During the first few years the keepers carried whips and used them.
The whips were soon phased out, however, and by 1796 mental pa-
tients were taken out of those cold, damp basement cells and settled
into a new wing.

By 1830 thirteen hospitals and asylums had been constructed as far
west as Kentucky and Ohio but mostly along the eastern seaboard.
Perhaps the most important thing to realize about these institutions is
that their impact was not great. Although a few were built and main-

Five Months in the New-York State Lunatic Asylum 113

tained according to enlightened principles, most were rough estab-
lishments where care was crude and inadequate. The nation's
population was small in comparison to what it is today, but these
early hospitals were still ineffectual in their numbers and size. By the
end of the 1820s, for instance, Massachusetts’ one asylum, McLean
Asylum, had room for only 23 patients. The Maryland Hospital had
space for 40 mental patients. The Eastern Kentucky Lunatics Asylum
was filled to capacity with 200 patients and the Ohio Lunatics Asylum
with 160. Despite the fact that every one of these early state institu-
tions provided for some indigent patients, few local governments
ever sent their paupers to them. Hospital and asylum care was simply
more expensive than the usual local systems of care. An indigent
patient, for example, could stay at New York's Bloomingdale Asylum
for $2.00 a week, but local governments could keep their welfare
cases in jails and poorhouses for a mere $.50 to $1.00 per week.

Before 1830 no state other than Virginia had wholly provided for its
mad; but by 1873, every state in America except Delaware and one or
two western states had built at least one asylum. Between 1840 and
1870, while the overall population of the United States increased only
three and one-half times, the number of mad and allegedly mad peo-
ple in state-run institutions increased from twenty-five hundred to
seventy-four thousand (p. 232).

In the most general terms this trend toward state care was part of a
larger transition in America from a loosely organized, rural, and agri-
cultural society to a more centrally organized, urban, and industrial
society. The trend toward specialized care—from the poorhouse to
the asylum——was part of an overall change in ideas_ about the
appropriate treatment of mad people taking place throughout the
western world. Over the century the patients of the hépitaux généraux
of France, the workhouses of England, and the poorhouses of Amer-
ica were gradually transferred into institutions specializing, or claim-
ing to specialize, in psychiatric care. 1

In America there was also the ”cult of curability” and its own pecu-
liar and fascinating influence. Certain physicians early in the century
had been making extraordinary claims about the curability of mad-
ness, given proper institutional care. By rnid-century the fashion of
easy curability had become so powerful that many superintendents of
American institutions doctored their statistics to suggest cure rates
of 90 percent or higher. In 1843 Dr. William Awl of the Ohio State Lunatic
Asylufn was able to claim a one hundred percent cure rate—by con-
sidering only the patients who had been discharged. He became

Acknowledgments

SEVERAL PEOPLE supported and guided my work on this project. Professor
Thomas Moser of the Stanford English Department, in particular, watched
over, criticized, and nurtured it. Professor Irvin Yalom of the Stanford Depart-
ment of Psychiatry, and Professor Robert Polhemus and Wyn Kelley of the
Stanford English Department generously gave time and energy as readers and
critics; I appreciate their intelligence and standards. I thank William Allen and
Florence Chu of the Stanford libraries for the many hours they spent, with
good humor, helping me gather and examine many far-flung books. I wish to
thank Patricia Allderidge, archivist of the Bethlem Royal Hospital in London,
for calling my attention to Urbane Metcalf’s work of 1818 and for allowing me
to look at some early ”Bedlam” case notes; and I wish to thank Charles Steir for
his extensive help on my bibliography. The many quotations from ancient,
classical, and medieval authors on madness, which comprise Appendix I, were
collected by Professor Bert Kaplan of the University of California at Santa Cruz
and Jasper Rose; I wish to thank Professor Kaplan for passing them on to me
and for allowing me to make use of them. I also want to thank two patient and
supportive people from the University of Pittsburgh Press: Frederick Hetzel,
for his continuing interest in this project, and Cathy Mfller, for her pleasant
manner and eagle eye.

In large part, I have been supported by a Stanford Department. of English
Fellowship and a Teaching Assistantship, also by some shorter-term grants
from the Stanford English Department, the Office of the Graduate Dean at
Stanford, and the Maurice Falk Medical Fund. I am grateful for that support.

My parents and siblings have given moral, emotional, and financial sup-
port for this project; to them I am uniquely indebted.

Finally, I should acknowledge my particular reliance on the following
sources: Albert Deutsch, The Mentally III in America; Henri Ellenberger, The
Discovery of the Unconscious; William Parry-Jones, The Trade in Lunacy; and
Gregory Zilboorg, A History of Medical Psychology.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following publishers for permis-
sion to reprint excerpts that appear in this book. From The Book of Margery
Kempe, translated into modern English by W. Butler-Bowden, copyright ©

XI

114 ANONYMOUS

known as Dr. Cure-Awl (p. 153). The substance of such claims may
have been the stuff of dreams and wishes, but their effect was quite real
and even perhaps beneficial. The concept of easy curability with proper
treatment tremendously stimulated the development of American asy-
lums in the 1830s and 1840s.

Perhaps the single most important inspiration for asylum construction
in nineteenth century America was Dorothea Lynde Dix (1802-
1887), a retired schoolteacher from New England. In the winter of 1841
Dix taught a Sunday school class in a jail in East Cambridge. There
she saw several deranged people locked in cells without heat. She
asked the jailer to give them heat and he refused, saying, ”The insane
need no heat.” Dix took the issue to the East Cambridge court and
won: the mad inmates of the jail were provided heat. She was
touched by the incident and went on for the next two years touring
the entire state of Massachusetts and seeing for herself the treatment
of mad people in that state.

With the results of her two-year survey Dix addressed the Mas-
sachusetts legislature giving the following inventory. In Lincoln one
madwoman was caged. In Medford one retarded person was
chained, another had been kept in a closed stall for seventeen years.
In Concord a woman was kept in a cage in a poorhouse. In Savoy one
man was caged. In Lenox, two mad persons were kept in the town
jail. And so proceeded her list. From town to town, county to county,
she gave her evidence of inhuman treatment of the mad and mentally
retarded to the state legislature. The opposition was immediate and
noisy, but by a large majority the legislature voted to enlarge Worcester
State Hospital to take in the indigent mad from the jails and the poor-
houses of the state.

From there Dix went to Rhode Island, then to New Jersey. During
the next decade she went through every state in the union east of the
Rockies. In each case she exposed the treatment of the mad and
proposed a single solution—the construction and expansion of state
asylums. By the end of her career in 1881 she was directly responsible
for the creation or expansion of thirty-two asylums in the United
States and abroad.

The tendency for the rest of the century was toward the creation of
more and more similar institutions. But it seemed that as soon as an
institution was built, it was filled to capacity. Furthermore, the asy-
lums themselves were often not much better than the poorhouses
they were meant to replace. Reforrnists had tended to see the state
asylum as an end in itself. Conditions in the poorhouses and jails

, were so bad, and the advocates of easy curability had made such

‘a enticing promises, that many reformists attributed almost a magical

Five Months in the New-York State Lunatic Asylum 115

curative aura to the mere edifices of these new public psychiatric
institutions. The urgency and faith with which these nineteenth-
century public institutions were created produced a nationwide sys-
tem of specialized institutional buildings, but it did not produce a
nationwide system of specialized treatment. With few exceptions
these American asylums were characterized more by their lack of
treatment than by treatment. At best they had discarded some of the
old regimen—bloodletting, excessive coercion—but seldom made
significant replacements.

We know little about the anonymous narrator of the early American
protest, Five Months in the New-York State Lunatic Asylum (1849). He
was a fourteen-year resident of Buffalo, New York. He may have been
a businessman. He may well have been the same person who reg-
istered the work in 1848, a Mr. W. Hotchkiss. At any event, in 1847 the
narrator experienced ”a very high fever in [his] head” and became
”very much deranged.” He describes that experience of derangement
in this way: ”My brain seemed like a liquid mass, throbbing, rolling,
tumbling, foaming and evaporating. My imagination roamed over
wild creation in wild and eccentric flights. Thoughts rushed in rapid
succession into my mind, and as rapidly rolled from my lips,
independent of my own volition. I had no more control over my
thoughts words and actions, than I have now over the raging tem-
pest.” Someone bound him hand and foot and sent him by carriage to
the recently opened state asylum in Utica where he stayed five
months.

Soon after his release he published Five Months in the New—York State
Lunatic Asylum, a ”plain statement of facts” to the public and an
”execution of . . . duty.” The work is interesting partly because it
gives some unusually vivid descriptions of what we would now call
”mania.” It is even more interesting as a rare inside view of the great
institutional hope of the nineteenth century: the state asylum.

During the 1800s New York was a leader in social and institutional
reform. The Utica Asylum, which opened in 1843, was New York's
first state asylum and the most costly asylum in the entire country. It
was the first to have steam heat. It was also the first asylum to adopt,
in 1846, a form of restraint known as ”the crib,” sometimes called the
”Utica crib”: a wooden structure like a baby crib with a lid on top in
which the patient could be pinned. The first superintendent of Utica,
Dr. Amariah Brigham, was one of the best and most prominent
psychiatric physicians of his time. He was one of the founders of
what is now the American Psychiatric Association and originated The
American Iournal of Psychiatry. Utica fell woefully short of providing for

116 ANONYMOUS

all the indigent mad in New York (an 1855 survey counted 2,123 indi-
gent mad, with only 296 at Utica). Nonetheless, it was hoped that the
enlightened system of treatment would be a model for the state asy-
lums opening up across the country.

Given such a rosy official view, it is only reasonable to examine in
detail this anonymous unofficial insider's view of the same institu-
tion. The narrator himself quickly suggests that there will be a conflict
between the external and internal views of Utica: ”When people visit
or take friends to the Asylum, they are invited into the office or sitting
room, which is carpeted and furnished in good style. The doctors are
very polite; and perhaps speak eloquently of their wonderful success
in treating the insane.” And his own view indeed contradicts the
optimism of the times. In spite of the modern setting and expensive
construction, the narrator describes the crowdingand herding of pa-
tients into large halls, the inadequate portions of food, and scram-
bling and conniving for food among patients. The superintendent, Dr.
Brigham, is certainly a prominent psychiatric physician but the writer
seldom sees him. Most of the time he remains under the control of a
handful of untrained and vicious attendants who beat him, force
medicines down his throat, choke him, and sometimes throw
him to the floor and jump on him. One attendant threatens him
with a knife. The narrator concludes with this comment on the
new, developing state asylum system: ”The different counties of this
state can provide a home for their insane, as well and as cheap, as
they can support them at the Asylum, and save the expense of
travel.”

In his preface the writer promises ”a plain statement of facts.”
Occasionally he resorts to strong, simple metaphor: ”My blood throb-
bed like a boiling pot; my tongue was parched with a raging fever.”
But his style is generally straightforward, with surprisingly little in-
trusion of opinion or emotion. Nonetheless, there is a selectivity and
collapsing of events that at last floods us with images of cruelty and
brutality, leading finally to a Dantesque vision of hell. The narrator
concludes his work with this fervent statement: ”Is it thus to be
treated like swine, that you send your friends from their own houses
to the asylum? That Institution professes to the world to be a home for
the suffering insane, but to them it is a hell!"

ON THE SEVENTH DAY of November, 1847, I was taken from the
city of Buffalo and carried to the New York State Lunatic Asylum

Pive Months in the New-York State Lunatic Asylum 117

at Utica. I had a very high fever in my head; it may have been
the inflammation on the brain, but I know not what it was. I was
very much deranged, and had been for two days previous to my
removal from Buffalo. Until that time I had regularly attended to
my business. I was bound hand and foot, and fastened to the
bottom of the car; I knew not whither I was going. When I
reached Utica I was much worse from the effect of my ride. My
head felt like a ball of fire; I was in constant fear of those who
attended me. But one of them, in whom I had the most confi-
dence, after I was taken from the cars at Utica and placed in a
carriage to be conveyed to the Asylum, saw that I was afraid of
my attendants. He placed his cold hand on my cheek and
assured me that I should not be injured; this greatly quieted me,
for I believed what he said. In apprehension that I might escape,
they placed a rope around my breast; this exceedingly increased
my fear, supposing the Thugs of India had me in tow; but when
he soothed me with kind words, my fear to a great extent was
removed. While on our way to the Asylum there fell a re-
freshing shower of rain. I held my head uncovered out of the
carriage window; the rain cooled very much my brain. I sup-
posed it was a breeze from the ocean, and passing a cottage
which resembled one I had seen in New Haven, Connecticut, I
imagined I was in that city, and that the Asylum was Yale Col-
lege. I cannot tell precisely where I was taken from the carriage,
but I think it was in the inclosure in the rear of the Asylum. An
attendant supported my weak frame on either side. At the door
we met Dr. Brigham. He asked me if I remembered a person
(calling his name) who had been an inmate in the Institution,
from Buffalo. I think I made no reply. The doctor's countenance
made an impression upon my mind which will never be effaced.
It was full of kindness and sympathy. Had he then taken me by
the hand and conducted me to a good bed, I think I should have
secured some rest; and by such a manifestation of regard for
me, he would have so completely gained my confidence that he
could have controlled me as he pleased. But there are too many
inmates in the Asylum, to receive such attentive treatment. I did
not stop, but was hurried onward. I do not recollect who were
by my side. I had but one glance at Dr. Brigham. We passed
through a long hall in the basement, which had rooms on either
side. There were potatoes in one room, and bricks were scat-

118 ANONYMOUS

tered along the hall, which made an unfavorable impression
upon my mind. We soon passed into another hall in which there
were some lunatics, who looked worse to me than bricks and
potatoes. I was placed in a cell eight or ten feet square. A door
which had open-work at the top, was locked after me; a batten
door closed upon the outside of the jamb-casing of the inside
door, so that I could not see into the hall. There was one win-
dow in the room, with iron bars on the outside of the sash. A
wooden shutter made like a picket gate, opened on the inside of
the window, but it was kept locked to secure the window from
the inmate of the room. When I was conducted into the room, I
was exhausted and fell to the floor. I did not again see those
who, a few moments before, had promised me that I should not
be injured. My confidence in all human beings was fast failing. I
imagined the floor I was on was hung on hinges, and served for
a trap—door to let persons through into a dissecting room, which
I supposed was under it. I thought those who came with me to
the Asylum, had sold me to the Doctor for dissection, and that
one of them had gone below to unfasten the floor and let me
down. I fancied the floor moved; I sprung to the window; held
on to the shutter till I supposed they had given me up, or some
one had come to my rescue. The floor did not fall, and I conjec-
tured the reason why it did not, was that it wanted my weight
to carry it down. Concluding that some one had made it fast, I
let go my hold on the shutter and ventured-myself again upon
the floor. Soon after this, Dr. Brigham, with two other persons,
opened my door, and took me to a room on the opposite side of
the hall. They took a sketch of my features with a pencil as I
supposed. They then returned me to the side of the hall whence
they had taken me, but to a room, I believe, next below the one
in which I was first placed. It was of the same size of my first
room. When the door was closed on me, I saw that it was
gnawed half through in some places. On the wall was marked
or drawn the form of a man lying horizontally, with the head of
a nail or screw in each joint. This figure produced great fear in
my mind.

From the window of my room I looked into an enclosed yard,
in which were kept a large buck and doe, and where the pa-
tients in the summer season are let out to play ball. Had it been

Five Months in the New-York State Lunatic Asylum 119

in my power, I would have given worlds to a kind friend, who
would have taken me from that dismal place, and given me a
comfortable room. Some doves flew past my window—I was
delighted with the sight, for they seemed harmless. I imagined
they were the ones that Noah had in the Ark; and the buck
having branching horns, I fancied was the beast with ten horns
mentioned in Holy Writ.

In a short time, the batten door to my cell was opened, and a
piece of bread was handed me through the open-work of the
inner door. My taste was bad, but I took the bread, and it tasted
like dung. I threw it back, and told the attendant that it was
dung. The moment it struck the floor, a half a dozen or more
patients scrambled after it, as though they had been without
food for a week. One black imp, whom, upon first sight, I had
considered an Egyptian mummy and incapable of motion, won
the prize and instantly swallowed the bread. I believed the in-
mates had just risen from the dead and were shut up for a
season in prison with the spirits of the damned. My outer-door
was soon closed, and I saw no more of them for some time.

It now began to grow dark. I looked out of my window; a
brick wing erected at right angles to the stone or front building
was in full view. They were lighting up in the different halls,
which greatly pleased my fancy. I thought there was some one
who would rescue me soon. I thought my wife had risen from
the dead, and would help me as soon as she could. I raised
myself up to my window by holding on to the inside shutter,
and talked pretty loud of victory and of never giving up until the
last breath of life was taken from me. I fell from my window
three times exhausted, and the fourth time I clung with a deadly
grasp, determined never to let go my hold while life lasted, and
not to stop talking as long as I could move my tongue. It is
impossible to describe my feelings. I knew not what I had done
to deserve such treatment. Two beings bearing the forms of
men, then entered my cell and laid hold of me, one on each
side. They drew me from the window and said it was enough,
and I thought it was finished as they threw me headlong upon
the floor. The back of my head struck the floor, and I lay sense-
less, I know not how long. I suppose I lay thus until morning.
Whether I had a bed of straw that night or not, I do not know.

120 ANONYMOUS

There was no bed of any kind when I entered the room, nor a
seat to sit upon. The next I recollect it was daylight. Two men
were holding me with a gag in my mouth, pouring in medicine
of some kind which I thought was aqua fortis.

31- 3(- il-

There were, I think, between thirty and forty patients in this
hall. There were five negroes; and two or three whites, who, I
was told, had committed murder. Some were from the State
Prisons, and others from the poor houses of the several coun-
ties. In this hall most of the patients were together during the
day, but at night were locked up in seperate rooms. During the
day some were up for office, running for president, some plead-
ing law, some preaching, praying, cursing and swearing; others
were lying and fighting, hallooing murder, having fits, and
others still were dancing and crying; some were naked, and
some were doing nothing. I can only give a description of this
hall for one or two days; and I think that will satisfy all who may
read these pages. I was informed that the name of the first
attendant in this hall was WARREN POTTER; the name of the
second attendant, I believe, was HUNT or HUNTER. I thought
the first attendant was MOHAMMED, and the second half an
aligator or man eater. At three or four o'clock in the afternoon,
each day, POTTER places himself at the head of the hall, and
cries at the top of his voice, ”pots.” At the sound of his voice all
the patients rush from different parts of the hall, under full
headway, for the pot-room, each one straining his nerves and
lungs, and crying ”pots,” ”pots,” ”pots;” and from the confu-
sion one would think there was nothing left in the world except
pots; but when his room is unlocked at five o'clock in the morn-
ing, and each one sets his pot out side of the door and in the
hall, all who have the sense of smelling find there is something
left besides pots. Some of the pots are not large enough, and
consequently run over; some get broken; some patients are
pulled out of bed, and in the affray their pots are turned over,
which leaves the contents running upon the floor, mixed with
tobacco juice, which altogether makes a good job. Don't it? And
now all is hurry and bustle—some carrying pots to the wash-
room; some running for the water closet with pail, mop, and
water, and others dressing, and some swearing—I generally

Five Months in the New-York State Lunatic Asylum 121

went to the veranda to obtain fresh air. POTTER soon comes in
with medicine for some of the patients. I took it three times each
day while I was in this hall, which was between three and four
months. When he finds that I have the window up, he would
order it down, and order me to take a dose of something out of a
mug similar to those Deacon GILES’ workmen carried when in
his distillery, and not to raise the window again under penalty
of being shut up in a dark room, as they call it. But I loved fresh
air at this time, and talking out of the window, so well, I could
not obey, and up went the window; and then in came two
attendants and a watchman. They would sometimes strap the
mittens on so tight that it made me faint. They would throw me
headlong upon the floor, then one would take hold of my shoul-
ders and one hold of my legs. Sometimes one would catch hold
of my cravat and nearly choke me, and would almost stop my
breath; but if the mittens were not on, perhaps I could get two
fingers between my cravat and throat in order to keep my wind-
pipe from being broken.

Now commences the chase. They run the length of the hall in
this manner, pouncing me at every jump upon the floor with all
their might, at the same time endeavoring to loosen my hold of
my cravat, for fear it would not choke hard enough to suit their
purpose. Then I am pressed into the room, excited and feeling
bad that any thing in the form a man could treat a human being
in such a barbarous manner. My shattered and fevered brain
becomes heated and my mind enraged. I curse the attendant

and bid him defiance, that he can not kill me, although I never

raised a hand to injure him or to defend myself, yet he is en-
raged at my talk. Two stand and look on while I lie upon my
back on the bare floor, and POTTER jumps with his knees some
half dozen times into my breast with all his might, then leaves
me locked up until breakfast; perhaps all day. I have no seat to
sit upon nor bench on which to recline; my hands sometimes
made fast by the mittens; if I lie on the bare floor my head is too
low; if I am on my back, the lock or staple cuts the bones and
flesh; the mittens secure my hands so that below my elbows my
arms are at right angles with the part above, and when I turn
upon my side it brings my elbows under the short ribs; if I turn
upon my breast the staples cut my hands; so that in no position

122 ANONYMOUS

could I enjoy any ease. Many a night I lay in this torturing
manner while in the basement. If I am left all day, HUNT comes
with bread and water or coffee, feeds me and at the same time
remarks; ”that he is feeding the animal.” It enrages me; I reply
that the beast is doing it. If I am lying down when the attendant
comes to the door, he orders me up; but he never assists me. I
have to turn on my knees and elbows; my knees being covered
with sores, the blood spirting out and running quite freely,
sometimes filled my shoes half full; when it dries up it sticks my
drawers fast to the sores, so that all is pain.

1868“?-

The Prisoner's Hidden Life, or Insane Asylums
Unveiled: As Demonstrated by the Report of the
Investigating Committee of the legislature of
Illinois. Together with Mrs. Packard’s Coadjutors’
Testimony, by Elizabeth Parsons Ware Packard

In 1860 the Reverend Theophilus Packard committed his wife,
Elizabeth, to the fllinois State Asylum at Jacksonville. In fact very little
in Elizabeth Packard’s appearance or behavior suggested madness.
Her greatest offense seemed to be openly disagreeing with her hus-
band on religious matters within his church. She insisted that she was
locked up ”for simply expressing religious opinions in a community
who were unprepared to appreciate and understand them,” but
according to the Illinois commitment law of 1851 Packard’s sanity or
madness did not matter: married women could be held in an asylum
indefinitely, solely on the authority of their husbands with the con-
currence of the asylum superintendent.

Though she was usually denied writing materials Packard kept a
journal, hiding the pages behind her mirror, in false liners of her
hatbox and satchel, and inside her bonnet. Released in 1863, after
three years’ confinement, Packard proceeded to publish a number of
protests partly based on that asylum journal. At the same time she
lobbied to change state commitment laws and in 1867 persuaded the
Illinois legislature to pass into law a ”personal liberty bill” requiring
trial by jury before a person could be committed. In 1872, due to
Packard’s influence, Iowa passed a similar law. Other states followed
suit.

The concept of jury trial commitments, however, was doomed to
fail. For various reasons, Illinois repealed its ”personal liberty" law in
1892, after Packard’s death. In the twentieth century many states still
had jury trial commitment procedures, but the liberal psychiatric
movement became progressively convinced that such commitments
were bad. It was argued that jury trials caused unnecessary public
embarrassment to the patient, suggested criminality, were slow, and
were liable to be unfair due to the medical naiveté of jurors. In 1930
the First International Congress of Mental Hygiene recommended the

123

xii Acknowledgments

1944 by the Devin-Adair Company, reprinted by permission of the Devin-

Adair Co., Old Greenwich, Conn. 06870. From Schizophrenia 1677, © 1956,

and from Daniel Paul Schreber’ s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, © 1955, both

translated and commented upon by Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter, re-

printed by kind permission of Dr. Richard Hunter. Excerpts from A Mind That

Found Itself, by Clifford W. Beers, copyright 1902, 1917, 1921, 1923, 1931, 1932,

1934, 1935, 1937, 1939, 1940, 1942, 1944, 1948, 1953 by the American Founda-

tion for Mental Hygiene, Inc., reprinted by permission of Doubleday & Com-

pany, Inc. From The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky, copyright © 1936, 1963 by Simon

& Schuster, Inc., reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, a division of
Gulf & Western Corporation; reprinted by Jonathan Cape in the United King-

dom, by permission of Eric Glass Ltd. From The Witnesses, by Thomas Hennell,
© 1944, reprinted by permission of University Books, Inc., (Lyle Stuart, Inc.),

Secaucus, N.J. From Brainstorm, by Carlton Brown, copyright 1944, © 1972 by

Carlton Brown, reprinted by permission of Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Pub-

lishers, and by the Harold Matson Company, Ltd. From The Snake Pit, by Mary

Jane Ward, copyright © 1946 by Mary Jane Ward, reprinted by permission of
Random House, Inc. From Wisdom, Madness and Folly, by John Custance,

copyright 1952 by John Custance, copyright renewed © 1980 by John
Custance, reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. ; first
published by Victor Gollancz in 1951. From I Never Promised You a Rose Garden,

by Hannah Green (Joanne Greenberg), copyright © 1964 by Hannah Green,

reprinted by permission of Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Publishers, and by the

William Morris Agency, Inc., on behalf of the author. Specified excerpts from

Beyond All Reason, by Morag Coate (J . B. Lippincott), copyright © 1964, 1965 by

Morag Coate, reprinted by permission of Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., and

by Constable Publishers. From The Eden Express, by Mark Vonnegut, copyright

© 1975 by Praeger Publishers, Inc., reprinted by permission of Holt, Rinehart

and Winston, Publishers, and by Knox Burger Associates. From Insanity Inside

Out, by Kenneth Donaldson, © 1976 by Kenneth Donaldson, used by perrnis—

sion of Crown Publishers, Inc.

124 ELIZABETH PARSONS WARE PACKARD

abolition of all such laws, and the American Psychiatric Association
soon echoed that sentiment. By the middle of the twentieth century
nearly all commitments were taking place without appeal to a jury.
Any person could be imprisoned indefinitely, essentially on the word
of one or two psychiatric experts.

In Insane Asylums Unveiled, Packard describes severe beatings,
chokings, forced cold baths (a therapy of the time), and subtler forms
of abuse, but she is most absorbed by the broader issues of the civil
rights of mental patients and of women. She notes that an 1867 inves-
tigation of the Illinois Asylum at Jacksonville found some 148 women
detained ”without the proper legal evidence of their insanity.” She
also describes the situations of individual women incarcerated by
their husbands. Finally, she attaches at the end of her own narrative
the testimonies of five other female patients at Jacksonville three of
whom insist they were never mad.

In the following excerpts, Packard describes her seizure and trans-
portation to the Illinois asylum; in the final scene we are left with the
image of her four younger children, broken-hearted at the separation
from their mother. Packard’s habits of melodrama tend to weaken the
pathos of the actual event. The exclamation points lose their effect
after a while, as do the rhetorical ”O’s." Packard’s description of her
son, George, running down the track after the train loses much of its
effect when we realize that she could never have witnessed that
event; at best, it is dramatized after hearsay. Nonetheless, through all
the reconstruction and dramatization of this story, there is a moving
real event. The basic scenes and dramatis personae are true-to-life.
With exaggeration and melodrama stripped away, the picture re-
mains of a hard, authoritarian husband, a firm, yet rational and dig-
nified wife, a family torn apart. In another time, under different laws,
this might have been the story of a simple ‘marital breakup. As it
stands, it is the story of a husband dreadfully abusing a wife with the
full cooperation. of his community and the State of Illinois.

L:

AND NOW THE FATAL HOUR had come that I must be transported
into my living tomb. But the better to shield himself in this
nefarious work, Mr. Packard tried to avail himself of the law for
commitment in other cases, which is to secure the certificate of
two physicians that the candidate for the Asylum is insane.

The Prisoner's Hidden Life, or Insane Asylums Unveiled 125

Therefore at this late hour I passed an examination made by our
two doctors, both members of his church and our bible class,
and opponents to me in argument, wherein they decided that I
was insane, by simply feeling my pulse!

This scene is so minutely described in the ”Introduction to my
Three Years Imprisonment,” that I shall not detail it here. The
doctors were not in my room over three minutes, conducting
this examination, and without asking me a single question, both
said whfle feeling my pulse, ”she is insane!”

My husband then informed me that the ”fonns of law’ ’ were
now all complied with, and he now wished me to dress for a
ride to Jacksonville Insane Asylum. I complied, but at the same
time entered my protest against being imprisoned without a
trial, or some chance at self-defence. I made no physical resis-
tance however, when he ordered two of his church-members to
take me up in their arms, and carry me to the wagon and thence
to the cars, in spite of my lady-like protests, and regardless of all
my entreaties for some sort of trial before commitment.

My husband replied, ”I am doing as the laws of Illinois allow
me to do—you have no protector in law but myself, and I am
protecting you now! it is for your good I am doing this, I want to
save your soul—you don't believe in total depravity, and I want
to make you right.”

”Husband, have I not a right to my opinions?”

”Yes, you have a right to your opinions, if you think right.”

”But does not the constitution defend the right of religious
toleration to all American citizens?”

”Yes, to all citizens it does defend this right, but you are not a
citizen; while a married woman you are a legal nonentity, with-
out even a soul in law. In short, you are dead as to any legal
existence while a married woman, and therefore have no legal
protection as a married woman.” Thus I learned my first lesson
in that chapter of common law, which denies to married woman
a legal right to her own identity or individuality.

The scenes transpiring at the parsonage, were circulated like
wild-fire throughout the village of Manteno, and crowds of men
and boys were rapidly congregating at the depot, about one
hundred rods distant from our house, not only to witness the

126 ELIZABETH PARSONS WARE PACKARD

scene, but fully determined to stand by their pledge to my son,
I.W., that his mother should never leave Manteno depot for an
Insane Asylum.

The long two-horse lumber wagon in which I was conveyed
from my house to the depot, was filled withstrong men as my
body guard, including Mr. Packard, his deacons, and Sheriff
Burgess, of Kankakee city among their number. When our team
arrived at the depot, Mr. Packard said to me, ”now, wife, you
will get out of the wagon yourself, won't you? You won't com-
pel us to lift you out before such a large crowd, will you?”

”No, Mr. Packard, I shall not help myself into an Asylum. It is
you who are putting me there. I do not go willingly, nor with my
own consent—I am being forced into it against my protests to
the contrary. Therefore, I shall let you show yourself to this
crowd, just as you are—my persecutor, instead of my protector.
I shall make no resistance to your brute force claims upon my
personal liberty—I shall simply remain a passive victim, help-
less in your power.” He then ordered his men to transport me
from the wagon to the depot in their arms.

1- 36 3(-

As soon as I was landed in the cars, the car door was quickly
locked, to guard against any possible reaction of the public,
manly pulse, in my defence. Mr. Packard, Deacon Dole, and
Sheriff Burgess seated themselves near me, and the cars quietly
moved on towards my prison tomb, leaving behind me, chil-
dren, home, liberty and an untarnished reputation. In short, all,
all, which had rendered life desirable, or tolerable.

Up to this point, I had not shed a tear. All my nervous energy
was needed to enable me to maintain that dignified self-
possession, which was indispensably necessary for a sensitive
womanly nature like my own, to carry me becomingly through
scenes, such as I have described. But now that these scenes
were past, my hitherto pent up maternal feelings burst their
confines, and with a deep gush of emotion, I exclaimed, ‘'0!
what will become of my dear children!” I rested my head upon
the back of the seat in front of me, and deliberately yielded
myself up to a shower of tears. O! thought I, ”what will my dear
little ones do, when they return to their desolate home, to find

The Prisoner's Hidden Life, or Insane Asylums Unveiled 127

no mother there! 0 their tender, loving hearts, will die of grief,
at the story of their mother's wrongs!”

Yes, it did well nigh rend each heart in twain, when the fact
was announced to them, that they were motherless! My sons,
1. W., and George were just about this time returning from their
prairie errand, and this fact was now being communicated to
them, by some one returning from the depot, whom they met
near the same. When within speaking distance, the first saluta-
tion they heard was, ”Well, your mother is gone.”

”What?” said I. W., thinking he had misunderstood.

”Your mother is gone!”

Supposing this was only an old rumor revived, he carelessly
replied, ”No she isn't, she is at home; where I just left her, and I
am now on the way there to take her to ride with me.”

”But she has gone—I just came from the depot, and saw her
start.”

Now, for the first time, the terrible truth flashed upon his
mind, that this is the reason George and I have been sent off on
this errand, and this accounts also, for the attentions so lavishly
bestowed upon us this morning by my groom, by my father,
and by Mr. Comstock. Yes, this awful fact at last found a lodg-
ment in his sensitive heart, when he, amid his choking and
tears could just articulate, ”George! we have no mother.”

Now George, too, knew why he had been so generously
treated to sugar-plums that morning, and he too burst into loud
crying, exclaiming, ”they shall not carry off my mother.”

”But they have carried her off! We have no mother!” said I. W.
Here they both lifted up their voices and wept aloud, and as the
team entered the village, all eyes were upon them, and others
wept to see them weep, and to listen to their plaintive exclama-
tions, ”We have no mother! We have no mother!” As they drew
near the front of Mr. Comstocl<’s store, seeing the crowd settling
there, I. W. felt his indignation Welling up within him, as he
espied among this crowd some of his volunteer soldiers in his
mother's defence, and having learned from his informant that
no one had taken his dear mother's part, he reproachfully ex-
claimed, as he leaped from his wagon, ”And this is the protec-

tion you promised my mother! What is your gas worth to me!”.,

128 ELIZABETH PARSONS WARE PACKARD

They felt the reproaches of a guilty consdence, and dared not
attempt to console them. Mr. Comstock was the only one who
ventured a response in words. He said, ’’You must excuse me,
I. W., for I did what I thought would be the best for you. I knew
your father was determined, and he would put her in at any
rate; and I knew too, that your oppositionwould do no good,
and would only torment you to witness the scene. So I had you
go for your good!” ”For my good!” thought he, ”I think I should
like to be my own judge in that matter!” He spoke not one
reproachful word in reply, but quickly sought his mother’ s
room, where he might weep alone.

But George, knowing the [direction the cars went with his
mother, ran on the track after them, determined he never would
return until he could return with his motherlrescued from pris-
on! He was not missed until he was far out of hearing, and
almost out of sight—he only looked like asmall speck on the
distant track. They followed after him; but he most persistently
refused to return, saying, ”I will get my dear mamma out of
prison! My mamma shan’t be locked up in a prison! I will not go
home without my mother!” I

He was of course forced back, but not to stay—only until he
could make another escape. They finally had to imprison him-
my little manly boy of seven years, to keep him from running
two hundred miles on the track to Jacksonville, to liberate his
imprisoned mother!

But 0, my daughter! no pen can delineate thy sorrow, to find
thy mother gone! perhaps forever gone! from thy compan-
ionship, counsel, care and sympathy! She wept both night and
day, almost unceasingly; and her plaintive moans could be
heard at quite a distance from her home. ‘'0! mother! mother!
mother!” was her almost constant, unceasing call. Her sorrow
almost cost her her reason and her life. And so it was with I. W.
He grieved himself into a settled fever, which he did but just
survive; and during its height, he moaned incessantly for his
mother, not knowing what he said! His reason for a time was
lost in delirium.

But my babe, thank God! was too young to realize his loss. For
him, I suffered enough for two human beings.

Here we leave these scenes of human anguish, to speak one

The Prisoner's Hidden Life, or Insane Asylums Unveiled 129

word of comfort for the wives and mothers of Illinois. Conscious
that there had already been innocent victims enough offered in
sacrifice on the altar of injustice, in consequence of these cruel
laws of Illinois against my own sex, I determined to appeal,
single handed and alone, if necessary, to their Legislature, to
have them repealed, and thereby have the personal liberty of
married women protected by law, as well as by the marital
power. Consequently, in the winter of 1867, I came alone, and at
my own expense, from Massachusetts to Illinois, and paid my
board all winter in Springfield, Illinois, trying to induce the
Legislature to repeal the barbarous law under which I was im-
prisoned, and pass in its stead a ”Bill for the Protection of Per-
sonal Liberty,” which demands a fair jury trial of every citizen of
the State, before imprisonment in any Insane Asylum in the
State. The Legislature granted my request. They repealed the
barbarous law, and passed the Personal Liberty Bill, by an
unanimous vote of both houses. So that now, no wife or mother
in Illinois need fear the re-enacting of my sad drama in her own
case; for, thank God! your personal liberty is now protected by
just laws.

18694-'-I-

The Trial of Ebenezer Haskell, in Lunacy, and His
Acquittal Before Iudge Brewster, in November,
1868, together with a Brief Sketch of the Mode of
Treatment of Lunatics in Different Asylums in this
Country and in England, with Illustrations,
Including a Copy of Hogarth’s Celebrated Painting
of a Scene in Old Bedlam, in London, 1635

A photograph of Ebenezer Haskell on the frontispiece of his book
shows him to be middle-aged, portly, and generally dignified. He is
formally dressed, wearing a black coat, white shirt, and a loose black
cravat. His eyes are dark and not very expressive, his nose is broad.
Most notably, he sprouts a full, curly white beard. The white hair of
his head is thin, receding, and combed forward at the temples. His
expression is almost blank, with no social smile, just the trace of a
slightly quizzical frown and a pensive lowering of the brow.

In a preface he describes himself in positive terms. He had been a
resident of Philadelphia for over forty years; he ”won by honest in-
dustry a fair name and fame in business circles.” Like many other
protest writers before him, Haskell tries hard to project a persona of
sobriety, promising ”simply to speak a few plain unvarnished
truths.” But there is almost no other information about his life before
he became a patient.

In May 1866 a police officer interrupted Haskell’s breakfast and took
him to the Philadelphia Almshouse, not explaining why. At the alms-
house, forty-three dollars in cash and a gold watch were taken from
him, his beard was shaved, his hair was cropped, and he was placed
in a yard with some five hundred other patients in the Almshouse
Insane Department. A few days later he was removed to the Pennsyl-
vania Hospital for the Insane where he remained until June when his
wife removed him against the advice of hospitalphysicians. Over the
next two years authorities took him back to the almshouse three times
but he escaped each time—once by sawing through a barred win-
dow. During his final escape he broke his leg and was captured and

130

The Trial of Ebenezer Haskell 131

taken to the Pennsylvania Hospital (different from the Pennsylvania
Hospital for the Insane). In November 1868 he had to appear before
court, apparently in an attempt to establish a long-term commitment,
but the court ruled in his favor.

Was he mad? Physicians at the trial insisted he was. Dr. S. P. Jones,
a physician from the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane, described
Haskell as unusually loquacious, excitable, and hostile toward his
family, accusing them of conspiring to lock him up over the issue of
an inheritance. Jones went on to say that symptoms of mania often
included: ”enmity towards family, aversion to relatives.” On the
other hand Jones noted that in madness ”excretions from the skin are
often offensive,” and such was not the case with Haskell. Nonethe-
less the physician concluded that the man had been mad. Dr. 5.
Butler, a physician from the almshouse, concurred with Dr. Jones: ”I
saw Haskell and believed him at that time, insane, he manifested
every appearance of it.” The judge and jury, however, disagreed and
set Haskell free. Soon after, he wrote and published The Trial of
Ebenezer Haskell.

The book opens with a long transcript of the trial, proceeds to
Haskell’s disappointingly short narrative of his experiences as a pa-
tient, then finishes with some brief sketches of conditions in other
asylums Haskell observed as a visitor. Of consequence are the several
ink drawings in the original, some of which portray asylum condi-
tions and various abusive treatments of patients. Two of the drawings
show Haskell in the act of escaping; and these particular images add
impact to the work as a whole. One drawing depicts his first escape in
November of 1866. Formally dressed, wearing a top hat, his white
beard flowing, Haskell descends by a rope or knotted bedsheet from
the third-story window (bars sawed open and bent back) of a massive
prisonlike building. A second drawing shows his escape in Septem-
ber 1868. He dangles by the fingertips of one hand from the top of a
stone wall more than twice his height, about to drop on the free
side—and as we know from the trial manuscript—about to break his
leg.

One wishes that Haskell had included accounts of his several
escapes to accompany these drawings. He did not, however, and we
must rest content with his brief but clear and absorbing narrative of
life inside the Philadelphia Almshouse and the Pennsylvania Hospital
for the Insane (which he sometimes calls ”Kirkbride’s” after the
prominent superintendent of that institution). Included here is all of
that narrative and sections containing his description of one of the

132 EBENEZER HASKELL

water-shock treatments of the time, the ”spread-eagle cure” with
”douche bath.” .

ON THE MORNING of May 24th, 1866, while sitting at breakfast I
was kidnapped by a policeman and forcibly taken to the Phil-
adelphia Almshouse. It never occurred to me that a charge of
insanity was preferred against me, causing the outrageous
arrest.

The questions put to me by the keeper; were as follows, viz:

”Where is your native place?”

”How old are you?”

”What is your occupation?"

After that my pockets were searched, and forty-three dollars
in money, and my gold watch, worth one hundred dollars
more, were taken from me.

Next I was ordered to take off my clothes, then the barber
came to shave off my beard and hair close to the skin, and a
straight jacket was close at hand to be placed on me instead of
the clothing removed. After a short consultation with the keep-
ers or managers I was directed to follow a rough looking fellow
with a bunch of keys in his hand, through several doors. At last
one opened into the outer ward, which contained upwards of
500 black and white males of every grade one can imagine.
Some of them half naked and full of sores, and diseases of all
sorts and kinds, half of them were lying on the ground, some
were standing on their heads, others were singing, while some
were dancing. Forty or fifty of them had leather mittens on their
hands strapped close to their bodies, others had straight jackets
on, which are a kind of shirt pulled down over their bodies,
their arms inside pinioned close to their bodies. Such frightful
objects of misery are indescribable. From what I have said the
reader may form a faint idea of human beings huddled together
within the sound of church bells of the City of Philadelphia,
with a Christian population of several hundred thousand, living
in affluence, ease and comfort as unconcerned as though no
such place of torture was allowed in the country. The whole
present Almshouse system of management would be a disgrace

The Trial of Ebenezer Haskell 133

to any heathen nation on the face of the earth. Death is far
preferable to the misery endured in the Blockley Almshouse of
Philadelphia; in short it is a living sepulchre. The few days I was
there sickened my heart at the cruelty practiced by those mon-
sters in human shape called nurses. I have seen poor sick and
feeble old men kicked and knocked down, hit in the face and on
the head with a large bunch of keys, their eyes blackened, noses
bleeding, lips cut and swollen, which all added to make life a
burden. There is a great want of proper attendants; nearly all
the nurses are without education, and brute force used con-
tinually upon all under them. The day the committee propose to
visit a public or private institution should not be made known in
the institution. When it is known everything is cleaned up in
good order to deceive, so that the report will read ”in excellent
condition,” and such like. To prevent abuse the authorities
should send committees once a week, made up from outside the
institution and in no way connected therewith.

I have seen marks of thumb and finger nails on the throats of
the poor victims, being choked by the rough nurses, remain for
two weeks. While I was locked up in the seventh ward in Kirk-
bride’s mad house I have witnessed a struggle on the floor with
a poor victim and his keeper over half an hour; the poor fellow
had his hands strapped close to his body and fought with des-
peration; he was finally conquered by choking until he was
black in the face, his tongue protruding from his mouth and his
eyes nearly strained from their sockets, the froth and blood

oozing from his mouth; he was then taken off from the floor by

two stout keepers, and put into a dungeon naked, with a bun-
dle of straw for his bed. I was confined during the night for over
three months in a dungeon which joined this poor victim's; at
first his yelling and howling kept me from sleeping. We are all
creatures of circumstances and soon become reconciled; when
he stopped it awakened me, the same as the howling did at
first. In the day time about thirty of us were let out of our cells
and dungeons with the liberty of going up and down the corri-
dors and into a small yard off the ground floor. It is necessary if
you want to place a human creature in this mad house to pay
thirteen weeks’ board in advance. As soon as payment of his
board bill is discontinued the person remains there for three
months more free of charge; after that time he is removed to the

Introduction

IN MARCH 1969, after two weeks’ training, I entered a psychiatric
ward to begin two years of full-time work as an attendant.

The head nurse described the patients on her ward as
”chronic burnt-out schizophrenics” and proceeded to intro-
duce me to them. I met a patient we might caH Andy. He shook
my hand, smiled, and said in a childish voice, ”I’m glad you've
come! You better take good care of me, I'm crazy. I'm loony as
they come.” He smiled and stared directly into my eyes. ”Take
good care of me. Look: I can't move my eyes to the right or to
the left. I speak three languages.” I was introduced to another
patient—let’s call him Tom—who certainly looked mad, his face
ravaged with deep arroyo wrinkles, his hair yellow, short, and
chaotic, shreds of tobacco around his lips, his eyes pale blue and
blank. He whined. ”Well, go to school. Well, Tom, Tom, go to
school.” I reached out to shake his hand. He took my hand, and
bent down and kissed it with a loud, wet smack, leaving a
half-dollar sized spot of saliva and tobacco fragments. Then he
frowned, turned away, and shuffled off, his pants falling down
his narrow hips, again and again thumping his rib cage with a
strange, awkward, stereotyped gesture.

Certainly Andy said such things with some degree of mock-
ery, including, perhaps, self-mockery. But it was a desire to take
Andy seriously, at his word, as well as a curiosity perhaps first
stimulated by Tom, and an affection for them both and for
others in their position, that originally motivated my work on
this history.

This history is simply a collection of pieces from the published
autobiographical works of mad people and mental patients,

XIII

134 EBENEZER HASKELL

Almshouse or some other Poor House and supported at the
expense of the county or State treasury.

The Spread Eagle Cure

It is a term used in all asylums and prisons. A disorderly
patient is stripped naked and thrown on his back, four men take
hold of the limbs and stretch them out at right angles, then the
doctor or some one of the attendants stands up on a chair or
table and pours a number of buckets full of cold water on his
face until life is nearly extinct, then the patient is removed to his
dungeon cured of all diseases; the shock is so great it frequently
produces death.

If all the persons in this commonwealth found intoxicated and
not able to govern themselves in a proper manner should by
LAW RECEIVE SUCH MEDICAL TREATMENT, say four buck-
ets full of cold water applied in that way for the first offence,
and for the second two more added and so on until the desired
reform is accomplished, it would do more to prevent crime and
INTEMPERANCE than any other means. The tax payers would
save a vast amount of money collected now to support the
paupers of every grade in this community. Let a steady stream
of water seven or eight feet in height fall down directly on the
face of the patient, it will have the same effect as if he was held
under water the same number of feet for the same time; a per-
son cannot breathe when the water is falling down directly in
his mouth any better than he can ten feet under water; it is a
shock to the whole nervous system, and it drives the blood from
the brain, which has been forced up there in many ways, which
causes the patient to lose his proper balance of mind.

1- 3l- 3(-
I speak from my own observation on the spot. I have witnessed
the most cruel and barbarous treatment by a nurse in the hospi-
tal at Pine street that could be inflicted on a human being. The
person was brought to the hospital with the mania a potu, and
put into a cell, strapped on an iron bedstead, with a hard mat-
tress under him—the term familiarly used in the hospital, made
into a spread eagle. The person is stretched out flat on his back,
with a strap around the bedstead, up over the breast of the

The Trial of Ebenezer Haskell 135

victim, and buckled under the bedstead; his legs are pulled wide
apart and strapped to each corner at the foot of the bedstead,
the arms are pulled out straight from the body, and strapped
down under the bedstead, leaving his head scarcely room to
turn one quarter around; in that position a person was kept
three days and three nights; on the fourth night, at 9 o'clock,
death relieved him of his agony.

1903'-E-»

Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, by Daniel Paul
Schreber

The last of the great exorcists in the medieval tradition was Father
Johann Joseph Gassner (1727—1779).1 Born in a mountain village of
western Austria in 1727, and ordained in 1750, Father Gassner began
his career as a country priest in 1758 in a small village in eastern
Switzerland. After a few years of ministry Gassner fell ill with severe
headaches, dizziness, and other symptoms, which became aggra-
vated during preaching, confession, or performance of the Mass. He
believed he was possessed by the Devil and treated himself with
prayer and traditional Catholic exorcism. I

When the symptoms disappeared Gassner assumed the exorcism
had worked and soon he began to practice it on  parishioners. His
reputation as an exorcist developed rapidly and members of other
parishes began coming to him to be exorcized. In 11774, after the suc-
cessful treatment of Countess Maria Von Wolfegg, Gassner acquired
international fame and notoriety. Count Fugger, the prince bishop of
Regensburg, invited Father Gassner to take an honorary office in his
court. The priest consented and left his country parish to take resi-
dence in the town of Ellwagen under the count’s.patronage. There he
became something of a tourist attraction. Crowds of Europeans, both
well and ill, came to see and be treated by Father Gassner. He
exorcized out in the open, for everyone to see, before church
authorities, physicians, nobility, persons of all rank. A notary public
recorded every word and act, and the records were countersigned by
the highest ranking members of the witnessing crowds. In Germany,
Austria, Switzerland, and France, dozens of pamphlets were pub-
lished arguing both for and against his veracity.

In retrospect Gassner can be seen as an important representative of
a dying medieval world view. Scientific advances since the late
Renaissance seemed to prove that the world could be understood,
perhaps even manipulated, by reason. This new world view—which
we call the Enlightenment—-affected not only the intellectual life of
Europe, but the political, social, economic, and religious life as well.

‘Information about Father Gassner is taken from Ellenberger, The Discovery of the
Unconscious, pp. 53-57.

136

Memoirs of My Nervous Illness 137

The Church itself was anxious to put away some of its most egregious
superstitions and errors. The practice of witch-hunting was nearly
over. In England the last execution for witchcraft took place in 1716
when a woman and her child were hanged in Huntington.’ On the
Continent such executions had become quite rare, though a woman
was executed for witchcraft as late as 1782 in Switzerland. The
Church, meanwhile, had made the order of Jesuits a scapegoat for
past inquisitory excesses and suppressed the order in 1773. Talk of
demons, possession, and exorcism had become an embarrassment to
the Church and was generally shunned as a vestige of medieval su-
perstition.

Gassner’ s protector, Count Fugger, was apparently forced to order
a formal inquiry in 1775 after which he advised the priest to select his
patients more carefully. In Munich another inquest was undertaken
by the prince elector Max Joseph of Bavaria. The commission of this
trial invited a young Viennese physician, Anton Mesmer, for con-
sultation. Mesmer claimed Gassner’s successes had nothing to do
with exorcism but that Gassner had mistakenly stumbled on the new
scientific principles of ”animal magnetism.” He demonstrated this

concept to the commission, causing various symptoms, including

convulsions, to appear and disappear in subjects merely by the touch
of a finger. The imperial court at Vienna asked Count Fugger to
dismiss Gassner, which he did, and Gassner retired to the isolated
village of Pandorf. Meanwhile the Pope had ordered his own
investigation of Gassner after which he issued an oblique disclaimer
stating that while the Church still sanctioned exorcism in certain in-
stances, it had to be performed discreetly and strictly according to
established ritual.

”Animal magnetism,” otherwise known as Mesmerism and later
known as hypnotism, was in certain respects Mesmer’s own creation.
He used the same healing modality previously associated with exor-
cism—authoritarian suggestion—-but he described it in secular,
seemingly-scientific terms, in accord with the intellectual demands of
the Enlightenment.3 He theorized that the stars passed their in-
fluence down to earth through a fluid which pervaded everything

2Deutsch, The Mentally III in America, p. 23.

3E11enberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious, pp. 55-57, 62, 63. According to
Ellenberger, the traditions and techniques of the great modern systems of dynamic
psychotherapy (non-somatic healing which involves interaction with unconscious pro-
cesses) have been in existence since ancient times: "a continuous chain can be demon-
strated between exorcism and magnetism, magnetism and hypnotism, hypnotism and
the great modern dynamic systems” (p. vi).

138 DANIEL PAUL SCHREBER

animate and inanimate. One form of the fluid was magnetism,
another electricity, and a third animal magnetism. He spoke of the
third form of this fluid in terms analogous to the recent scientific
theories of electricity: it had poles, streams, discharges, positive and
negative potential, conductors, isolators, and accumulators.4 Equilib-
rium of the animal magnetic fluid insured health, but disequilibrium
was sure to bring illness; Mesmer claimed that he, as a magnetizer,
had the power to restore equilibrium. He went to Paris in 1778 and
created a sensation by producing miraculous cures of psychological
and psychosomatic ailments.

Mesmer would stare into a patient’s eyes, grasp the thumbs, then
pass his hands along the limbs, realigning the invisible magnetic
fluid. He would repeat the process two or three times until the patient
typically went into a ”crisis”—of laughing, crying, minor convul-
sions, or unconsciousness. For group sessions he invented a magne-
tizing machine which he called the baquet. Based on the design of the
recently invented Leyden jar, the baquet was a circular tub filled with
magnetized iron filings that had several projecting iron rods which
his subjects could easily grasp. Mesmer would appear and produce
curative motions of the invisible fluid emanating from the tub by
waving his hands and moving his eyes, adding to the intensity of the
situation with large mirrors that reflected the fluid and with music
from magnetized instruments. From time to time he would play a few
ear-splitting notes on his glass harmonica, a newly invented musical
instrument perfected in America by Benjamin Franklin.

After Mesmer had been in Paris about six years the Académie des
Sciences, the Académie de Médicine, and the Société Royale
appointed committees of prominent scientists to investigate. In-
cluded on the committees were the American ambassador Benjamin
Franklin, the chemist Antoine Lavoisier, the astronomer Jean Sylvain
Bailly, and the physician Joseph Guillotin. Both Lavoisier and Bailly
were beheaded a few years later by a machine that Dr. Guillotin had
introduced in France, but of course no one could foresee that at the
time of the investigation. As it was, there seems to have been little
disagreement among the gentlemen of the investigating committees.
They observed the work of Mesmer’s disciple, Dr; D’Eslon, and found
serious flaws in Mesmer’s claims. When Mesmer and D’Eslon
prompted their subjects to go into crisis by touching magnetized
trees, the doctors noticed that many patients were touching un-

4Ibid., p. 63.

Memoirs of My Nervous Illness 139

magnetized trees and still going into crisis. The committee reported
that it had ”demonstrated by decisive evidence that imagination
without magnetism produces convulsions and that magnetism with-
out imagination produces nothing,” and hence that ”animal magnetic
fluid . . . does not exist and therefore cannot be useful/'5

The rejection of the theory of animal magnetism by those scientific
gentlemen is of some interest because it illustrates an attitude of the
time regarding the ”imagination.” The scientists did not reject animal
magnetism because it had no effect but rather because its effect was
the result of imagination.

The transition from exorcism to magnetism marked the end of
medieval, spiritual psychiatry, but modern psychiatry had not yet
arrived. The nineteenth-century scientific community was preoccu-
pied with the study of matter and appeared oblivious to the impor-
tance of the non-material imagination. Not until the end of the
century did the scientific establishment finally show some curiosity
about animal magnetism, by then called hypnotism, thus finally
embracing the imagination and the mind as entities open to scientific
investigation.

Psychiatry as a science began in the nineteenth century. Although
that particular word was not used until about 1846, the first European
schools of psychiatry were opened early in the century in Paris—at
the Salpétriere in 1817 and at the Bicétre in 1818. Science was the study
of physical matter; medical science was the study of human matter,
the body; so, logically enough, psychiatric science became the study
of gray matter, the brain. There were exceptions: in the first half of the
century four prominent German psychiatrists published theoretical
works emphasizing the significance of psychological factors in certain
forms of madness or mental imbalance as well as the importance of
psychological treatment.6 But by the 1850s German psychiatry had
fallen almost wholly under the dominance of positivism, which fol-
lowed the models of physics and chemistry and rejected speculation
in favor of factual knowledge gained by experimentation.7

German psychiatry focused on the anatomy of the brain and thus a
somatic View of madness. In France the isolation and description of
general paresis as a disease of the central nervous system in which

5As quoted by Zilboorg, A History of Medical Psychology, p. 345.
6Ellenberger, Tlze Discovery of the Unconscious, pp. 211-14.
7Ibid., p. 225.

140 DANIEL PAUL SCHREBER

purely somatic changes could be seen under a microscope and in
which the origin was found to be in a comprehensible physical event-
the contraction of the syphilitic spirochete during sexual intercourse-—
lent a good deal of weight to the somatic beliefs -of both French and
Gennan psychiatry. The French physician Jean Pierre Falret, who
made major discoveries regarding general paresis, stated what seems
to have been the majority opinion in 1822:

I believe firmly that in all cases, without exception, one could find in
the mentally sick appreciable lesions in the brain or its membranes;
these lesions are sufficiently marked and sufficiently constant to
account satisfactorily for all the various intellectual and affective dis-
turbances in insanity.8 F

Typically the ”mind” was considered to be accessible to scientific
study only when it was linked to the brain and spinal cord and
nerves, only when it was a segment of the body, the soma, and could
be looked at through a microscope or cut with a scalpel. That portion
of the mind which could not be located in the brain or spinal cord or
nerves might be the ”soul” or psyche, but whatever it was, it was not
interesting to official psychiatry. T T

In philosophy and literature, however, the theme of the ”uncon-
scious” was gradually emerging. Lancelot Law Whyte has shown that
during the two hundred years between 1680 and 1880, well over fifty
important figures of the European intellectual community contrib-
uted to a cumulatively developing concept of the unconscious.9 By
the end of the nineteenth century Nietzsche's vision of man as a
self-deceiver, driven by instinctual, irrational forces of the uncon-
scious, was commonly accepted. Freud remarked in 1925 that for a
long time he had avoided reading Nietzsche to keep his mind clear of
external influences but that he at last recognized Nietzsche as a
philosopher ”whose guesses and intuitions often agree in the most
astonishing way with the laborious findings of psychoanalysis.” 10

While official psychiatry was turning increasingly toward a somatic
view of madness, and while the mysteries of the unconscious con-
tinued to be a subject for the ”guesses and intuitions” of philo-
sophers, a few physicians and lay healers confirmed to practice the
fonn of dynamic psychotherapy known as magnetism and later called

3Zilboorg, A History of Medical Psychology, p. 398.
9Whyte, The Unconscious Before Freud, p. 63.
"Freud, An Autobiographical Study, p. 114.

Memoirs of My Nervous Illness 141

hypnotism. But what the philosophers of the unconscious lacked,
and what the early hypnotists lacked, was a sense of scientific meth-
odology: the application of measurement, quantification, and
systematic analysis. Freud's statement about Nietzsche makes the
difference clear: Nietzsche's ”guesses and intuitions” are in amazing
agreement with the ”laborious findings” of psychoanalysis. Whether
Freud's sense of superiority for his own theory is wholly justified is
not the point. The point is that while Nietzsche and other philo-
sophers speculated, Freud began the tradition of the systematic,
quasi-scientific analysis of the products of the imagination.

Freud received his earliest professional training in neurophysiol-
ogy. His first work was in Ernst Briicl<e’s physiology laboratory study-
ing the spinal cord of the ammocoetes petromyzon and later studying
the medulla oblongata of the human brain. After leaving Briicke’s
laboratory Freud worked at the Institute of Cerebral Anatomy of
Vienna and published several papers on the system and nuclear ori-
gins of the medulla oblongata. He gradually established a reputation
in Vienna as a diagnostician of organic nervous diseases and in the
spring of 1885 was appointed lecturer on neuropathology in Vienna.

Up to this point Freud's interests and studies were not so different
from his scientific peers. Then he became interested in hypnotism.
His first serious interest may have been brought about by discussions
with a prominent colleague, Dr. Josef Breuer, who seemed to have
unusual success with the treatment of a young female patient, Bertha
Pappenheim, later known in a published account as ”Anna O.” In the
autumn of 1885 Freud left for Paris to attend Charcot’ s lectures on
hypnotism and hysteria at the Salpétriére. Upon returning to Vienna
in 1886 he settled down to private practice as a specialist in ”nervous
diseases,” relying on hypnotism as his principal therapeutic tech-
nique. Even though the psychiatric establishment was at the time
contemptuous of hypnotism, Freud found ”something positively
seductive” about working with it.“ In 1889 he went to Berheim’s
school at Nancy—the only other school of hypnotism in Europe. He
was later to recall: ”I was a spectator of Berheim’s astonishing experi-
ments upon his hospital patients, and I received the profoundest
impression of the possibility that there could be powerful mental
processes which nevertheless remained hidden from the conscious-
ness of men.” 12

“Ibid., p. 29.
12Ibid., p. 30.

142 DANIEL PAUL SCHREBER

Freud continued using hypnotism until one of his most responsive
hysteria patients came out of hypnosis and spontaneously threw her
arms around his neck. For Freud the incident seemed to reveal the
real nature of hypnotism ”in the crudest light.” *3 He abandoned the
technique and began using a new one that he called psychoanalysis.
He insisted that the only vestigial remnant of hypnotism was the
couch. But, in fact, he also maintained the central technique he had
developed in hypnotherapy: the exploration of the unconscious.
Only now he made the patient do more of the work by no longer
suggesting the direction of the unconscious exploration but rather
allowing the patient to investigate unconscious material freely by
what he called free association.

Freud insisted that psychoanalysis was a science and that his dis-
coveries, therapy, and theories were made by using scientific
methods. ”I have always felt it as a gross injustice that people always
refused to treat psychoanalysis like any other science,” he wrote in
1925.14 But his science was, for the first time, a science of the psyche.
The ”imagination” that those illustrious scientific gentlemen of Paris
chose to dismiss in 1784 now became impossible to ignore.

The development of psychiatry in the nineteenth century spawned
its own specialized journalism. Between 1818 and 1893 nearly fifty
psychiatric journals appeared, and for the first time scientific works of
all sorts began to be written in the vernacular, which greatly ex-
panded the potential audience.“ 8

Case histories have been a part of medical literature since the time
of Hippocrates, but it was not until Freud and psychoanalysis that

1 case histories and autobiographical material containing manifesta-

tions of the unconscious became important as documentation—and
open to scientific scrutiny and analysis. Charcot had been the first to
try to analyze art in psychological terms. Freud continued that con-
cept and also turned to literature, biography, autobiography, and
mythology. Further, through the popular dispersal of psychoanalysis,
Freud made such analyses a common intellectual exercise in the
twentieth century. 8

Around the turn of the century Freud published several case histo-
ries including his analyses of psychiatric patients. In 1911 he published

‘3Ibid., p. 49.
”Ibid., p. 111.
‘5Zilboorg, A History of Medical Psychology, p. 383.

Memoirs of My Nervous Illness 143

the first analysis of an autobiographical account of madness,
”Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of
Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides).” The autobiography on which
Freud's article was based, Daniel Paul Schreber’s Denkwiirdigkeiten
eines Nervenkranken (1903), translated as Memoirs of My Nervous Illness
(1955), was originally conceived by its author partly as an attempt at
self—justification but mostly as a work of prophecy, a kind of spiritual
autobiography. It aroused, however, much psychiatric interest. Re-
viewers at the time of its publication described the book as ”valuable
from the scientific medical point of view.” Others said it ”must be
called perfect by the wel1—informed physician,” and should be ”re-
commended to all psychiatrists.” 16 Freud's 1911 essay insured the
preservation of the Memoirs, and perhaps helped create a demand for
similar subjective descriptions of madness. Schreber’s Memoirs is the
first autobiographical account of the experience of madness regarded
as psychiatric documentation—the earliest ”psychiatric auto-
biography.” 17

Daniel Paul Schreber was Senatspriisident, or presiding judge, of the
supreme court of the kingdom of Saxony, in Germany, at a relatively
early age. He was a man of superior intellect and education. He came
from a prominent—indeed, famous—German family. Aside from re-
ports and descriptions of almost a decade spent in an asylum, how-
ever, there is actually very little information about his life. He was born
around 1842. He married but was childless. And, according to an
unconfirmed report, he died in 1911.

“Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs, p. 6. Unless otherwise noted, background informa-
tion on Schreber has been taken from introductory notes by Macalpine and Hunter.

17Definition: the psychiatric autobiography is an authentic autobiographical account
by a mad person or a person who was fonnerly mad that has as its main purpose the
depiction of inner experience during a state of madness. In some basic ways the
psychiatric autobiography might be considered merely a modern continuation of the
earlier tradition of the spiritual autobiography. Often, of course, the spiritual auto-
biography deals with supposedly ”normal” inner experience, while the psychiatric
autobiography, by definition, deals with ”abnormal” inner experience. The crucial
difference lies in reference and terminology: the psychiatric autobiography deals with
inner experience from a psychiatric rather than a spiritual frame of reference, using
psychiatric terminology. The Memoirs, however, differs from the typical psychiatric
autobiography in some important ways. For one thing, most psychiatric autobiog-
raphies have had a large lay audience, while the Memoirs has had mostly a professional
audience. Also, unlike authors of typical psychiatric autobiographies, Schreber himself
thought of his work as a prophetic spiritual autobiography. Perhaps it is best to consid-
er the Memoirs as a historical turning point.

xiv Introduction

written about the experience of being mad or being a mental
patient, from a period of more than five centuries. I have seen fit
to include historical background and commentary of my own;
but I have tried, mostly, to have mad people and mental patients
themselves address the most serious, difficult, and complex
issues.

Is there meaning in madness? Can we know it? What is mad-
ness? What was madness? What is the history of madness? What
is the history of how people have seen madness? Is it a disease,
or is it simply a private religion, a little harmless deviance of
thought and action? Which is better, institution or no institu-
tion? Which is better, psychiatry or no psychiatry? Are we all, in
our own obscure ways, mad, and is madness really so close to
sanity?

Experts and authorities have addressed these questions for
centuries, with confused results. It is time to hear from those
who, by experience, are more closely connected to the issues-
mad people, mental patients, themselves. Perhaps they are less
confused.

144 DANIEL PAUL SCHREBER

He was hospitalized for ”severe hypochondriasis" in 1884 at the
Psychiatric Clinic of the University of Leipzig under the care of Dr.
Paul Flechsig, but he quickly recovered and was discharged in June
1885. In 1893 he became ill again, but this time the illness quickly
became more serious and soon developed into what Schreber said
was a ”nervous illness” combined with unusual contact with the
supernatural world. His physician thou ht the illness was a ”para-
noid form” of ’’hallucinatory insanity.” 1 For several months he was
again under Dr. Flechsig’s care at the University-Clinic in Leipzig, but
in June 1894 Dr. Flechsig had taken him to Sonnenstein Asylum,
Germany’ s first public asylum, near Dresden, where he remained for
almost a decade. For the last three years of his confinement Schreber
worked on legal proceedings for his own release. After two appeals,
and an excellent self-defense in court of his right to freedom under
the law, Schreber finally won his freedom. He left Sonnenstein Asy-
lum in 1903. ,

Dr. Weber, the superintendent of the asylum, had reported in 1899
that at the beginning of Schreber’ s madness the patient had com-
plained of hypochondriacal symptoms, but had quickly developed
ideas of persecution. Upon his transfer to S-ongnenstein he was stiff,
unmoving, and stared into space with a frightened look. He did not
respond to questions and demanded to be left alone. By November
1894 he seemed more accessible, moved around a little, and began
speaking, ”although in an abrupt and somewhat staccato manner.”
Gradually Schreber became more active. He still complained of var-
ious pains and bodily ailments, but at the same time he became
increasingly noisy and prone to attacks of laughter, shouting, ”bellow-
ing,” and pounding on the piano. He would stand in the asylum
garden for long periods of time staring directly into the sun, grimac-
ing, and raving threats at it. Sometimes he raved while in his room,
calling out that Dr. Fleschig, his first physician, was a ”soul murder-
er.” He shouted abuse so loudly from the window of his room, even
late at night, that the townspeople finally met and complained. In
June 1896 it was decided to have him sleep in a padded isolation cell at
night. During this period another habit began: he was often seen in
his room half-undressed, insisting that he was developing female
breasts. Gradually his noctural outbursts diminished so that in De-
cember 1898, after two and a half years of sleeping in a padded cell,

“Schreber, Memoirs, p. 271.

Memoirs of My Nervous Illness 145

Schreber was allowed to sleep again in his own room. Although some
of this behavior continued, Dr. Weber was able to remark one year
later that ”President Schreber now appears neither confused, nor
psychically inhibited, nor markedly affected in his intelligence.”
Nevertheless, according to Weber, Schreber remained severely mad.
His noticeable symptoms had simply become internalized: ”the pa-
tient is filled with pathological ideas, which are woven into a com-
plete system, more or less fixed.” 19

Dr. Weber went on to describe Schreber’s ”pathological ideas” in
some detail, but much of his information he simply took from Schre-
ber’s writings. Dr. Weber, after all, had firsthand knowledge only of
Schreber’ s outer behavior. Schreber alone knew what was happening
in his ”pathological” internal world. Unfortunately his Memoirs
emanate a great bubbling incoherence, consisting basically of descrip-
tions of hallucination, confusion, and hypochodriasis, and Schreber’s
interpretations of these experiences.

When Schreber was beset by hallucinations of voices and visions,
he witnessed alternations of the sun and stars, mysterious illumina-
tions in the sky, a bright halo around his head, and the spontaneous
generation of insects. He constantly heard voices, usually disem-
bodied, though sometimes apparently coming from birds. Especially
in the first year, his ordinary time sense vanished, and in its place he
had a sense of living in greatly expanded time. The passage of a few
months seemed like centuries.

Schreber referred to his numerous hypochondriacal symptoms as
”bodily miracles.” And they do indeed have the aura of the miracu-
lous about them. Once he was given a different heart. His lungs were
often subjected to violent attacks, his ribs were sometimes smashed,
and at times his whole chest would be compressed, destroying his
ability to breath. His stomach could be taken away entirely, and his
gullet and intestines were often torn or ”miracled” away. Pain was
directed at his seminal cord, and his abdomen seemed to be putrified
so badly that he feared his entire body might rot away. All of his
muscles were subject to attacks: when he wanted to play the piano or
write there were attempts to paralyze his fingers. When he wanted to
walk, there were miracles against his knee-caps. There were miracles
against his eyelids, causing them to open and close at inopportune
moments, and very threatening miracles were directed against his

‘9Ibid., pp. 269-86.

146 DANIEL PAUL SCHREBER

head, as well as his spine, which he felt were mainly meant as attacks
on his ability to reason. There were attempts to draw the spinal cord
out of his body and attempts to draw the nerves out of his head. His
skull was continually sawed apart in various directions. The vibratory
ability of the nerves of his brain was attacked, and even his private
thoughts were manipulated miraculously: not allowed the ”natural
right of mental relaxation,” he was driven to think compulsively.
Finally there was the terrifying ”bellowing miracle,” the uncontroll-
able attacks of crying out. i

The one miracle that seems to have been quite crucial to Schreber’s
experience was the ”unmanning,” or being. transformed into a
woman. Twice in the early days of his madness, Schreber was certain
that he had received a ”female genital organ, although a poorly de-
veloped one.” His body began to look more and more feminine, and
his skin began to take on a feminine softness. Some hairs of his beard
and mustache were being removed by miracle. His body was becom-
ing smaller. And at times, his penis actually began to retract. For
almost two years he desperately fought the unmanning: ”I sup-
pressed every feminine impulse.” By November 1895, however, the
change seemed impossible to ignore. Schreber at last gave in and
chose to cultivate femininity. By 1900 the transformation seemed to
him so near completion that Schreber offered to submit his body to a
medical examination to prove to others the truth of his experience.

That menagerie of voices, visions, and bodily miracles was terrify-
ing and confusing to Schreber, especially during the first year or two.
It was probably a great relief to him when he eventually began to sort
out some meaning from it all, to develop what others would call a
”delusional system.” The voices seemed to give him information,
sometimes straightforward, but often oblique and cryptic. He listened
closely to the voices, and tried to make sense out of them.

He concluded that the voices and visions were indications of a
contact with the spirit world and with God and that he had been
singled out to have a special relationship with God. He concluded
that the various miracles directed against his body and mind were
part of a systematic cosmic program of persecution that began when
Dr. Fleschig, or perhaps an ancestor of Dr. Fleschig, had tried to
commit ”soul murder” against him or one ofhis ancestors. Schreber
realized that Dr. Fleschig’s soul had raised itself up to the level of
God, without the death and purification process that ordinary souls
go through. F1eschig’s soul entered into a conspiracy with many of
the souls near God to commit soul murder, to destroy Schreber’s soul

Memoirs of My Nervous Illness 147

and use it selfishly, against the intended order of the world. Instead
of succeeding at soul murder, however, Fleschig’s soul caused a ”ner-
vous illness” that brought Schreber into unusually close nerve contact
with the world of souls. Souls who were in God's proximity were so
attracted to Schreber’s abnormally excited nervous system—caused
by his nervous illness—that they were actually being pulled away
from God and drawn toward Schreber’s head and body. He could
hear their cries of ”He1p! Help!” hundreds of times a day as they were
swept into the powerful currents of his nerves, drawn fatally toward
him, striking him in the form of little men just before they dissolved
into his head and body. Stolen from God, taken over by Schreber,
they added even more nervous attraction to his system. Eventually
Schreber’ s nervous system reached such a high state of excitement
that God himself was in danger of being pulled apart. God was being
drawn into the vicinity of the earth, looming dangerously close.
Schreber had for a time anticipated the end of the world, due to the
growing attraction between himself and God. That catastrophic situa-
tion quickly degenerated into a war between God and Schreber——
with most of the aggression coming from God. God was compelled to
stop the seepage of his nerves into Schreber’s body, and so he
attacked, raining down on Schreber those numerous painful miracles
designed to be attacks ”on my life, my bodily integrity, my manliness
and my reason."

Schreber considered the most serious of the attacks to be the assault
on his ”manliness,” the repeated attempts at ”unmanning." Schreber
had first assumed that God meant to transform him into a woman for
the ignominious purpose of sexual abuse, ”to hand over my body in
the manner of a female harlot.” But when, in November 1895, the
transformation was almost complete, Schreber developed a new
theory: ”But now I could see beyond doubt that the Order of the
World imperiously demanded my unmanning . . . and that therefore
it was common sense that nothing was left to me but reconcile myself to
the thought of being transformed into a woman.” Schreber concluded
that in his transformation lay the hope of doomed humanity. Once he
was at last changed into a woman, God would be able to impregnate
him and thus renew the human race with a nation of Schrebers.

Schreber’s Memoirs have probably stimulated more discussion and
analysis than any other autobiographical account of madness. Eugen
Bleuler read the Memoirs and made several references to it in his 1911
study of schizophrenia. Freud also became interested in the Memoirs

148 DANIEL PAUL SCHREBER

and in 1911 published a psychoanalytic interpretation of Schreber’ s
madness.

Freud based his analysis upon the contents of the delusional sys-
tem. He considered that the madness was simply a psychic reac-
tion to homosexual feelings at a time of crisis. At a basic and unre-
solved infantile level the original object of Schreber’s homosexual
love may have been his father, but by the time of his madness the love
object had become his first physician, Dr. Fleschig. Since those
homosexual feelings were forbidden, he had to try to repress the
feelings, to hold them back from conscious awareness. When the
attraction became too obvious to ignore, he used a second technique
for defending himself from the forbidden impulse: he projected his
attraction for Dr. Fleschig. That is, he assumed that the attraction was
not originating from within himself but from an exterior source-
namely from Dr. Fleschig. He further defended himself by assuming
the attraction was hate, rather than love. Rather than having to cope
with the intolerable message ”I love him,” he was able to assume the
far more comfortable message ”he hates me.” That maneuver may
have worked for a time, but the forbidden homosexual interest con-
tinued. At last it was necessary to erect yet another defensive system:
since the interest could no longer be ignored, Schreber at last admit-
ted it to conscious awareness, then denied the most threatening part.
Making a leap into further depths of fantasy, Schreber convinced
himself that homosexual impulses, which would in ordinary cir-
cumstances be degrading and wrong, in certain extraordinary cir-
cumstances could be not only acceptable but necessary. Schreber
reasoned at last that his feminine impulse, his homosexuality, was
fully consonant with the order of things, was due to his special situa-
tion in the universe, and was after all not really love for a man but
uncontrollable attraction for God. It was demanded from him—as a
duty for the good of the universe and mankind.

Freud, it is important to recall, never actually worked with the most
severely disturbed patients. Patients who came to his office were
generally troubled or neurotic but were never asylum inmates. In
fact Freud felt that mad people were inaccessible to psychoanalysis
because they were incapable of ”transference.” Nonetheless, many
psychoanalysts accepted his 1911 essay as the classic explanation of
paranoia, and some later analysts u held the essay as the definitive
explanation of madness in general? Not until 1953 did anyone pub-

‘°Ibid., pp. 10-11.

Memoirs of My Nervous Illness 149

lish serious criticism of Freud's analysis of Schreber. In that year Ida
Macalpine and Richard Hunter pointed out that although Freud
seemed to explain the structure of the delusional system, he ignored
the original symptoms: the fantastic hypochondriasis and the massive
hallucinations. They concluded that those original symptoms were in
fact at the heart of the madness and were somatic in origin. What
Freud considered to be conflict over homosexuality was really a reac-
tion to the emergence of ”archaic asexual procreation fantasies with
. . . loss of sex differentiation."21

In 1955 Macalpine and Hunter published the first English transla-
tion of the Memoirs. The appearance of that translation inspired
several new analyses of Schreber’ s madness, including Morton
Schatzman’s Soul Murder, which contains material about Schreber’ s
father.

The father, Dr. Daniel Gottleib Schreber, was a famous physician
and a lecturer at Leipzig University. He published several books on
pediatrics and social reform, promoted the therapeutic use of gym-
nastics and athletics, and came to be considered the founder of ther-
apeutic gymnastics in Germany. His influence was significant and
lasting. By 1958 over two million German people belonged to societies
for exercise and gardening known as Schreber Associations, and
small allotment gardens in Germany are called Schrebergiirten, after
him.” His book, Medical Indoor Gymnastics, went through nearly forty
editions and was translated into seven languages.

He saw as the purpose of chfld-rearing the higher development of
the human race. He believed in strict discipline, control and exter-
mination of bad impulses, unconditional submission to authority,
absolute mastery over emotion, and absolute control of sexual im-
pulse. In his writings he recommended cold baths for children over
six months to induce physical toughness, cold sleeping quarters for
children beyond six or seven years old, visual exercises to improve
the eyes, and rigid posture while sitting, standing, or sleeping. He
felt that in order to learn self-control, children should not eat between
meals and should adhere to a strict diet and time schedule, while
children under the age of seventeen must be forced to eat all the food
given them. He recommended posture exercises to be done twice a
day, before breakfast and supper. The parent and educator, he
advised, should closely watch the child for any signs of unwanted

“Macalpine and Hunter, ”The Sclueber Case,” p. 368.
zzschatzman, Soul Murder, p. 16.

150 DANIEL PAUL SCHREBER

traits, and spontaneity should be kept within narrow limits. The child
should not be allowed to play with more than one toy at a time. Even
babies could be taught self-control by being forbidden food while
their nurses are eating. T

Dr. Schreber wrote that children should learn to use their limbs
equally, to prevent ”one-sidedness.” He devised several means to
insure good posture such as his exercise to fight stooped head and
shoulders in which the child practices “bridging” his body between
two chairs, feet on one, head on the other. ”Schreber’ s straight-
holder,” forced children to sit properly: an iron afossbar clamped to a
table or desk, serving as a sort of fence at the upper chest to prevent
leaning forward. He invented a spring-tensed shoulder strap to
habituate good posture in children. A ”head-holder” attached the
child's hair to his underwear so that if he did not keep his head
straight his hair would be pulled. Schreber’s unique chin band,
attached by straps around the head, ensured the correct growth of
jaw and teeth.

The father’ s ideas of child-rearing were, of course, practiced on his
children—with less than optimal results. Although little is known
about his three daughters, it is known that both Dr. Schreber’s sons
went mad. Daniel Paul's only brother, Daniel Gustav, was said to
have suffered a ”progressive psychosis.” He shot and killed himself
at the age of thirty-eight. Schatzman concludesthat Schreber’s ”ner-
vous illness” was nothing but a direct symbolicresponse, late in life,
to the remembered tyrannies of his father.

The following excerpts from Schreber’s Memoirs were chosen for
their general interest and for their significance? to the theoretical con-
troversies about the book. First, Schreber likens the origin of his ner-
vous illness to a soul murder committed some time in the past. Next,
he describes one battle in the continuous war between himself and
the hostile cosmos: playing the piano enables him temporarily to
ward off the ”nonsensical twaddle” of the souls’ voices, but hostile
souls and ”rays” from God rain down curses. Once the original
absurd premises are expressed, the discussion that follows conveys a
perfect sense of the rules of logic and rationality. In the third excerpt,
Schreber faces a crucial moment of decision: he concludes that his
unmanning is not part of a malevolent design but is instead con-
sonant with the ”Order of the World.” That conclusion is, of course,
central to Freud's analysis of the madness. Finally, Schreber describes
an aspect of his experience which has been ignored by the theorists:
the appearance of thought disorder, the ”compulsive thinking” and
especially the ”system of not-finishing-a-sentence.” The passage is

Memoirs of My Nervous Illness 151

the clearest description found to date of an experience Bleuler called
the ”disorder of association” present in schizophrenia.”

 :

THIS "MIRACULOUS STRUCTURE" has recently suffered a rent,
intimately connected with my personal fate. But it is impossible
even for me to present the deeper connections in a way which
human understanding can fully grasp. My personal experiences
enable me to lift the veil only partially; the rest is intuition and
conjecture. I want to say by way of introduction that the leading
roles in the genesis of this development, the first beginnings of
which go back perhaps as far as the eighteenth century, were
played on the one hand by the names of Flechsig and Schreber
(probably not specifying any individual member of these fami-
lies), and on the other by the concept of soul murder.

To start with the latter: the idea is widespread in the folk-lore
and poetry of all peoples that it is somehow possible to take
possession of another person's soul in order to prolong one’s
life at another soul's expense, or to secure some other advan-
tages which outlast death. One has only to think for example of
Goethe's Faust, Lord Byron’s Manfred, Weber's Frieschiitz, etc.
Commonly, however, the main role is supposed to be played by
the Devil, who entices a human being into selling his soul to
him by means of a drop of blood, etc. for some worldly advan-
tages; yet it is difficult to see what the Devil was to do with a
soul so caught, if one is not to assume that torturing a soul as an
end in itself gave the Devil special pleasure.

Although the latter idea must be relegated to the realm of
fable because the Devil as a power inirnical to God does not exist
at all according to the above, yet the wide dissemination of the
legend motif of soul murder or soul theft gives food for thought;
it is hardly likely that such ideas could have been formed by so
many peoples without any basis in fact. The voices which talk to
me have daily stressed ever since the beginning of my contact
with God (rnid-March 1894) the fact that the crisis that broke
upon the realms of God was caused by somebody having com-

23See Appendix H.

152 DANIEL PAUL SCHREBER

mitted soul murder; at first Flechsig was named as the instigator of
soul murder but of recent times in an attempt to reverse the facts
I myself have been ”represented” as the one who had commit-
ted soul murder. I therefore concluded that at one time some-
thing had happened between perhaps earlier generations of the
Flechsig and Schreber families which amounted to soul murder;
in the same way as through further developments, at the time
when my nervous illness seemed almost incurable, I gained the
conviction that soul murder had been attempted on me by
somebody, albeit unsuccessfully.
3(- 36 3(-

Playing the piano in particular was and still is of immense
value to me; I must confess that I find it  to imagine how
I could have borne the compulsive thinking and all that goes
with it during these five years had I not been able to play the
piano. During piano playing the nonsensical twaddle of the
voices which talk to me is drowned. Next to physical exercises it
is one of the most efficient forms of the so-called not-thinking-
of-anything-thought; but again one wanted to deprive me of it
by introducing the "musical-not-thinking-of-anything-thought"
as it was called in the soul-language. The frays always at least
have a visual impression from my hands  from my reading
the score, and every attempt at ”representir§g” me by the ”crea-
tion of a false feeling”and suchlike is doomed to end in failure
because of the real feeling one can put into piano playing. Piano
playing therefore was and still is one of the main objects of
curses. 

The difficulties which were put in my way defy description.
My fingers are paralysed, the direction of gaze is changed in
order to prevent my finding the correct keys, my fingers are
diverted on to wrong keys, the tempo is quickened by making
the muscles of my fingers move prematurely; all these were and
still are daily occurrences. Even the pianoitself was frequently
the object of miracles and strings were broken (luckily much
more rarely in recent years). In 1897 alone the bill for broken
piano strings amounted to no less than 86 Marks.

This is one of the few instances which I believe furnishes
sufficient proof to convince other people  the reality of the
miracles which I maintain happen. Superficial judgment might

Memoirs of My Nervous Illness 153

lead some to assume that I myself have caused the piano strings
to snap by senseless banging on the piano; this was for instance
my wife's repeatedly stated opinion, possibly having heard it
from the physicians. In reply I maintain—and I am convinced
that every expert will support me in this—that it is altogether
impossible to snap the strings of a piano merely by banging on
the keys, however violently. The small hammers linked with the
keys only lightly touch the strings, and could never strike them
sufficiently hard to break them. Let anyone try to hit the keys as
hard as he likes, even with a hammer or a log of wood; the
keyboard may perhaps be broken to pieces but he will never be
able to break a string. Strings have broken much less frequently
in recent years—it still happens occasionally—because the rays’
(God's) intent towards me has become less unfriendly (more
about this later) owing to my constantly increasing soul-
voluptuousness; the rays were also forced by still more un-
pleasant conditions (even for them) in particular by the so-called
“bellowing”, to consider piano playing the most congenial past-
time for all concerned.
1- 31- X-

The month of November 1895 marks an important time in the
history of my life and in particular in my own ideas of the
possible shaping of my future. I remember the period distinctly;
it coincided with a number of beautiful autumn days when
there was a heavy morning mist on the Elbe. During that time
the signs of a transformation into a woman became so marked
on my body, that I could no longer ignore the imminent goal at
which the whole development was aiming. In the immediately
preceding nights my male sexual organ might actually have
been retracted had I not absolutely set my will against it, still
following the stirring of my sense of manly honour; so near
completion was the miracle. Soul-voluptuousness had become
so strong that I myself received the impression of a female body,
first on my anns and hands, later on my legs, bosom, buttocks
and other parts of my body. I will discuss details in the next
chapter.

Several days’ observations of these events sufficed to change
the direction of my will completely. Until then I still considered
it possible that, should my life not have fallen victim to one of

A Mad People's History of Madness

154 DANIEL PAUL SCHREBER

the innumerable menacing miracles before, it would eventually
be necessary for me to end it by suicide; apart from suicide the
only possibility appeared to be some other horrible end for me,
of a kind unknown among human beings. But now I could see
beyond doubt that the Order of the World imperiously de-
manded my unmanning, whether I personally liked it or not,
and that therefore it was common sense that nothing was left to
me but reconcile myself to the thought of being transformed
into a woman. Nothing of course could be envisaged as a fur-
ther consequence of unmanning but fertilization by divine rays for
the purpose of creating new human beings. My change of will
was facilitated by my not believing at that time that apart from
myself a real mankind existed; on the contrary I thought all the
human shapes I saw were only ”fleeting and improvised”, so
that there could be no question of any ignominy being attached
to unmanning. It is true however that those rays which were
intent on ”forsaking” me and which for that purpose wanted to
destroy my reason, did not fail to make a hypocritical appeal to
my sense of manly honour; some of the phrases, since repeated
innumerable times whenever soul—voluptuousness appeared,
were: “Are you not ashamed in front of your wife?”, or still
more vulgarlyz ”Fancy a person who was a Senatspriisident allow-
ing himself to be f. . . .d.” But however repellent these voices,
however often I had occasion to air my just indignation in one
way or another during the thousand-fold repetition of these
phrases, I did not allow myself to be diverted from that be-
haviour which I had come to recognize as essential and curative
for all parties—myself and the rays.

Since then I have wholeheartedly inscribed the cultivation of
femininity on my banner, and I will continue to do so as far as
consideration of my environment allows, whatever other people
who are ignorant of the supernatural reasons may think of me. I
would like to meet the man who, faced with the choice of either
becoming a demented human being in male habitus or a spirited
woman, would not prefer the latter. Such and only such is the
issue for me. The pursuit of my previous profession, which I
loved wholeheartedly, every other aim of manly ambition, and
every other use of my intellectual powers in the service of man-
kind, are now all closed to me through the way circumstances

Memoirs of My Nervous Illness 155

have developed; even communication with my wife and rela-
tives is denied me apart from occasional visits or exchange of
letters. I must follow a healthy egoism, unperturbed by the
judgment of other people, which prescribes for me the cultiva-
tion of femininity in a manner to be described more fully later. In
this way only am I able to make my physical condition bearable
during the day and at night—at least in some measure—and
obtain the sleep necessary for the recuperation of my nerves;
high-grade voluptuousness eventually passes into sleep—maybe this
is even known to medical science. Conducting myself in this
manner I serve at the same time the express interest of the rays,
that is God Himself.
36 >l- 3(-

In the previous chapters I described the changes in my out-
ward life during the past years and the forms the battle of anni-
hilation assumed which divine rays led against me. I will now
add some more about the forms—also vastly changed——of the
constant compulsive thinking. Compulsive thinking has been de-
fined in Chapter V as having to think continually; this con-
travenes man's natural right of mental relaxation, of temporary
rest from mental activity through thinking nothing, or as the
expression goes in the basic language, it disturbs the “basis” of
a human being. My nerves are influenced by the rays to vibrate
corresponding to certain human words; their choice therefore is
not subject to my own will, but is due to an influence exerted on
me from without. From the beginning the system of not-finishing
a-sentence prevailed, that is to say the vibrations caused in my
nerves and the words so produced contain not mainly finished
thoughts, but unfinished ideas, or only fragments of ideas,
which my nerves have to supplement to make up the sense. It is
in the nature of nerves that if unconnected words or started
phrases are thrown into them, they automatically attempt to
complete them to finished thoughts satisfactory to the human
mind.

The system of not-finishing-a-sentence became more and
more prevalent in the course of years, the more the souls lacked
own thoughts. In particular, for years single conjunctions or
adverbs have been spoken into my nerves thousands of times;
these ought only to introduce clauses, but it is left to my nerves

156 DANIEL PAUL SCHREBER

to complete them in a manner satisfactory to a thinking mind.
Thus for years I have heard daily in hundredfold .repetition
incoherent words spoken into my nerves without any context,
such as ”Why not?”, ”Why, if”, ”Why, because I”, "Be it”,
"With respect to him” (that is to say that something or other has
to be thought or said with respect to myself); further an abso-
lutely senseless ”Oh” thrown into my nerves; finally certain
fragments of sentences which were earlier on expressed com-
pletely; as for instance

1. ”Now I shall”,

2. ”You were to”,

3. ”I shall”,

4. ”It will be”,

5. ”This of course was”,

6. ”Lacl<ing now is”,
etc. In order to give the reader some idea of the original mean-
ing of these incomplete phrases I will add the way they used to
be completed, but are now omitted and left to be completed by
my nerves. The phrases ought to have 

1. Now I shall resign myself to being stupid;

2. You were to be represented as denying God, as given to
voluptuous excesses, etc. ;

3. I shall have to think about that first;

4. It will be done now, the joint of pork;

5. This of course was too much from the-soul's point of view;

6. Lacking now is only the leading idea, that is—we, the
rays, have no thoughts.

The rather tasteless phrase about the joint of pork (number 4) is
due to myself having used years ago the figure of speech ”done
like a joint of pot ” in the nerve-language. This phrase was
seized on and became a constantly recurring part of the speech-
material. The ”joint of pork” I was to refer to myself: it was
meant to express that I was done, i.e. that my power of resis-
tance against the attacks on my reason by the rays must by now
be exhausted.

The purpose of not-finishing-a-sentence is consistent with
God's attitude to me throughout: to prevent dissolution in my

Memoirs of My Nervous Illness 157

body which would necessarily result from its attraction. While
conditions prevailed which were at least somehow in conso-
nance with the Order of the World, that is before tying-to-rays
and tying-to-celestial-bodies was started (compare Chapter IX),
a momentary uniform feeling was enough to make the freely
suspended souls jump down from the sky into my mouth, thus
ending their independent existence; an event, as mentioned in
Chapter VII, page 83, I actually experienced repeatedly. But
mere ”intellectual deliberation” had the same effect; whenever
expressed in a grammatically complete sentence, the rays would
be led straight to me, and entering my body (though capable of
withdrawing) temporarily increase its soul—voluptuousness.
Not-finishing-a-sentence has apparently the effect that the rays
are, as it were, held up half way, and could therefore withdraw
before having added to soul-voluptuousness in my body; but
even this does not permanently prevent the attraction com-
pletely; it only shows it down.

It is hard to give a picture of the mental strain the compulsive
thinking imposed on me particularly after it had become so
much worse, and what mental torture I had to suffer. During the
first years my nerves indeed seemed irresistibly compelled to
continue each started clause to the satisfaction of the human
mind, much as in ordinary human intercourse an answer is
regularly given to somebody’s question.

I will give an example to illustrate how such a need is inherent
in the nature of human nerves. Consider the case of parents or
teachers being present during a school examination of their chil-
dren. If they follow the examination attentively they will auto-
matically answer every question in their mind, perhaps only in
the form: ”I am not at all sure whether the children will know
this”. Of course there is no mental compulsion for parents or
teachers, they have only to divert their attention from the pro-
ceeding examination towards something else in their environ-
ment to spare their nerves this strain. This is the essential differ-
ence between this example and my case. The questions or
querying particles spoken into my nerves compel my mind to
work by setting the corresponding nerves in vibration, in a way
that they cannot possibly escape the impulse to think. I must
leave undecided whether the expression I chose of my nerves

158 DANIEL PAUL SCHREBER

being set in corresponding vibrations by the rays, covers the
circumstances correctly; what I directly feel  that the talking
voices (lately in particular the voices of the talking birds) as inner
voices move like long threads into my head and there cause a
painful feeling of tension through the poison of corpses which
they deposit.

In contradistinction to these inner voices I hear outer voices
particularly spoken by birds, which come to me from outside,
from the birds’ throats. However, in both cases my nerves can-
not avoid the sound of the spoken words; the stimulation of my
nerves follows automatically and compels me to think on when
I hear questions or incomplete thoughts. In earlier years my
nerves simply had to think on, to answer questions, to complete
broken-off sentences etc. Only later was I gradually able to
accustom my nerves (my ”basis”) to ignoring the stimulation
which forced them to think on, by simply repeating the words
and phrases and thus turning them into not-thinking-of-
anything-thoughts. I have done that for a long time now with
conjunctions and adverbs which would need a full clause for
their completion. If I hear for instance ”Why, because I”, or ”Be
it”, I repeat these words for as long as possible without at-
tempting to complete the sense by trying toconnect them with
what I thought before. a

I proceed in the same manner when attempts are made with
the words ”If only my” to compel my nerves to develop ideas of
fear, not really present in my mind but falsely imputed to me. I
know what can be ”expected” to follow—because as a rule the
corresponding miracle happens simultaneously and I feel it on
my body; the intended continuation is sometimes ”If only
my voluptuousness were not disturbed”, sometimes ”If only
my boots were not removed by miracle”, sometimes ”If
only my nose, my eyes, my knee-cap, my skull, etc., would not
be affected by miracles."

Since my nerves have become accustomed to suppress the
corresponding stimulation, I no longer elaborate in words the
nonsense to which these falsified ideas lead; I am satisfied to
keep on repeating the same words ”If onlymy” without adding
anything to them. In ordinary conversation of course everybody
would simply counter ”If only my” with i’ ‘W hat do you really

Memoirs of My Nervous Illness 159

mean”, or perhaps would use abusive language in self-defence.
This is very difficult for me because the rays regularly answer
”We have had this before” (with the effect mentioned in Chap-
ter IX). It would in any case be unendurable in the long run to
submit nerves all day long to the counter question ”What do
you really mean”, or to abusive language.

The infringement of the freedom of human thinking or more
correctly thinking nothing, which constitutes the essence of
compulsive thinking, became more unbearable in the course of
years with the slowing down of the talk of the voices. This is
connected with the increased soul-voluptuousness of my body
and—despite all writing-down—with the great shortage of
speech-material at the disposal of the rays with which to bridge
the vast distances separating the stars, where they are sus-
pended, from my body.

No one who has not personally experienced these phe-
nomena like I have can have any idea of the extent to which
speech has slowed down. To say ”But naturally” is spoken
B.b.b.u.u.u.t.t.t. n.n.n.a.a.a.t.t.t.u.u.u.r.r.r.a.a.a.l.l.l.y.yy or
”Why do you not then shit?” W.w.w.h.h.h.y.y.y
d.d.d.o.o.o. . . . . . . . . . .; and each requires perhaps thirty to sixty
seconds to be completed. This would be bound to cause such
nervous impatience in every human being, not like myself more
and more inventive in using methods of defence, as to make
him jump out of his skin; a faint idea of the nervous unrest
caused is perhaps the example of a Judge or teacher always
listening to a mentally dull witness or a stuttering scholar, who
despite all attempts cannot clearly get out what he is asked or
wants to say.

Playing the piano and reading books and newspapers is—as
far as the state of my head allows—my main defence, which
makes even the most drawn-out voices finally perish; at night
when this is not easily done or in day-time when the mind
requires a change of occupation, I usually found committing
poems to memory a successful remedy. I learnt a great number
of poems by heart particularly Schiller’ s ballads, long sections of
Schfller’s and Goethe's dramas, as well as arias from operas and
humorous poems, amongst others from Max and Moritz,
Struwelpeter and Spekter’s fables, which I then recite in silence

160 DANIEL PAUL SCHREBER

on the quiet verbatim. Their value as poetry naturally does not
matter; however insignificant the rhymes, even obscene verses
are worth their weight in gold as mental nourishment compared
with the terrible nonsense my nerves are otherwise forced to
listen to. I

Even while reciting poems I have to combat difficulties which
at times reduce their effectiveness; miracles aimed at scattering
my thoughts act on my nerves and make it impossible to find
the continuation of a poem learnt by heart; or when the most
persistent inner voices have at last been silenced by the recital of
longer poems and I have reached a state of great soul-
voluptuousness through union of all rays, the lower God starts
the bellowing miracle until I am so breathless that I cannot
continue reciting the poems even softly. I am therefore forced to
change the systems much in the same way as externally new
systems are continually started (by God's omnipotence) to slow
down the attraction of rays and prevent the union of all rays
necessary for sleep or complete soul-voluptuousness. Recently I
found counting aloud up to a large figure ofgreat help, but this
is naturally very boring for any length of time. When severe
bodily pain sets in or persistent bellowing occurs, the last re-
maining remedy is swearing aloud which I have to do occa-
sionally, but which I sincerely hope will become less and less
necessary in future.

1908 ‘-E-
A Mind That Found Itself, by Clifford Beers

After Clifford Beers graduated from Yale in 1897 he embarked on a
promising business career with a life insurance firm on Wall Street.
Eventually, a tendency toward shyness, combined with a morbid fear
that he might succumb to seizures and a brain tumor—as his older
brother had-—left him incapacitated. He came to see suicide as the
only solution and on June 23, 1900, jumped from the fourth story
window of his home in New Haven. He survived and was hospital-
ized with broken bones in his feet. In the hospital, for reasons not
clear, he became delirious. Lying in the hospital bed, he watched an
attendant put bars in the windows to keep him from trying another
jump. Beers mistakenly thought that he was being held prisoner and
concluded that he was going to be tried for the crime of attempting
suicide. He became scared and suspicious. Speaking to no one, he
slowly began to imagine he was being held for crimes far more serious
than suicide. He eventually believed that he was at the center of all evil
and crime, that he had committed numerous horrible crimes, written
about daily in the newspapers. He was afraid that the public at large
hated him for these crimes and that he was a disgrace before the
world. He returned home for a short while but then was sent to a
private sanatorium, still mute. Beers soon decided that this sanatorium
was set up by the government, that the nurses, the attendants, and the
patients were really detectives trying to gather information about the
many crimes he had committed. He was careful about all his actions,
trying not to communicate anything, in any way, to all the detectives
around him. His food tasted odd and he assumed it was poisoned.
After a year, he was sent to another private institution, then, finally, to
a large state institution. His family visited him at times, but he refused
to speak to them, believing that his real family had been taken away by
the government, and that the people visiting him were ”doubles” sent
to obtain information from him.

During the first two years Beers remained depressed, secretive,
and mute. His brother visited him regularly, but Beers always re-
garded him as a double——not his actual brother at all. Beers desper-
ately fixed upon suicide as his only escape from persecution, but as a
last resort sent a letter to his brother. When the ”agent,” the person
Beers thought was posing as his real brother, returned the next day
with the letter, Beers realized he had been wrong all along and at last

161

162 CLIFFORD BEERS

the ”Gordian knot” of his faulty belief systemwas cut. He was so
pleased to have made contact with his real brother, he talked for two
hours almost without pause. His vocal cords were very weak from
two years of silence, so he often had to whisper. After he left his
brother he went back to his ward and talked to the patients as much
as he could during the next two weeks—only pausing to sleep two or
three hours a night.

Beers had previously written only one letter--A-the fateful letter to
his brother—during the full two years of his hospitalization. Now he
began to make up for that lapse. He wrote letters until he ran out of
stationery and then used wrapping paper, tearing strips a foot across
and four feet long. Most of his letters were composed of several of
these strips fastened together, sometimes twenty or thirty feet in
length. One letter stretched the full length of his ward corridor, one
hundred feet. A

He became manic: aggressive, brash, extremely talkative, sleeping
little, and filled with impossible energy and grandiose schemes. First,
he believed he had invented a way to defy gravity. Then he believed
he would create a worldwide movement to reform mental hospitals.
Little by little, however, his mania subsided anfdeby 1903 he was well
enough to resume his business affairs.

Beers persisted in his grandiose schemes for. refonn, however. He
wanted to start a patients’ rights movement to change the treatment of
American mental patients. To establish his own credentials in this
venture, he wrote an autobiographical account of his experiences as a
mental patient, A Mind That Found Itself. Beers lucidly describes his
unusual mental experiences, his multiple hallucinations, and the logic
that held together his delusions. The book gives one of the clearest
descriptions of abnormal mental experience, but it may be principally
significant as a protest. Almost unpunctuated  commentary, judg-
ment, or emotionalism, Beers’s direct and vivid accounts of ward life
at the turn of the century remain a particularly disturbing reminder of
what can happen when people are given almost unlimited power
over others.

In the private sanatorium where he first stayed, the owner made
some $100,000 a year, by ”economies.” Attendants were untrained,
usually ignorant, rough, and poorly paid. In the next institution Beers
was kept in a cold, unventilated cell for three weeks and not permit-
ted to bathe. In the state institution he was severely assaulted by
attendants—knocked down, kicked, beaten, choked—and the atten-
dants were never reprimanded. He saw attendants kicking and beat-
ing some helpless patients daily; he watched vicious beatings of
elderly patients which resulted in injuries and, in one case, death.

A Mind That Found Itself 163

Beers outlined serious plans for a reform movement and—sending
out A Mind That Found Itself as his calling card—won the support of
several influential people, including William James and Adolph
Meyer. In 1908 he founded the Connecticut Society for Mental
Hygiene and, a year later, the National Committee for Mental
Hygiene to promote the ”humane and scientific institutional care of
mental disease.” The Connecticut Society expanded and became the
model for nearly thirty state societies. The National Committee also
grew, attracted philanthropic support, and was the prototype for
several national organizations, including the Canadian National
Committee for Mental Hygiene founded in 1918. In 1928 Beers estab-
lished the American Foundation for Mental Hygiene which was
mainly a money—raising organization designed to generate con-
tinuous financial support and distribute it to important projects. In
1930 he organized the First International Congress in Mental
Hygiene, which met in Washington: a gathering of representatives
from fifty countries. One result of that conference was the creation of
a permanent international organization known as the International
Committee for Mental Hygiene. During this time the National Com-
mittee, founded by Beers in 1909, endured—promoting research, leg-
islation, hospital care studies, information programs, and community
guidance centers. In 1950 it merged with two other groups to form the
National Association for Mental Health, the one organization of its
kind still active.

Clifford Beers, former mental patient, created the greatest psychiat-
ric reform movement of this century, the ”mental hygiene move-
ment.” Eventually Beers was awarded an honorary degree from Yale,
a medal of honor by the French, a gold medal from the National
Institute of Social Sciences, and was made an honorary member of the
American Psychiatric Association.

In the first excerpt, Beers describes the incidents following his first
suicide attempt in 1900; in the hospital, then in his own home, Beers
begins to suspect a plot as his familiar world drifts into a world of
visions and hallucinations. The beatings by attendants are depicted
next. Beers then portrays the ”Bull Pen,” a row of isolation cells in a
state institution for 2300 patients.

 

NATURALLY I WAS SUSPICIOUS of all about me, and became more
so each day. But not until about a month later did I refuse to


164 CLIFFORD BEERS

recognize my relatives. While I was at Grace Hospital, my father
and eldest brother called almost every day to see me, and,
though I said little, I still accepted them in their proper charac-
ters. I remember well a conversation one morning with my
father. The words I uttered were few, but full of meaning. Short-
ly before this time my death had been momentarily expected. I
still believed that I was surely about to die as a result of my
injuries, and I wished in some way to let my father know that,
despite my apparently ignominious end, I appreciated all that
he had done for me during my life. Few men, I believe, ever had
a more painful time in expressing their feelings than I had on
that occasion. I had but little control over my mind, and my
power of speech was impaired. My father sat beside my bed.
Looking up at him, I said, ”You have been a good father to me.”

”I have always tried to be,” was his characteristic reply.

After the broken bones had been set, and the first effects of
the severe shock I had sustained had worn off, I began to gain
strength. About the third week I was able to sit up and was
occasionally taken out of doors. But each day, and especially
during the hours of the night, my delusions increased in force
and variety. The world was fast becoming to me a stage on
which every human being within the range of my senses
seemed to be playing a part, and that a part which would lead
not only to my destruction (for which I cared little), but also to
the ruin of all with whom I had ever come in contact. In the
month of July several thunder-storms occurred. To me the thun-
der was ”stage” thunder, the lightning man-made, and the
accompanying rain due to some clever contrivance of my perse-
cutors. There was a chapel connected with the hospital—or at
least a room where religious services were held every Sunday.
To me the hymns were funeral dirges; and the mumbled
prayers, faintly audible, were in behalf of every sufferer in the
world but one.

It was my eldest brother who looked after my care and in-
terests during my entire illness. Toward the end of July, he
informed me that I was to be taken homeagain. I must have
given him an incredulous look, for he said, ”Don’t you think we
can take you home? Well, we can and will.” Believing myself in

A Mind That Found Itself 165

the hands of the police, I did not see how that was possible. Nor
did I have any desire to return. That a man who had disgraced
his family should again enter his old home and expect his rela-
tives to treat him as though nothing were changed, was a
thought against which my soul rebelled; and, when the day
came for my return, I fought my brother and the doctor feebly
as they lifted me from the bed. But I soon submitted, was placed
in a carriage, and driven to the house I had left a month earlier.

For a few hours my mind was calmer than it had been. But my
new-found ease was soon dispelled by the appearance of a
nurse—one of several who had attended me at the hospital.
Though at home and surrounded by relatives, I jumped to the
conclusion that I was still under police surveillance. At my re-
quest my brother had promised not to engage any nurse who
had been in attendance at the hospital. The difficulty of procur-
ing any other led him to disregard my request, which at the time
he held simply as a whim. But he did not disregard it entirely,
for the nurse selected had merely acted as a substitute on one
occasion, and then only for about an hour. That was long
enough, though, for my memory to record her image.

Finding myself still under surveillance, I soon jumped to a
second conclusion, namely, that this was no brother of mine at
all. He instantly appeared in the light of a sinister double, acting
as a detective. After that I refused absolutely to speak to him
again, and this repudiation I extended to all other relatives,
friends and acquaintances. If the man I had accepted as my
brother was spurious, so was everybody—-that was my deduc-
tion. For more than two years I was without relatives or friends,
in fact, without a world, except that one created by my own
mind from the chaos that reigned within it.

While I was at Grace Hospital, it was my sense of hearing
which was the most disturbed. But soon after I was placed in
my room at home, all of my senses became perverted. I still
heard the ’’false voices”—which were doubly false, for Truth no
longer existed. The tricks played upon me by my senses of taste,
touch, smell, and sight were the source of great mental anguish.
None of my food had its usual flavor. This soon led to that
common delusion that some of it contained poison—not deadly

166 CLIFFORD BEERS

poison, for I knew that my enemies hated me too much to allow
me the boon of death, but poison sufficient to aggravate my
discomfort. At breakfast I had cantaloupe, liberally sprinkled
with salt. The salt seemed to pucker my mouth, and I believed it
to be powdered alum. Usually, with my supper, sliced peaches
were served. Though there was sugar on the peaches, salt
would have done as well. Salt, sugar, and powdered alum had
become the same to me. .

Familiar materials had acquired a different ”feel.” In the dark,
the bed sheets at times seemed like silk. As I had not been born
with a golden spoon in my mouth, or other accessories of a
useless luxury, I believed the detectives had provided these silk-
en sheets for some hostile purpose of their own. What that
purpose was I could not divine, and my very inability to arrive
at a satisfactory conclusion stimulated my brain to the assem-
bling of disturbing thoughts in an almost endless train.

Imaginary breezes struck my face, gentle, but not welcome,
most of them from parts of the room where currents of air could
not possibly originate. They seemed to come from cracks in the
walls and ceiling and annoyed me exceedingly. I thought them
in some way related to that ancient method of torture by which
water is allowed to strike the victim's forehead, a drop at a time,
until death releases him. For a while my sense of smell added to
my troubles. The odor of burning human flesh and other pes-
tilential fumes seemed to assail me.

My sense of sight was subjected to many weird and uncanny
effects. Phantasmagoric visions made their visitations through-
out the night, for a time with such regularity that I used to await
their coming with a certain restrained curiosity. I was not entire-
ly unaware that something was ailing with my mind. Yet these
illusions of sight I took for the work of detectives, who sat up
nights racking their brains in order to rack and utterly wreck my
own with a cruel and unfair Third Degree.

Handwriting on the wall has ever struck terror to the hearts of
even sane men. I remember as one of my most unpleasant ex-
periences that I began to see handwriting on the sheets of my
bed staring me in the face, and not me alone, but also the
spurious relatives who often stood or sat near me. On each
fresh sheet placed over me I would soon begin to see words,

A Mind That Pound Itself 167

sentences, and signatures, all in my own handwriting. Yet I
could not decipher any of the words, and this fact dismayed me,
for I firmly believed that those who stood about could read them
all and found them to be incriminating evidence.

I imagined that these visionlike effects, with few exceptions,
were produced by a magic lantern controlled by some of my
myriad persecutors. The lantern was rather a cinematographic
contrivance. Moving pictures, often brilliantly colored, were
thrown on the ceiling of my room and sometimes on the sheets
of my bed. Human bodies, dismembered and gory, were one of
the most common of these. All this may have been due to the
fact that, as a boy, I had fed my imagination on the sensational
news of the day as presented in the public press. Despite the
heavy penalty which I now paid for thus loading my mind, I
believe this unwise indulgence gave a breadth and variety to my
peculiar psychological experience which it otherwise would
have lacked. For with an insane ingenuity I managed to connect
myself with almost every crime of importance of which I had
ever read.

Dismembered human bodies were not alone my bedfellows at
this time. I remember one vision of vivid beauty. Swarms of
butterflies and large and gorgeous moths appeared on the
sheets. I wished that the usually unkind operator would con-
tinue to show these pretty creatures. Another pleasing vision
appeared about twilight several days in succession. I can trace it
directly to impressions gained in early childhood. The quaint
pictures by Kate Greenaway—little children in attractive dress,
playing in old-fashioned gardens—would float through space
just outside my windows. The pictures were always accompa-
nied by the gleeful shouts of real children in the neighborhood,
who, before being sent to bed by watchful parents, devoted the
last hour of the day to play. It doubtless was their shouts that
stirred my memories of childhood and brought forth these pic-
tures.

In my chamber of intennittent horrors and momentary de-
lights, uncanny occurrences were frequent. I believed there was
some one who at fall of night secreted himself under my bed.
That in itself was not peculiar, as sane persons at one time or
another are troubled by that same notion. But my bed-fellow-

168 CLIFFORD BEERS

under the bed—was a detective; and he spent most of his time
during the night pressing pieces of ice against my injured heels,
to precipitate, as I thought, my overdue confession.

The piece of ice in the pitcher of water which usually stood on
the table sometimes clinked against the pitcher’ s side as its cen-
ter of gravity shifted through melting. It was -many days before I
reasoned out the cause of this sound; and until I did I supposed
it was produced by some mechanical device resorted to by the
detectives for a purpose. Thus the most trifling occurrence
assumed for me vast significance.

1- 36 3(-

On the night of November 25th, 1902, the head attendant and
one of his assistants passed my door. They were returning from
one of the dances which, at intervals during the winter, the
management provides for the nurses and attendants. While
they were within hearing, I asked for a  of water. It was a
carefully worded request. But they were in ahurry to get to bed,
and refused me with curses. Then I replied in kind.

”If I come there I'll kill you,” one of them said.

”Well, you won't get in if I can help it,”Ireplied, as I braced
my iron bedstead against the door. I

My defiance and defences gave the attendants the excuse for
which they had said they were waiting; and my success in keep-
ing them out for two or three minutes only served to enrage
them. By the time they had gained entrance they had become
furies. One was a young man of twenty-gven. Physically he
was a fine specimen of manhood; morally he was deficient-
thanks to the dehumanizing effect of several years in the em-
ploy of different institutions whose officials countenanced im-
proper methods of care and treatment. It was he who now
attacked me in the dark of my prison room- The head attendant
stood by, holding a lantern which shed a dim light.

The door once open, I offered no further resistance. First I
was knocked down. Then for several minutes I was kicked
about the room—struck, kneed and choked. My assailant even
attempted to grind his heel into my cheek. In this he failed, for I
was there protected by a heavy beard which I wore at that time.
But my shins, elbows, and back were cutby his heavy shoes;
and had I not instinctively drawn up my knees to my elbows for

A Mind That Found Itself 169

the protection of my body, I might have been seriously, perhaps
fatally, injured. As it was, I was severely cut and bruised. When
my strength was nearly gone, I feigned unconsciousness. This
ruse alone saved me from further punishment, for usually a
premeditated assault is not ended until the patient is mute and
helpless. When they had accomplished their purpose, they left
me huddled in a corner to wear out the night as best I rnight—to
live or die for all they cared.

Strange as it may seem, I slept well. But not at once. Within
five minutes I was busily engaged writing an account of the
assault. A trained war correspondent could not have pulled
himself together in less time. As usual I had recourse to my bit
of contraband lead pencil, this time a pencil which had been
smuggled to me the very first day of my confinement in the Bull
Pen by a sympathetic fellow-patient. When he had pushed
under my cell door that little implement of war, it had loomed as
large in my mind as a battering-ram. Paper I had none; but I had
previously found walls to be a fair substitute. 1 therefore now
selected and wrote upon a rectangular spot—about three feet by
two—which marked the reflection of a light in the corridor just
outside my transom.

The next morning, when the assistant physician appeared, he
was accompanied as usual by the guilty head attendant who, on
the previous night, had held the lantern.

”Doctor,” I said, ”I have something to tell you,”—and I
glanced significantly at the attendant. ”Last night I had a most
unusual experience. I have had many imaginary experiences
during the past two years and a half, and it may be that last
night’ s was not real. Perhaps the whole thing was phantasma-
goric—1ike what I used to see during the first months of my
illness. Whether it was so or not I shall leave you to judge. It just
happens to be my impression that I was brutally assaulted last
night. If it was a dream, it is the first thing of the kind that ever
left visible evidence on my body.”

With that I uncovered to the doctor a score of bruises and
lacerations. I knew these would be more impressive than any
words of mine. The doctor put on a knowing look, but said
nothing and soon left the room. His guilty subordinate tried to
appear unconcerned, and I really believe he thought me not

170 CLIFFORD BEERS

absolutely sure of the events of the previous night, or at least
unaware of his share in them.
8- 3(- 3(-

Like fires and railroad disasters, assaults seemed to come in
groups. Days would pass without a single outbreak. Then
would come a veritable carnival of abuse—due almost invari-
ably to the attendants’ state of mind not to an unwonted aggres-
siveness on the part of the patients. I can recall as especially
noteworthy several instances of atrocious abuse. Five patients
were chronic victims. Three of them, peculiarly irresponsible,
suffered with especial regularity, scarcely a day passing without
bringing to them its quota of punishment. One of these, almost
an idiot, and quite too inarticulate to tell a convincing story even
under the most favorable conditions, became so cowed that,
whenever an attendant passed, he would circle his oppressor as
a whipped cur circles a cruel master. If this avoidance became
too marked, the attendant would then and there chastise him
for the implied, but unconscious insult. I

There was a young man, occupying a cell. next to mine in the
Bull Pen, who was so far out of his mind as to be absolutely
irresponsible. His offence was that he could not comprehend
and obey. Day after day I could hear the blows and kicks as they
fell upon his body, and his incoherent cries for mercy were as
painful to hear as they are impossible to forget. That he survived
is surprising. What wonder that this man, who was ”violent,”
or who was made violent, would not permit the attendants to
dress him! But he had a half-witted friend, a ward-mate, who
could coax him into his clothes when his oppressors found him
most intractable. s

Of all the patients known to me, the one who was assaulted
with the greatest frequency was an incoherent and irresponsible
man of sixty years. This patient was restless and forever talking
or shouting, as any man might if oppressed by such delusions
as his. He was profoundly convinced that -one of the patients
had stolen his stomach—an idea inspired perhaps by the re-
markable corpulency of the person he accused. His loss he
would wofully voice even while eating. Of-course, argument to
the contrary had no effect; and his monotonous recital of his
imaginary troubles made him unpopular -with those whose

A Mind That Found Itself 171

business it was to care for him. They showed him no mercy.
Each day—including the hours of the night, when the night
watch took a hand—he was belabored with fists, broom han-
dles, and frequently with the heavy bunch of keys which atten-
dants usually carry on a long chain. He was also kicked and
choked, and his suffering was aggravated by his almost con-
tinuous confinement in the Bull Pen. An exception to the gen-
eral rule (for such continued abuse often causes death), this man
lived a long time—five years, as I learned later.

Another victim, forty-five years of age, was one who had
formerly been a successful man of affairs. His was a forceful
personality, and the traits of his sane days influenced his con-
duct when he broke down mentally. He was in the expansive
phase of paresis, a phase distinguished by an exaggerated sense
of well-being, and by delusions of grandeur which are symp-
toms of this form as well as of several other forms of mental
disease. Paresis, as everyone knows, is considered incurable
and victims of it seldom live more than three or four years. In
this instance, instead of trying to make the patient’s last days
comfortable, the attendants subjected him to a course of treat-
ment severe enough to have sent even a sound man to an early
grave. I endured privations and severe abuse for one month at
the State Hospital. This man suffered in all ways worse treat-
ment for many months.

I became well acquainted with two jovial and witty Irishmen.
They were common laborers. One was a hodcarrier, and a strap-
ping fellow. When he arrived at the institution, he was at once
placed in the violent ward, though his ”violence” consisted of
nothing more than an annoying sort of irresponsibility. He irri-
tated the attendants by persistently doing certain trivial things
after they had been forbidden. The attendants made no al-
lowance for his condition of mind. His repetition of a forbidden
act was interpreted as deliberate disobedience. He was physical-
ly powerful, and they determined to cow him. Of the master
assault by which they attempted to do this I was not an eyewit-
ness. But I was an ear witness. It was committed behind a
closed door; and I heard the dull thuds of the blows, and I heard
the cries for mercy until there was no breath left in the man with
which he could beg even for his life. For days, that wrecked

172 CLIFFORD BEERS

Hercules dragged himself about the ward moaning pitifully. He
complained of pain in his side and had difficulty in breathing,
which would seem to indicate that some of? his ribs had been
fractured. This man was often punished, frequently for com-
plaining of the torture already inflicted. But later, when he be-
gan to return to the nonnal, his good-humor and native wit won
for him an increasing degree of good treatment.

The other patient’s arch offence—a symptom of his disease-
was that he gabbled incessantly. He could no more stop talking
than he could right his reason on command. Yet his failure to
become silent at a word was the signal for punishment. On one
occasion an attendant ordered him to stop talking and take a
seat at the further end of the corridor, about forty feet distant.
He was doing his best to obey, even running to keep ahead of
the attendant at his heels. As they passed the spot where I was
sitting, the attendant felled him with a blow behind the ear;
and, in falling, the patient’s head barely missed the wall.

Addressing me, the attendant said, ”Did you see that?”

“Yes,” I replied, ”and I'll not forget it.”

”Be sure to report it to the doctor,” he said, which remark
showed his contempt, not only for me, but for those in author-
ity. O

The man who had so terribly beaten me was particularly
flagrant in ignoring the claims of age. On more than one occa-
sion he viciously attacked a man of over fifty, who, however,
seemed much older. He was a Yankee sailing-master, who in his
prime could have thrashed his tormentor  ease. But now he
was helpless and could only submit. However, he was not utter-
ly abandoned by his old world. His wife called often to see him;
and, because of his condition, she was permitted to visit him in
his room. Once she arrived a few hours after he had been cruel-
ly beaten. Naturally she asked the attendants how he had come
by the hurts-—the blackened eye and bruised head. True to the
code, they lied. The good wife, perhaps herself a Yankee, was
not thus to be fooled; and her growing belief that her husband
had been assaulted was confirmed by a sight she saw before her
visit was ended. Another patient, a foreigner who was a target
for abuse, was knocked flat two or three times as he was rough-
ly forced along the corridor. I saw this little affair and I saw that

A Mind That Found Itself 173

the good wife saw it. The next day she called again and took her
husband home. The result was that after a few (probably sleep-
less) nights, she had to return him to the hospital and trust to
God rather than the State to protect him.

Another victim was a man sixty years of age. He was quite
inoffensive, and no patient in the ward seemed to attend more
strictly to his own business. Shortly after my transfer from the
violent ward this man was so viciously attacked that his arm
was broken. The attendant (the man who had so viciously
assaulted me) was summarily discharged. Unfortunately,
however, the relief afforded the insane was slight and brief, for
this same brute, like another whom I have mentioned, soon
secured a position in another institution—this one, however, a
thousand miles distant.

Death by violence in a violent ward is after all not an unnatu-
ral death-—for a violent ward. The patient of whom I am about
to speak was also an old man—over sixty. Both physically and
mentally he was a wreck. On being brought to the institution he
was at once placed in a cell in the Bull Pen, probably because of
his previous history for violence while at his own home. But his
violence (if it ever existed) had already spent itself, and had
come to be nothing more than an utter incapacity to obey. His
offence was that he was too weak to attend to his common
wants. The day after his arrival, shortly before noon, he lay
stark naked and helpless upon the bed in his cell. This I know,
for I went to investigate immediately after a ward-mate had
informed me of the vicious way in which the head attendant
had assaulted the sick man. My informant was a man whose
word regarding an incident of this character I would take as
readily as that of any man I know. He came to me, knowing that
I had taken upon myself the duty of reporting such abomina-
tions. My informant feared to take the initiative, for, like many
other patients who believe themselves doomed to continued
confinement, he feared to invite abuse at the hands of vengeful
attendants. I therefore promised him that I would report the
case as soon as I had an opportunity.

All daylong this victim of an attendant’s unmanly passion lay
in his cell in what seemed to be a serni-conscious condition. I
took particular pains to observe his condition, for I felt that the

143 6 '~B~
The Book of Margery Kempe

The earliest theories on madness were spiritual, assuming a posses-
sion of the mind by an alien deity. By the time of Hippocrates (460-
377 B.C.), most bodily illnesses were thought to be the result of mate-
rial events, of various fluidic or humoral imbalances in the body. Still,
madness, abnormalities of behavior, and epilepsy, were generally re-
garded as the workings of the gods.

In his treatise The Sacred Disease, however, Hippocrates argued for
the natural rather than the supernatural origin of epilepsy. ”It . . .
appears to me to be in no way more divine, nor more sacred than
other diseases, but has a natural cause from which it originates like
other afflictions,” he wrote. ”If you cut open the head, you will find
the brain humid, full of sweat and smelling badly. And in this way
you may see that it is not a god which injures the body, but disease.” 1
Hippocrates also described other similar ailments in natural terms,
identifying not only epilepsy, but also mania, melancholy, and a form
of mental deterioration he called ”paranoia.”

The Greeks had developed a quadripartite theory of the universe.
The universe was composed of four elements: earth, air, fire, and
water. All four elements, and therefore all matter, partook of four
basic qualities: hot, cold, moist, and dry. Earth was cold and dry. Air
was hot and moist. Fire was hot and dry. And water was cold and
moist.

As a tradition of secular medicine developed, the Greeks applied
the quadripartite system to their concept of the body. Hippocrates
taught that the healthy body had a balance of four basic humors:
black bile from the liver, yellow bile from the spleen, blood, and
phlegm. Black bile, like earth, was considered to be cold and dry; its
predominance was supposed to cause solitary behavior and a
melancholic temperament. Yellow bile, like fire, was hot and dry; its
predominance supposedly caused an angry, violent, and splenetic
personality. Blood, like air, was considered hot and moist; its pre-
dominance supposedly resulted in a ruddy countenance and a cheer-
ful, sanguine temperament. And finally, phlegm, like water, was cold

1Zilboorg, A History of Medical Psychology, pp. 43, 44.

174 CLIFFORD BEERS

assault of the morning might result in death. That night, after
the doctor's regular tour of inspection, the patient in question
was transferred to a room next my own. The mode of transfer
impressed itself upon my memory. Two attendants—one of
them being he who had so brutally beaten the patient—p1aced
the man in a sheet and, each taking an end, carried the ham-
mocklike contrivance, with its inert contents, to what proved to
be its last resting-place above ground. The; bearers seemed as
much concerned about their burden as one might be about a
dead dog, weighted and ready for the river. .

That night the patient died. Whether he was murdered none
can ever know. But it is my honest opinion that he was. Though
he might never have recovered, it is plain that he would have
lived days, perhaps months. And had he been humanely, nay,
scientifically, treated, who can say that he might not have been
restored to health and home? ‘I

The young man who had been my compgiion in mischief in
the violent ward was also terribly abused. I am sure I do not
exaggerate when I say that on ten occasions, within a period of
two months, this man was cruelly assaulted, and I do not know
how many times he suffered assaults of lessseverity. After one
of these chastisements, I asked him why he persisted in his
petty transgressions when he knew that he thereby invited such
body-racking abuse. .

”Oh,” he said, laconically, ”I need the e srcise.”

To my mind, the man who, with such gracious humor, could
refer to what was in reality torture deserved to live a century.
But an unkind fate decreed that he should die young. Ten
months after his commitment to the State Hospital he was dis-
charged as irnproved—but not cured. This was not an unusual
procedure; nor was it in his case apparentlyan unwise one, for
he seemed fit for freedom. During the first} month of regained
liberty, he hanged himself. He left no message of excuse. In my
opinion, none was necessary. For aught any man knows, the
memories of the abuse, torture, and injustice which were so
long his portion may have proved to be the last straw which
overbalanced the desire to live.

Patients with less stamina than mine often submitted with
meekness; and none so aroused my sympathy as those whose

A Mind That Found Itself 175

submission was due to the consciousness that they had no rela-
tives or friends to support them in a fight for their rights. On
behalf of these, with my usual piece of smuggled led pencil, I
soon began to indite and submit to the officers of the institution,
letters in which I described the cruel practices which came
under my notice. My reports were perfunctorily accepted and at
once forgotten or ignored. Yet these letters, so far as they related
to overt acts witnessed, were lucid and should have been con-
vincing. Furthermore, my allegations were frequently corrobo-
rated by bruises on the bodies of the patients. My usual custom
was to write an account of each assault and hand it to the doctor
in authority. Frequently I would submit these reports to the
attendants with instructions first to read and then deliver them
to the superintendent or the assistant physician. The men
whose cruelty I thus laid bare read with evident but perverted
pleasure my accounts of assaults, and laughed and joked about
my ineffectual attempts to bring them to book.

1909'-B~

The Maniac: A Realistic Study of Madness
from the Maniac’s Point of View, by T
E. Thelmar

The Maniac is an autobiographical story of a journalist's acute mad-
ness, characterized by continual auditory hallucinations, occasional
visual and tactile hallucinations, and strange ”out of the body” ex-
periences. Most of the time, E. Thelmar believed that she was posses-
sed by demons of ”fiends” and that she was in communication with
the spirit world. Only when she began to recover-did she renounce,
at least partially, the various demons, fiends, spirits, and telepathic
contacts and conclude that they were unreal and that she had
been mad.

In some ways this account of ”demonic possession” is reminiscent
of Margery Kempe’s fifteenth-century spiritual autobiography, espe-
cially the account of the time when she ”went out of her mind and
was wondrously vexed and laboured with spirits” and thought she
saw ”devils opening their mouths all inflamed with burning waves of
fire.” The difference between the two works has to do mostly with
presentation. Both women had severe hallucinatory experiences that
appeared to be the workings of spiritual forces; both were treated for
madness. Yet Margery Kempe only once describes herself as being
”out of her mind,” while the speaker of The Maniac, as she describes
retrospectively her unusual experiences, never completely leaves the
psychiatric perspective: even though at the time of her mad experi-
ences she often felt that she was communing with spirits, in telling
about them she completely accepts the psychiatric opinion that the
spirits were products of her own mind and that she was experiencing
an ”attack of madness.” The publishers of The Maniac in 1909
presented it as a psychiatric rather than a spiritual study, as the title
and the subtitle, A Realistic Study of Madness from the Maniac’s Point of
View, indicate. Various reviewers called it ”an  for psychologists
and alienists and other scientific people” which ”should be studied
attentively by the student of medicine,” ”shou1dsbe in the hands of
every doctor and every nurse who has to attend to the mentally sick,”
and ”should . . . be given a place in the libraries of all mental hospi-
tals, for the perusal of both the medical staff and the attendants.” 1

1The1mar, The Maniac, introductory page.
I 76

  The Maniac 177

The excerpts included here portray the progression of the journal-
ist’s ”possession.” The speaker describes her first hallucination,
which she experiences as a casual, pleasant telepathic conversation
with a well-known artist whom she calls Ray Hall. In the next excerpt
she relates her second meeting with Hall, during which time she
momentarily projects her awareness outside her body. ‘After these
initial pleasant encounters the situation rapidly changes. In the last
two excerpts, the narrator is seduced by a ”fiend” and a hallucinatory
crowd of people appears, while threats of attacks by ”fiends” and
”thousands of mad voices” ring in her ears. By now thehal1ucina-
tions and strange experiences have taken over her world; she is in
some fashion ”possessed,” and the rest of the book concerns itself
with her internal adventures and agonies.

I WENT TO BED EARLY, being so tired.

On referring since to the calendar in my diary, I see that the
day and hour at which I did get into bed that night are down in
the calendar as being the exact day and hour of the new moon.

Is there really, as superstitiously believed by all nations, any
connection between Luna and lunacy?

I did not read in bed, but blew out the candle immediately.
My head had scarcely touched the pillow when a man's voice—
a very pleasant baritone voice—proceeding apparently from the
large armchair by the fireplace, asked clearly and aloud-

”Are you awake?”

I raised myself on my left elbow, and facing the direction
whence the voice came, and feeling suddenly no longer tired,
but brisk and most alert, I answered-

”Yes, wide awake. Who are you?”

(I have never in my life heard any ”voices,” and should have
been extremely startled at hearing one then had I been in my
right senses. As it was, I was no more startled than one is
startled by dreams, when the most astonishing and unlikely
things seem quite natural and ordinary.)

The ”voice” ignored my question and went on-

”Are you not the author of ’——’?” (mentioning a book which,
five years previously, had taken me six months’ incessant labour
to write. It was of inordinate length and dealt largely with oc-
cultism.)

178 E. THELMAR

“Yes!” I exclaimed in surprise. “But how can you possibly
know of that? It never was published.”

“Well, to prove to you that I do know it, is not the motto to
the book ‘——’?” (The voice quoted in full the three lines of
poetry which I had put as a motto.)

“Perfectly correct! But how can you know? Are you——?” (I
mentioned a publisher who had offered to publish the book if I
would cut it.) I

“No, I am not.”

“Are you one of his ‘readers’?”

“N o." a

“Are you a ‘reader’ at any other publisher’ s?"

“No.” a .

“Well, then, how on earth can you have read my book at all?”

“I did not say that I had read it.” I

This rather nonplussed me. .

“Ah! Then you haven't read it?” I remarked, after a pause.

“Yes, I have—at least, extracts from it. The fact is, a friend of
mine read it.”

“Oh? Is he a ‘reader’ anywhere?”

“No.”

“Then where could he have read it?”

"At ——’s.”

“But if he isn't a ‘reader’ there, I don't understand how he
could have read the thing at all.” T

“He isn't a ‘reader’ there, but he Works there. He read the
book because they told him it was such an extraordinary one. It
is he who told me about it, and showed me extracts he had
copied from it.”

"What is your friend's name?” I asked.

“He might not like me to tell you.” * I

"Oh! I beg your pardon—I did not meancto be rudely inquisi-
tive—but the whole thing seems to me so inexplicable. What
did your friend think of the book?"

“It made the greatest impression on him—it changed his
whole views of life."

(“Now I wonder if it changed them for the better or the
worse,” I thought to myself: “I am rather curious to know that,
but I am not going to court a second snub by asking for any
further information whatever about that friend.”)

The Maniac 179

”Yes, it changed his whole life. It made him join such-and-
such a community.”

Again I longed to inquire whether joining that community
had enabled that friend to find what he sought; but again, for
the same reason as before, I refrained, and merely remarked-

”Oh?”

”Yes. He tells me everything, you know.”

”So it appears.” (I was determined not to evince the smallest
further curiosity about that friend.)

In my room I had a copy of the work of art of a celebrated
living artist—a man who is completely unknown to me person-
ally, but for whose genius as an artist I have always had the
greatest admiration.

The voice said to me—

”The young man depicted in such-and-such a position in that
work of art in your room is this friend of mine about whom we
have been speaking. He was the model from which that figure
was drawn.”

This statement interested me very much. I said quickly-—

”If you know so much about the creation of that work, you
must be the artist? You must be —-—?” (I named the artist's
name—which for the remainder of this history I will alter to the
fictitious one of ”Ray Hall.”)

The voice did not deny this indictment, and throughout the
entire remainder of my attack of madness I was fully convinced
that this man's voice continually holding converse with me was
the voice of that artist. I see now, on carefully reviewing the
whole thing, that this voice never once actually admitted to
being that artist; it merely never denied it, and always answered
instantly to that name whenever I summoned it.

How long exactly the conversation lasted that night, I cannot
tell, but when the voice ceased talking to me I dropped quietly
off to sleep.

The next morning I was, apparently, perfectly normal, in ev-
ery respect except one: I clearly remembered the conversation of
the previous night, and it still seemed to me the most ordinary
occurrence. I merely thought how pleasant it was to be able thus
to hold converse with someone so entirely congenial to me in
tastes, and that now I should never feel lonely any more in that
lodging-room, as the voice had said we should always be able to

180 E. THELMAR

talk to each other as we had done the previous night, whenever
we wished—we were so completely en rapport.

I felt disinclined to commence the new story I had intended
starting that morning, but I occupied myself with a variety of
other usual occupations—lunched out at a restaurant (but quite
forgot to order any food to be sent to my lodging for that even-
ing and for Sunday, as I should have done). N 0 ’’voices’’ what-
ever talked to me that day. Again I went to.-bed early.

Again immediately I blew out the light the same man's voice
which had been conversing with me the previous evening re-
commenced. It asked gently-

”Darling, are you afraid?”

I raised myself in bed and looked in the direction whence the
voice seemed unmistakably to proceed—namely the large table
in the centre of the room—but I could see nothing. (The street-
lights would have enabled me to see objects in my room.) It
sounded exactly as if the speaker were seated on the edge of
that table nearest to my bed. I felt most wide-awake.

”No,” I answered, ”I am not in the leastafraid; why should I
be afraid? But who are you?”

Again the voice evaded any direct reply. Again, when I asked
him point-blank if he was ”Ray Hall” he did not deny it. What
he said was, that we were ”twin souls,” as was proved by our
being able to communicate like this when any distance apart,
and that in less than three months’ time wefishould infallibly be
united. He said it would be impossible for anything on earth to
come between people who could converse direct with each
other as we could, no matter what distance separated us. He
then began talking about the Medium at  office. He said he
wished, for a particular purpose, to engage her as his secretary.
He asked me if I thought she would accept the billet?

I said I thought she would.

He then said I was to speak to her on the subject and offer her
the appointment. .

I said I would when next I saw her. Afterwards I said to him-

”You aren't here bodily, I know. It sounds as if you were
sitting on the edge of the big table in my room. Where are you
really?”

”In the easy-chair, smoking, in my own room. That is where I

The Maniac 181

am bodily, and I am merely sending my thought to you. But
shall we try an experiment?”

”What experiment?” I asked.

”Shall I try if I can send my spirit to you?” inquired the voice.

"Yes. That will be a most interesting experiment,” I ex-
claimed. ”Try it."

It seemed to me as if I were divided up into three distinct
layers of being——layers that should, normally, interpenetrate
each other, but now were arranged in three separate, superim-
posed strata. On the bed lay my physical body, fully awake and
conscious. Directly over it, at the distance of a few feet up, was
poised in rnid-air my human soul, consisting of a replica of my
physical body made of a substance like flame. Above that again,
at about an equal distance up, was my spirit, which seemed to
be composed of cold white light—more like electric light than
anything else.

Almost immediately after the preceding remarks, I experi-
enced a vivid and most distinct sensation; not in my physical
body at all, but high up near the ceiling in my ”top layer.” As I
have never felt any sensation in the least like it, I cannot de-
scribe it. It seemed as if two electric lights—my own spirit and
anothefs-—had merged into one light, with a sort of electric shock.

Directly I felt it I exclaimed excitedly (for I was most interested
in the experiment)-

”You have managed it! I can feel you here

The voice answered-

”I feel absolutely nothing.”

”Oh, what a pity!" I exclaimed. ”You don't know what you
are missing! Evidently you must be unconscious in your spirit.
That is most unfortunate. If you are unconscious, you might as
well not be here at all, as far as you are concerned. Try to send
your soul, and see if you are conscious in that, apart from your
body.”

The next instant I felt another, totally different sensation; this
time in my ”second layer.” It was a warm, magnetic sort of
sensation, and seemed caused by the mingling of two fiery
flames.

”I can feel that!” exclaimed the voice. ”T his is good enough
for me!”

'1!

182 E. THELMAR

”Ah! that is because you were unconscious your spirit,” I
said. ”That utterly surpassed this! However, it is useless trying
spirit experiments if you are unconscious in the spirit—you had
better just stay here in your soul.” a a

He stayed, talking for some time, and then remarked-

”Are you aware that I am still up and dressed, in my smoking-
room, and that it must be between two and three in the morning
now, I should think? I am afraid I shall have to leave and go and
get into bed.”

”Very well,” I said. ”Good-night. Try this experiment again
to-morrow night—but go to bed first, as I have done.”

”All right. Good—night.”

”Good-night,” I answered, and went off to sleep.

3(- 8- 3(-

”Kneel down and pray,” said the voice.

"Where shall I kneel?”

”There, in the sunlight by the fireplace. Be sure to kneel in the
sunlight.” . g

I deposited the brush on the mantelpiece, and knelt down as
directed.

”Lean more forward into the sunlight,” ordered the voice.

I obeyed. I

”Bend your head lower.” I

Again I obeyed; and my hair, which was hanging loose, fell all
over my face.

”Push back your hair from off your face,” the voice comman-
ded.

”Oh, what does it matter where my hair is when I am
praying?” I exclaimed impatiently, for all these elaborate prepa-
rations were beginning to annoy me. However, I pushed back
my hair as directed, but as my head remained in the bent posi-
tion ordered, my hair immediately tumbled;-once more over my
face, shutting out all view of everything except what was direct-
ly beneath my eyes. This happened to be} fa small black coal-
shuttle. T

Reflected in this shiny surface I saw quite distinctly a picture
of a very we1l—known woman occultist. (She is unacquainted
with me, but I am acquainted with her both through her books
and her lectures.)

The Maniac 183

”Oh,” I thought, ”this is all right. She understands all about
these things. Evidently this is part of some occult experiment,
and when the fiend appears she means to tackle it.”

I did not feel in the least afraid, and was racking my brain to
think what prayer would be suited to this most unusual occa-
sion, when suddenly I experienced a violent, physical sensation
inside my body. It did not in the least hurt me, but it was so
violent and unaccountable it frightened me. I could not under-
stand what was happening to me. (I neither saw nor heard
anything.)

I thought to myself, ”Has this perhaps something to do with
that fiend that they were warning me against?” And instantly
the voices confirmed this fear, saying that the fiend had now got
inside my body; that the explanation of this whole mysterious
sensation was that I had been seduced by a fiend, and that I
should therefore have a fiend-child.

8- >(- 3(-

This sent me off into a perfect frenzy.

I fully believed it to be the true explanation of the unaccount-
able sensation I had experienced.

I began calling on God, and everything and everyone I could
think of, in heaven and on earth, to come to my rescue. I sobbed
and cried and wrung my hands in agony of terror and despair. I
got up off my knees and rocked myself to and fro on the arm
of the big armchair, exclairning—

”O God! What have I done, that such an awful thing should
have happened to me? O God! 0 God! 0 God! 0 God!”

While I was going on thus, like the demented creature that I
was, the wall of the room facing me seemed suddenly to fade
away before my eyes, and up near the ceiling—but as if far
away in the dim distance—I saw a crowd of people seated in
what looked like a very large box at a theatre. They seemed to
have been observing, from that great way off, all that had been
taking place in my room. They seemed to be the people who
had been conducting the experiment which had resulted in this
awful catastrophe to me.

Seated in the centre of the box, I could distinguish the
woman-occultist whose reflection I had seen in the japanned
coal-shuttle, and I could hear her sobbing; whilst beside her,


4 MARGERY KEMPE

and moist; its predominance caused a pale appearance and a slug-
gish, phlegmatic temperament.

Hippocrates believed that both physical illnesses and madness
were caused by some imbalance of the four humors, and therefore his
treatment was to restore the natural balance of the body. For instance,
in the case of severe depression, presumably caused by excesses of
black bile, he would attempt to rid the body of bile by administering
the herbal purgative hellebore. At the same time, he would counteract
bi1e’s cold and dry qualities by giving the patient plenty of food and
drink, thus building up his supply of hot, moist blood.

Classical medicine and psychiatry reached a peak of innovation and
progress in the second century A.D., with the school of the Roman
court physician, Galen (130-200 A.D.). Galen taught an eclectic system
of medicine which combined the humoral theories of Hippocrates
and the so-called pneumatic theories with a strong interest in
anatomy? But the importance of Galen and Hippocrates has less to do
with the tightness or wrongness of their theories than with their
insistence on careful observation and their recognition of the inade-
quacies of traditional and popular lore. ”Do not go to the gods,”
wrote Galen, ”to make inquiries and thus attempt by soothsaying to
discover the nature of the directing soul . . . or the principle of action
of nerves; but go and take instruction on the subject from an
anatomist.” 3

After Galen died, the classical tradition of medicine lapsed into a
stagnation that lasted for more than a thousand years. Medicine dur-
ing the medieval period became a discipline based not upon first-
hand observation, but rather upon the simple rote memorization of
the teachings of Hippocrates and Galen. Dissection of bodies was
forbidden until the thirteenth century, and the teachings of classical
medicine became as rigid as the pronouncements of the Church.

Alongside the somewhat enlightened View of those educated in the
classical lore of Hippocrates and Galen, which taught that the origins
of madness could be understood in comprehensible, natural systems,
there continued the ancient view of madness as the possession of an

2Neaman, Suggestion of the Devil, p. 10. The pneuma was an invisible vital principle in
the body and mind, similar to our concept of spirit. Galen believed that pneuma began
as air, was inhaled into the lungs, and was then somehow transformed into a vital life
force animating both body and brain.

3Zilboorg, A History of Medical Psychology, p. 87.

184 E. THELMAR

turning towards her so that his face was hidden from me, was a
man standing up and denouncing her and these infernal experi-
ments in a voice that I instantly recognised as Ray Hall's.

He said, ”Mrs.——, you are a fiend, and this is your doing

I stopped sobbing, and exclaimed, ”Ray Hall! Take care what
you say! I am quite certain that Mrs. —— would never have
harmed me intentionally. It may be nobody’s fault, but I am
simply done for,” and I recommenced sobbing.

He said, ”I am going to drag all these fiends of people, with
their infernal experiments, to justice! I swear I will denounce
them and their practices, publicly, to the whole world! If I die for
it, I will have vengeance on them for the fiendish wrong they
have committed!” I T

"What is the use of vengeance?” I moaned. ”It will help no-
body. Stop their experiments, to save other victims—not for any
vengeance. As for me, anything now is too late to save me; I am
done for!” And I sobbed and sobbed. g

”No, you are not done for!” he exclaimed; "you are my wife
and I will never desert you!” I

"Oh, no!” I sobbed, ”I am not fit now to be the wife of any
decent man; but I call God to witness that I am a perfectly
innocent woman!”

”You are! And you are my wife, and I will never desert you,
but stand by you through all this, and get to me bottom of this
whole thing. I swear it!” 7

”Oh!” I said, ”you have spoken like a true man, Ray Hall. I
can never be your wife now; but I will live, and not kill myself,
in order that you and I together may get to the bottom of this
whole awful affair.”

I went on sobbing uninterruptedly, and moaning-

”Oh! why didn't you jump down from that gallery, Ray Hall,
into the arena, to help me and save me from the fiend? Now all
help is useless, and what am I to do? 0 God! What am I to do?”

I walked across to my bed and flung myself face-downwards
upon it, sobbing ceaselessly. I paid no further attention to the
crowd in the gallery, which seemed to vanish in the same man-
ner in which it had appeared.

Presently some voice exclaimed excitedly-

”Another fiend is coming!”

‘II

The Maniac 185

I started up in terror from the bed, and said-

”Where shall I pray?”

”There, in the sunlight by the sofa,” answered the voice.

I threw myself upon my knees in the spot indicated, and was
just about to commence frantic prayers, when suddenly I
thought, ”No! Why should I pray? Prayer is utterly useless! I
prayed before, and nobody helped me. I am perfectly innocent.
I will not pray: I demand justice! Besides, what does it matter
how many fiends come now? I have nothing more to lose!”

I got up from my knees, burst into a wild laugh, and quoting,
”’Come one, come all!’ ” I sat myself down on the sofa and
gazed round the room, feeling that if I caught sight of any
approaching fiend I would not wait for it to attack me, but
would attack it with the courage and fury of despair, and fright-
en it a good deal more than any fiend whatever would now be
able to frighten me.

I neither saw nor felt anything.

Finding nothing was coming, I got up, and was walking
across the room to throw myself again upon the bed to sob,
when suddenly thousands of mad voices commenced yelling in
my ears.

What those voices are like defies description. No human
being who has not actually experienced it can imagine such
hell-torment.

The voices seemed to be legion, and each separate voice felt
like a charge of dynamite exploding in my head, rending and
shattering the living substance of my brain.

I stopped dead-short in the centre of the room, held my head
between my hands (for my very skull felt as if being blasted),
and said aloud, quite quietly and slowly, these exact words-

”My God! This awful thing that has happened to me has sent
me stark, raving mad! This is unmistakable madness. And yet I
am sane enough to know that I am mad, and I shall do nothing
that these voices are yelling at me to do. I shall go and have a
good square meal, for it is my belief that one-half of this is sheer
starvation.”

It was midday, and I had not had a morsel of food.

In a perfect agony of mind and body, and with those scream-
ing voices still shattering my brain, I finished my dressing. I

186 E. THELMAR

hastily twisted up my hair and pinned it; I put on my dress, and
hunted about for a lace tie and a brooch to finish it off. I
thought-

”I must compose myself and dress myself properly; if I go out
looking as wild as I am feeling, I shall attract everyone’s atten-
tion, and perhaps be taken up in the street as a madwoman
before I have had time to get to the bottom of all this. I mean to
live and get to the bottom of this.”

1910'€~

Legally Dead, Experiences During Seventeen
Weeks’ Detention in a Private Asylum, by Marcia
Hamilcar

The British reform legislation of 1845, as we have seen, was aimed
both at maintaining a careful system of inspection and control over
existing private madhouses (and other institutions), and at reducing
their numbers—by establishing a network of public county asylums.
It partly succeeded in those aims. Certainly the number of mad-
houses continued to diminish into the twentieth century.

Several serious protests by English mental patients have been writ-
ten during this century. The Lost Days of My Life, Jane Simpson's 1958
account of a childhood spent in English homes and asylums, is prob-
ably the most alarming. But Marcia Hami1car’s Legally Dead is one of
the last written protests by a private madhouse patient.

In December 1907 Marcia Hamilcar, a fifty-seven-year old unmar-
ried English schoolteacher, became severely depressed. During the
Christmas holiday she went to stay at the house of a relative and quite
suddenly, as she explains it, ”the proportion of things” became dis-
torted. She believed she had committed many serious crimes, that
she was liable to be arrested at any moment, and suspected that the
police were already at her home, waiting for her. Trembling, unable to
sleep, she at last decided to return home. Back at home her sister and
a physician urged her to go to a private nursing home for what she
expected to be a short rest. She agreed to go.

Though Hamilcar was not yet officially certified as mad, the woman
running the nursing home, with the apparent collusion of Harnilcar’s
sister, held her prisoner for five weeks, taking away her clothes, cut-
ting off her hair, strapping her to the bed, and keeping her bound in
some kind of straitjacket. They forced drugs upon her and fed her
only a pint of milk a day. After five weeks Hamilcar had lost twenty-
five pounds and was covered with bruises that the director of the
nursing home said were ”self-inflicted.” By then she probably did
look quite mad, or, at the very least, peculiar, with her hair shaven to
the scalp, unnaturally thin, trembling, frightened, and occasionally
lapsing into a delirious state that was probably drug-induced. Two

187

188 MARCIA HAMILCAR

physicians examined her and signed a commitment order; the order
was countersigned by a local magistrate who was too busy actually to
see her for himself.

With the commitment properly signed Hamilcar was taken away to
a private madhouse, where she was beaten and force-fed. Though
she was never treated well there she was detoxified from the drugs
given her at the nursing home and allowed to eat full meals. She
gained weight and improved enough that within five weeks the su-
perintendent told her she could leave, provided her sisters would
agree. Her sisters did not agree, and Hamilcar remained imprisoned
in that institution for an additional seven weeks.

During her stay in the private madhouse, Hamilcar took notes in
preparation for Legally Dead. Like many protests this book opens by
calling attention to the author's sincerity and veracity, insisting that
hers will be a ”true, plain, unvamished tale, untouched by the glam-
our of imagination.” It is true that during much of her early experi-
ence in the nursing home she was delirious, and there is an almost
pathological bitterness that touches virtually all her descriptions (the
asylum water tastes terrible, the tea is always too strong, and so on).
But we have no reason really to doubt the major issues of her story.
Hamilcar insists that, once accused of madness, any person's civil
rights vanish. And her own experiences seem to support this disturb-
ing thesis. Legitimate complaints of false imprisonment and physical
assault went unheeded. Requests for release were ignored. She
claims she had only ”lost the proportion of things,” but whatever her
mental condition, she was pronounced ”insane” by those around
her—which meant that she was ”legally dead.”

In the following three excerpts we witness some of Hamilcar’s ex-
periences as a legally dead person. In the first excerpt, her hair is cut
off, without her permission or cooperation. In the second, she is
beaten and force-fed. Finally, she tries to plead her case before a
visiting inspector, who seems barely aware of her existence.

BUT THE CROWNING ACT of this fiend’s cruelty was the cutting off
of my luxuriant head of hair. And this was accomplished under
circumstances of wanton cruelty. As a child I had a wealth of
natural curling hair, my father’ s pride, and which my mother
had always tended with great care. I had throughout my life
continued to give it the same attention, with the result that my

Legally Dead 189

tresses were unusually abundant for my age. As my hair was of
a curly nature, it was perhaps difficult to keep in plaits, unless
tied at the ends, and as I was unable to attend to it myself, it
may have given some little trouble. Although she was well-
paid, the woman was too lazy to give any attention to it, and I
remember opening my eyes one day and finding my sister
standing near my bed. My hair was lying on the pillow, and the
woman was complaining of the trouble it caused her. ”I should
cut if of ,” remarked my sister.

Some hours later I was awakened by violent tugging of my
hair, which, as I have always had a very sensitive scalp, caused
me cruel pain. Looking at the head of the bedstead, I saw the
woman with a pair of scissors in her hand. Putting my hand
instinctively to one side of my head, I encountered only the
ends close to the scalp. As I lay on one side the woman had
found no difficulty in clipping my hair on the other. I had got
down at least two feet from the head of the bed, and the intense
pain I felt was caused by the woman pulling my remaining locks
through the bars of the bedstead, and dragging me bodily up to
the bars by this means. When my head touched the iron, fear-
ing, I imagine, my resistance, she cut my hair through or rather
against the ironwork, in spite of my cries and entreaties, and the
slight resistance I was able to make. With all her strength she
pulled at my hair, dragging me, at the same time shouting and
commanding me to lie still, and to give her no trouble, or I
should suffer for it. I put my hands up to save my hair, in which
I had taken a natural pride, and these narrowly escaped being
cut, too. My very natural resistance was called ”violence,” and I
was represented as a dangerous maniac, because I had tried as
far as excessive weakness permitted to prevent this abominable
outrage.

I have since been told that when the doctor next visited me he
expressed his indignation that such an extreme measure had
been adopted without his authorization or knowledge; but my
sister, whose locks have always been of the scantiest, had
accomplished her double purpose—she had robbed me of my
abundant tresses, and done all in her power to secure for me the
severest treatment, when I should arrive at the asylum, to
which she had from the outset of my illness determined to

190 MARCIA HAMILCAR

consign me. The woman also was freed from a daily duty she
found irksome, my feelings were far too insignificant to be con-
sidered by either.

What the loss of my hair cost me in mental suffering I can
never express. I was completely disfigured. What right had that
woman to cut off my hair? Would she have dared to do so had I
not been a mental patient? Why should this difference be made
in the sane and insane? The latter does not cease to feel, simply
because the mind is deranged. It may seem an exaggeration to
say that I felt the loss of my hair almost as much as that of my
home; I dreaded to go again into the world, fearing ridicule;
besides, my shorn head completely altered my appearance. As
an instance of the daily annoyance to which I was subjected, the
night before I left the ”Home” the woman showed me the hair
she had so ruthlessly cut from my head. The tresses were laid
on an open newspaper. ”Give them to me!” I cried. ”They are
mine! You have no right to keep my hair!”

”I have a perfect right,” she replied. ”You will never have
your hair, for I shall keep it. It belongs to me.”

I tried to take it, but I was too weak to rise from my bed, and
the woman triumphantly bore off my locks, and placed them in
her own room. Months after, a few wisps, about a quarter of the
amount cut off, were sent me. What was done with the remain-
der I do not know.

36 3(- 3(-

About midnight I heard voices and steps near my cell. 1 pre-
sume that some one had remembered that I had, so far, had
nothing to eat, for two attendants appeared, one bearing a
tumbler of some liquid, the other a lantern. Before I could
speak, one, a tall, very strong, coarse, swearing woman, whose
name I discovered afterwards was Stiles, had seized me rough-
ly, and in a moment I was lying flat on the unsavoury mattress (I
had for an hour or two sat up, with a blanket—or piece of
blanket—round me, vainly trying to get some warmth into my
frozen feet by weakly rubbing them). The other attendant sat
upon my trembling legs, whilst she pinioned my shaking arms.
Then Stiles roughly opened my mouth and thrust a tube down
my throat, causing me intense pain. The choking sensation was
indescribably horrible. To swallow was impossible, and a sick-

Legally Dead 191

ening sensation of suffocation almost robbed me of conscious-
ness. How long the pipe was in my mouth I cannot say; it
seemed, from the agony it caused me, quite half an hour. When
the pipe was withdrawn the woman tumed—or so it seemed to
me—my mouth inside out. As I have before stated, I have no
natural teeth, and all my life my gums have been very sensitive.
What she really did, was to deliberately thrust her big, coarse
fingers around my gums. She may have considered my mouth a
curiosity, and so a desire to examine it~led her to cause me the
pain she did. As her rough fingers went round and round my
mouth they lacerated the gums in every direction, and a stream
of blood followed them as she removed them. Before I could
protest she struck me a heavy blow on my left cheek-bone,
which protruded from the skin alone that covered it. This was
followed by some half dozen blows on my head—a twentieth
century method of ”settling the brains.” Then, getting up from
the floor, she gave me a parting kick, and with a vile word never
before addressed to me, she left me more dead than alive.

The intense pain in my throat, the smarting of my mouth and
face, the pain in my head from the blows alone prevented me
from relapsing into unconsciousness.

When, later on, I was able to get up I recounted to the matron
what happened on that first night, exactly as I have given it
here, but she made no remark whatever, nor was any report
made to the doctor. Such brutal attacks were too common to be
noticed.

Some hours later I was taken by a woman into the bath-room.
She threw a towel at me with which to wipe my bleeding
mouth.

Looking at her, I said, as I showed her the large discoloured
patch, ”You will hear of this again. You have no right to treat me
like this.”

Knowing her power, the woman only laughed and mocked. I
was too impotent, she well knew, to bring a rebuke on her
head.

3(- it 31-

As the spring advanced the patients began to talk of the visit
of the commissioners, which usually took place at this time of
the year, and I questioned everybody as to their powers of pro-

192 MARCIA HAMILCAR

cedure. Could they discharge me? I was answered in the nega-
tive; only the doctor could do that. But I determined that I
would get speech with these gentlemen. I knew that a private
interview would be useless. Doctors, matron, or nurses were
always within hearing, where all doors were kept open, even if
the interview were supposed to be private; but I would do my
best to be heard, and I would ask for my release.

The ”Temple” underwent a thorough purification in anticipa-
tion of the visit, which, from the anxiety of the matron and
attendants to have everything in order, was evidently regarded
by them as a matter of very considerable importance. The pa-
tients regarded it, however, with indifference; nothing appeared
to them important. Their sombre, dreary days brought no event
that concerned them nearly, they had left events outside the
walls of their graves, nothing occurred now to quicken the slow
beat of their languid pulses, and they looked on at the sweep-
ing, cleaning and garnishing with unconcern.

But I looked forward with eagerness to a conversation with
these arbiters of my fate, as I meant they should be. This visit is
supposed to be a surprise, but it is nothing of the sort. The
evening before I was seated in the garden with Miss Devise
when the Superintendent came up to her, and said——she was a
voluntary patient—”I suppose you do not wish to see the com-
missioners. I have just heard at the club that they will be here
to-morrow morning at eleven, and if you like, you can go for a
walk at that time,” which she did, and one of the gentlemen
was sent out at the same hour with an attendant.

The morning for which the staff had made such extensive
preparations was, for that cold season, bright and spring-like,
and the peremptory attendant ordered those patients who were
in the convalescent ward even more peremptorily than usual
into the garden much earlier than usual. We obeyed, but in a
quarter of an hour here again peremptorily ordered to return to
the lounge. There we found Miss Hares, who did not as a rule
appear until after eleven, and the fat old lady, who had been
induced to hasten her toilette, and was being made happy with
one of the hard cakes left over from Sunday. The lounge looked
its best, as the two elderly gentlemen entered it, and there were
about eighteen patients in it. Curiously enough, as the former

Legally Dead 193

entered, the matron asked me if I would fetch her something
she had left in another part of the house, and I was away quite
five minutes, for I could not find the article which, I believe, was
not there at all. For some reason best known to the authorities it
was evidently deemed advisable that I should see as little as
possible of the proceedings and the commissioners—hence my
errand.

When I got back to the lounge, the younger of the two men,
who was well over sixty, was questioning a patient. This opera-
tion lasted perhaps ten seconds, then he passed on to another.
The elder was apparently in an advanced stage of senile decay,
and, standing with his hands under his frock-coat tails, gazed
vacantly about him. If he attempted to approach a patient the
younger man bade him return to his side, which he obediently
did; nor did he address any of the patients whilst I was in the
room. As the interviews were of but a few seconds’ duration
with each patient, these were half over when I got back to the
lounge; but I meant to speak to one, if not both; so I approached
the younger man, who held a note-book in his hand, to which
he frequently referred.

”What is your name?” he inquired.

I gave it, and he referred to his book and verified my state-
ment.

‘'1 am very anxious to leave this asylum,” I said. ”I am not
mentally ill. I have no delusions, nor am I suffering from any
form of insanity.”

The Superintendent here heard my voice, and turning round,
placed his hand on my shoulder.

”This was a very bad one,” said he in a tone expressive of the
evident credit he took to himself for my cure, which he was the
last person in the world to deserve. Yet to me individually he
did not devote more than one half hour of his precious time
throughout the seventeen weeks of my detention.

”Ah, let me see,” replied the latter, ”I think we have already
had some correspondence with reference to this lady. Well, she
seems much better.” The doctor drew me away from the com-
missioner, who was already addressing another patient, and my
opportunity vanished, my hopes sank to zero. In a few minutes
the gentlemen had left the lounge.

The Book of Margery Kempe 5

individual by alien, spiritual forces. In pre-Christian Rome, it had
been popularly believed that the spirits of the forest, the sylvani and
the fauni, caused madness. Mad people were sometimes called larvar-
um plenus or larvatus, meaning ”full of larvae, or phantoms/'4 After
the death of Galen, such popular superstitions came to have greater
significance. Early Christianity, instead of countering such beliefs,
often appears to have absorbed them. The Christian Gnostics in par-
ticular believed that they had an essential gnosis, or wisdom, which,
among other things, involved an awareness of large numbers of spir-
itual mediators between God and man. The early Christian Father,
Origen (who castrated himself soon after his conversion), theorized
that the body was made up of thirty-six basic parts, each one under
the control of a different deity, and that sterility in women and famine
were the work of evil spirits. Demonologists catalogued signs of de-
monic possession that became known after the second century as
stigmata diaboli, the stigmata of the Devil. And finally, in 429 A.D., in
the Codex Theodesianus, the Church officially denounced the practice
of magic as criminal, and authorities prepared to prosecute anyone
who conspired with demonic powers. Shortly thereafter a magician in
Spain was executed for heresy.5

In short, the single most powerful institution of medieval times, the
Church, gradually accepted the validity of popular superstitions
about the existence of spiritual powers, and the reality of possession
by them, at last recognizing those superstitions as part of its own
sacred canon. Spiritual psychiatry had arrived.

Of course, not all cases of madness in medieval times were thought
to be caused by possession. Theologians, lawyers, and physicians
generally were careful to distinguish between madness of natural
origin and demonic possession. Yet the Church and its followers had
come to accept St. Augustine's vision of the world as a battleground
between the forces of good and evil, the legions of God and the Devil.
It is therefore not surprising that some mad people in medieval times
were seen as victims of the Devil or his minions.

For the classically trained physician, then, at least some of the
pathologies of the mind were thought to be of natural origin. The
theologian may have agreed that some mental pathologies were of
natural origin, but for him the mind was essentially equal to the soul.

“Ibid., p. 106.
5Ibid., pp. 99, 100, 110.

1918, 1919'~E-
The Dimy of Vaslav N ijinsky

Born in Kiev in 1890 Vaslav Nijinsky was of the fifth generation of a
family of dancers} His father, Thomas Nijinsky, traveled with his
own troupe of dancers through Russia, and at the age of three Vaslav
made his first public appearance in his father's troupe. At the age of
nine he was accepted into the Imperial School of St. Petersburg, one
of the greatest ballet schools of the world. There, students and
teachers alike recognized him as a prodigy. Two years before sched-
uled graduation his teachers declared they could teach him nothing
more and suggested he graduate early—a unique event in the
school's century and a half history. Even though he declined early
graduation and continued his studies, Nijinsky was at the same time
given increasingly prominent roles in the St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky
Ballet.

In 1909 Sergei Pavlovitch Diaghilev, a Russian aristocrat and patron
of the arts, formed the Russian Ballet which was to tour Europe.
Diaghilev acquired some of Russia's best dancers from both the
Mariinsky Theatre of St. Petersburg and the Bolshoi Theatre of Mos-
cow. Nijinsky was included. In September of that year the Russian
Ballet gave its first performance, in Paris. The ballet was an enormous
success, and Nijinsky was the star.

Aside from being a genius at characterization and a brilliant
choreographer, Nijinsky was perhaps the greatest dancer of the cen-
tury. He was the only dancer who could do an entrechat dix, a move-
ment in which the dancer, while in the air, crosses the feet back and
forth ten times. His leaps were tremendous. He was said to rise
unusually high, almost floating at the peak of his leap, and then
appear to descend twice as slowly as he rose. At the end of one
dance, Nijinsky would cross an entire stage, front to back, in a single
leap, to be caught by a human net behind the stage.

One of the great artists of Europe before the war, Nijinsky counted
among his friends Debussy, Ravel, Cocteau, Stravinsky, Picasso,
Rodin, and Charlie Chaplin. In spite of his universal recognition,
Nijinsky remained a modest, self-effacing man of simple tastes, who

1 All biographical information on Nijinsky is taken from Nijinsky, by Romola
Nijinsky.

194

The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky 195

had been protected from childhood on. There was at once a personal,
social, sexual, and artistic relationship between Diaghilev and the
young dancer. Diaghilev allowed Nijinsky to express his genius fully
in dance and choreography at the same time that he isolated him from
others. In 1912, however, the Russian Ballet performed in Budapest,
and a young Hungarian woman, Romola Markus, the daughter of
Hungary's greatest stage actress, saw Nijinsky and fell in love. Re-
markably, even though she had no training as a dancer, the young
woman persuaded Diaghilev to let her travel with the ballet as a
student. She and N ijinsky were married the following year.

Upon hearing of the marriage Diaghilev dismissed Nijinsky from
the company and vowed to destroy his career. Nijinsky tried to form
his own group but without success. When war broke out in Europe
Nijinsky and his wife were in Hungary. Because he was a Russian,
the Hungarian authorities took him and his family prisoner; they
were allowed to stay with Romola’s parents in Budapest but were
forbidden to travel. In 1916, after repeated requests from various aris-
tocratic and political figures of Europe, as well as the pope, the Au-
stro-Hungarian government agreed to ”lend” Nijinsky to the United
States for an extended tour.

Upon returning to Europe with his wife and child in 1917 Nijinsky
retreated to St. Moritz, Switzerland,‘ to await the end of the war.
During this time Romola began to notice disturbing changes in his
behavior. He became more solitary, preferring to take long walks
by himself. He began to write obsessively in his diary in Russian,
working many nights until dawn. He seemed to be more impulsive
and once—in an act wholly foreign to his nature—pushed Romola
down a stairway. At one point he performed a highly unusual dance
in St. Moritz, a violent, spontaneous, symbolic depiction of the hor-
rors of the war and afterward told Romola he had become married to
God. At last, deeply troubled by Nijinsky’s behavior, his wife per-
suaded him to see the psychiatrist, Eugen Bleuler, in Zurich. Bleuler
interviewed Nijinsky for ten minutes and then told Romola he was
”incurably insane.”

Hearing of this pronouncement Romola’s parents rushed to Zurich

  and arranged to have Nijinsky locked up. His hotel was surrounded

by firemen, in case he should try to jump out a window; police came
to the door and seized him. ”What have I done? What do you want of
me? Where is my wife?” he asked. He was taken to the state asylum
at Zurich, where he lapsed into a catatonic stupor. Although Romola
consulated all the great psychiatrists—Freud, Jung, Bleuler, l<raepe-
lin, Ferenczy—Nijinsky spent most of his remaining years in an asy-

196 VASLAV NIIINSKY

lum. It is said that he became hallucinatory and sometimes even
violent, but mostly he was withdrawn and blankly indifferent to the
rest of the world.

Nijinsky wrote his diary in 1918 and 1919 while in St. Moritz. At
times he tells us his words are the words of God, a spiritual message
to humankind. Though it was not published until 1936 (and then at
the direction of Romola) it seems as if Nijinsky had intended his diary
to be the preliminary study for a later, more finished piece.
Intentions aside, however, it is clear that the diary also served
as a private confessor, a way of dealing with his troubling thoughts,
fantasies, and experiences, a way of separating and examining them.

Taken as a whole, the diary is a rambling combination of philoso-
phy and anecdote. The philosophy resembles a Tolstoyan Christian
mysticism. Nijinsky is seeking God, seeking the God in himself, and
somehow he associates the human connection to God with a domi-
nance of spontaneous feeling over the reasoning mind. At times, his
search for God seems almost to become a deliberate and willful ac’-
quisition of madness: ”I want the death of the mind,” he says.

His identity is precarious. He tells us he is Nijinsky. Then he is God
in Nijinsky. Other times, he says he is Christ, Buddha, and so on.

I am a moujik, a workman, a factory worker, a servant, a master, an
aristocrat, the Tsar. God. I am God. I am God. I am all, life, infinity. I
will be always and everywhere. I can be killed but will live because I am
all. I want infinite life, not death. I also have faults, but I shall have no
more faults when people begin to help me. I want to see people and
therefore my doors are always open, my cupboards and trunks always
unlocked. Should you find my door locked, ring the bell and I will open
it if I am at home.

But this expansiveness and fluidity of ego is no more remarkable than
the words of a host of artists, prophets, or visionaries. America's
greatest poet, Walt Whitman, said the same things; the above passage
is certainly reminiscent of sections of Leaves of Grass. But where Whit-
man resolves his mystical journey, his loss of ego, his travel beyond
the world of time and space and self, Nijinsky cannot. Beyond the
mystical vision and the marked wisdom of a great man, we can see a
pathology, a sorrow, and a renunciation of human life. As with
Margery Kempe, Nijinsky’s relationship to God at times becomes
petty, absurd, and self-lirniting. Ironically, the ”marriage” to God
described in the last excerpt is not a liberation but an imprisonment,
figuratively and literally.

What was the cause and meaning of this madness, this alteration in

The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky 197

thinking and personality that so suddenly overcame the dancer?
Perhaps there was a hereditary predilection to madness. Nijinsky’s
oldest brother was an asylum inmate in Russia, but his illness may in
fact have been caused by a childhood head injury. Or perhaps Nijin-
sky’s divine marriage was an escape from difficult human marriages
and entanglements—with Diaghilev, with Romola and her family,
and with a Europe at war. Nijinsky himself said, ”I retired into my-
self. I retired so far that I could no longer understand people.”

N ijinsky was an extraordinary being. An American journalist called
him ”the human bird,” an image that represents both his physical
and mental being: a person too sensitive and uncompromising to
endure life intact. The following three excerpts explore his rela-
tionship with God. The first is a positive, hopeful statement of mys-
tical identity. The second depicts just how absurd and debilitating
that relationship has become. The last excerpt is a dialogue between
Nijinsky and God, just before he is taken away to the asylum.

I AM FEELING THROUGH the flesh and not through the intellect. I
am the flesh. I am the feeling. I am God in flesh and feeling. I
am man and not God. I am simple. I need not think. I must
make myself felt and understood through feeling. Scientists
think about me and break their heads, but their thinking will not
give any results. They are stupid. I speak simply without any
tricks.

The world was made by God. Man was made by God. It is
impossible for man to understand God, but God understands
God. Man is part of God and therefore sometimes understands
God. I am both God and man. I am good and not a beast. I am
an animal with a mind. I am flesh but I do come from flesh. God
made flesh. I am God. I am God. I am God. . . .

3l- 3(- 3(-

Once I went for a walk and it seemed to me that I saw some
blood on the snow. I followed the traces of the blood and sensed
that somebody who was still alive had been killed. I went in
another direction and more traces of blood were visible. I was
afraid but I followed the tracks; there was a precipice. I realized
that the traces were not of blood but manure. Walking in the
snow, I noticed the marks of skis which had apparently stopped

198 VASLAV NIIINSKY

near the traces of blood. I thought that someone had buried a
man in the snow, having knocked him down and killed him. I
got frightened and ran back. Later I returned again and felt that
God wanted to see whether I was afraid of Him or not. I said
aloud: ”No, I am not afraid of God: He is life and not death.”
Then God made me walk towards the precipice, telling me that
He had been hurt and should be saved. I was afraid. I thought
that the devil was tempting me, the same way as he did Christ.
He was saying: ”]ump down, then I will believe you.” I was
afraid and stood there for a little, then I felt that I was being
drawn towards the precipice. I approached its edge and slipped,
but some branches I had not noticed before stopped my fall. I
was amazed and thought it was a miracle. God had wanted to
try me. I understood Him. I tried to push the branches away but
He did not allow me. For a long time I held on to them, then
became terrified. God told me that I would fall if I let the bran-
ches go. Finally I disentangled myself from the bushes but did
not fall. God said to me: ”Go home and tell your wife that you are
insane.” I realized that God wanted to help me, and went home
to bring this news to my wife.

On the way back again I saw the traces of blood, but no longer
believed in their existence. God had shown me these in order
that I should feel Him. I felt His presence and returned. He told
me to lie down in the snow. I did so. He made me lie there for a
long, long time. My hands began to get cold, to freeze. I took
my hand off the snow and said that this could not be God's
wish, as my hand was hurting. God was pleased, but after I had
taken a few steps He ordered me to go back and lie down near a
tree. I got hold of the tree, then slipped. God again commanded
me to lie in the snow. I was lying there for a long time. I did not
feel the cold any more—then God made me get up. I got up. He
told me to go home. I went home. God said to me: ”Stop!” I
stopped. I again saw the traces of blood. He told me to return, I
did. He said: ”Stop!” I stopped.

>6 36 3(-

I offended my wife without realizing it—then I asked her
forgiveness; my faults were continuously being brought up at a
suitable moment. I am afraid of my wife; she does not under-
stand me. She believes that I am insane or wicked. I am not

The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky 199

Wicked, I love her. I write about life, not death. I am not Nijin-
sky as they think. I am God in man. My wife is a good woman. I
told her in secret all my plans, then she told the doctors every-
thing, believing this would help me. My wife does not under-
stand my object; I did not explain it, not wanting her to know. I
will feel and she will understand. She will feel and I will under-
stand. I do not want to think, thinking is death. I know what I
am doing. ”I do not wish you ill. I love you. I want to live and
therefore I will be with you. I spoke to you. I do not want intelligent
speech.” The doctors speak with intelligence, so does my wife. I
am afraid of them. I want them to understand my feelings. ”I
know that it hurts you. Your wife is suffering because of you. ” I do not
want death to come and therefore I use all kinds of tricks. I will
not reveal my object. ”Let them think you are an egoist. Let them put
you in prison. I will release you because you belong to me. I do not like
the intelligent Romola. I want her to leave, you. I want you to be mine. I
do not want you to love her as a man loves. I want you to love her with a
sensitive love. I know how to simplify and smooth everything that has
happened. I want the doctors to understand your feelings. I want to
scold you because the doctors think that your wife is a nervous woman.
Your cross has done so much harm that you cannot disentangle it all. I
know your faults because I have committed them.” I put on a cross on
purpose: ”She understood you. The doctor came in order to find out
what your intentions are and does not understand anything at all. He
thinks and therefore it is difficult for him to understand. He feels
Romola is right and that you are right too. I know how to understand.” I
think better than doctors. ”I am afraid for you, because you are
frightened. I know your habits. Your love for me is infinite; you obey my
orders. I will do everything to make you understand, I love your wife
and you. I wish her well. I am God in you. I will be yours when you will
understand me. I know what you are thinking about: that he is here and
is staring at you. I want him to look at you.” I do not want to turn
round because I can feel him looking at me. ”I want to show him
your writing. He will think that you are ill because you write so much. I
understand your feelings. I understand you well. I am making you
write with a purpose because he will understand your feelings too. I
want you to write everything I am telling you. People will understand
you because you are sensitive. Your wife will understand you also. I
know more than you and therefore I ask you not to turn around. I know

200 VASLAV NIIINSKY

your intentions. I want to carry out our plans but you must suffer.
Everybody will feel and understand only when they see your suffer-
ings. ”

I want to write about my conversation in the dining room
with my wife and the doctor. I pretended I was an egoist be-
cause I wanted to touch him. He will be offended if he finds this
out but I do not care. I do not divide love. I wrote that I loved
my wife better than anybody—I wanted to show how I feel
about my wife. I love A. just as much. I know her tricks. She
understands my feelings because she is going away in the next
few days. I do not want her presence. I want my mother-in-law
to come because I want to study her and help her. I do not study
people's character in order to write about them. I want to write
in order to explain to people their habits—which lead them to
death. I call this book ”Feelings.” I love feeling and will write a
big book about it. There will be a description of my life in it. I do
not want to publish this book after my death. I want to publish
it now. ”I am afraid for you because you are afraid for yourself. I want
to say the truth. I do not want to hurt people. Perhaps you will be put in
prison for writing this book. I will be with you because you love me. I
cannot be silent. I must speak. I know you will not be put in prison;
legally you have not committed an offense. If people want to judge you,
you shall answer that everything you said is God's word. Then they will
put you into an asylum, and you will understand insane people. I want
you to be put in a prison or into an asylum. Dostoievsky went to the
gallows and therefore you also can go and sit somewhere. I know people
whose love is not dead and they will not allow you to be put anywhere.
You will become as free as a bird when this book is published in many
thousands of copies. I want to sign the name of Nijinsky—but my name
is God. I love Nijinsky not as Narcissus but as God.” I love him
because he gave me life. I do not want to pay any compliments.
I love him. He loves me because he knows my habits. ”Nijinsky
has faults, but Nijinsky must be listened to because he speaks the words
of God.” I am Nijinsky. ”I do not want Nijinsky to be hurt and
therefore I will protect him. I am only afraid for him because he is afraid
for himself. I know his strength. He is a good man. I am a good God. I
do not like Nijinsky when he is bad.” I do not like God when he is
bad. I am God, Nijinsky is God. ”He is a good man and not evil.
People have not understood him and will not understand him if they

The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky 201

think. If people listened to me for several weeks there would be great
results. I hope that my teachings will be understood.” All that I write
is necessary to mankind. Romola is afraid of me, she feels I am a
preacher. Romola does not want her husband to be a preacher,
she wants a young, handsome husband. I am handsome,
young. She does not understand my beauty, I have not got
regular features. Regular features are not like God. God has
sensitiveness in the face, a hunchback can be Godlike. I like
hunchbacks and other freaks. I am myself a freak who has feel-
ing and sensitiveness, and I can dance like a hunchback. I am an
artist who likes all shapes and all beauty. Beauty is not relative.
Beauty is God, He is in beauty and feeling. Beauty is in feeling
too. I love beauty. I feel it and understand it. Those people who
think write nonsense about beauty. One cannot discuss it. One
cannot criticize it. I am feeling beauty. I love beauty.

I do not want evil—I want love. People think that I am an evil
man. I am not. I love everybody. I have written the truth. I have
spoken the truth. I do not like untruthfulness and want good-
ness, not evil. I am love. People take me for a scarecrow because
I put on a small cross which I liked. I wore it to show that I was
Catholic. People thought I was insane. I was not. I wore the
cross in order to be noticed by people. People like calm men. I
am not. I love life. I want it. I do not like death. I want to love
mankind. I want people to believe in me. I have said the truth
about A., Diaghilev, and myself. I do not want war and mur-
ders. I want people to understand me. I told my wife that I
would destroy the man who would touch my notebooks, but I
will cry if I have to do it. I am not a murderer. I know that
everyone dislikes me. They think I am ill. I am not. I am a man
with intelligence.

The maid came and stood near me, thinking that I was sick. I
am not. I am healthy. I am afraid for myself because I know
God's wish. God wants my wife to leave me. I do not want it, I
love her and will pray that she may remain with me. They are
telephoning about something. I believe they want to send me to
prison. I am weeping, as I love life, but I am not afraid of prison.
I will live there. I have explained everything to my wife. She is
no longer afraid, but she still has a nasty feeling. I spoke harshly

because I wanted to see tears—but not those which have been

202 VASLAV NIIINSKY

caused by grief. Therefore I will go and kiss her. I want to kiss
her to show her my love. I love her, I want her, I want her love.
A. has felt that I love her too and she is remaining with us. She
is not leaving. She has telephoned to sell her ticket. I do not
know for certain but I feel it.

My little girl is singing: ”Ah, ah, ah, ah!” I do not understand
its meaning, but I feel what she wants to say. She wants to say
that everything-—Ah! Ah!—is not horror but joy.

193 8%»
The Witnesses, by Thomas Hennell

Although The Witnesses begins in sanity and ends in sanity, the body
of the work is about the experience of madness. Parts of London, the
interiors of a room or an asylum ward are described, but usually the
events are not events of the material world. For the most part, the
book relates a mental adventure, a travel through the extraordinary
universe of a madman’s mind.

The author-narrator, Thomas Hennell, opens by describing his ex-
periences as a poor, overly sensitive young artist who falls in love and
is rejected by the woman he loves, a Miss Clarissa Firestone. He
introduces the reader to the mundane concerns of the artist-his
need to make a living, his poverty and failure, the success of a friend,
his lack of self-confidence. But he is obsessed by his love for
Clarissa—and troubled. He seeks out a psychiatrist. He goes to a
religious counselor. At last, he decides to make a pilgrimage to the
grave of his mentor, Bishop Raven. So he sets out from London in the
middle of the day, walking out on the Great West Road.

By now the world of ordinary time and space and rationality has
begun to collapse. There are distortions in the appearance of things.
Evening comes. Outside of London now, as Hennell walks along a
country road, the entire world seems on the verge of a horrible trans-
formation or collapse. The stars in the sky are moving inexplicably,
new constellations are being formed. A van pulls up out of the dark-
ness. Three men in long coats and helmets, who seem to be pimps
disguised as policemen, tumble out, seize him, and roll him into the
van amidst large lumps of cloth-wrapped meat and take him to jail.
From there he is taken to a mental hospital, is five weeks later dis-
charged, placed in another, escapes twice, is transferred, and is at last
discharged.

The narrator’ s inner world is characterized by dreams, visions, fan-
tasies, hallucinations, which all have the strength of reality. But
beyond that, his perceptions of what we would consider to be ordi-
nary objective reality, are at times drastically altered. Ordinary time
and space are gone: ”all things were whirled out of time and space.”
Solids can alter shape in fluid fashion: ”the walls of the chamber
again changed form and aspect: becoming elongated and cylindrical,
then tunnelling irregularly upwards as though through the eart .”

203

6 MARGERY KEMPE

Regardless of theory, in practice it was the theologian—not the
physician—who put forth a language and metaphor for the inner
drama of the mind. And so it was that the earliest autobiographies of
the inner life, the life of the mind, always described that life in spir-
itual or religious terms. I use the term spiritual autobiography to de-
scribe that kind of autobiography. Although seventeenth—century
English Puritans and Quakers applied this term to a traditional narra-
tive of the inner life, I use it more broadly to include all autobiographies
of the inner life which describe that life in spiritual or religious terms.

Margery Kempe’s Book is one such spiritual autobiography.

Margery Kempe was the daughter of the mayor of Lynn, a town in
Norfolk, England. She was born around 1373, grew up illiterate, and
married young. Soon after the birth of her first child, perhaps in 1393
or 1394, Kempe went ”out of her mind” (her words) for about eight
months, during which time she thought she saw and heard flame-
tongued devils. For much of her life after that Margery Kempe experi-
enced unusual visions or hallucinations, both visual and auditory,
usually about religious or spiritual matters. In 1413 she went on a
pilgrimage to Rome and the Holy Land, dressed in white according to
what she felt to be a divine injunction. Upon arriving in Jerusalem,
she began ”crying and roaring though she should have died for it.”
That was her first attack of crying out, but the attacks quickly became
chronic, often occurring several times a day, especially during times
of devotion and contemplation, and often in church.

In England, her persistent eccentric behavior aroused a lot of public
attention. Occasionally people assumed she was ill. We are told that
at one time people thought she had ”the falling evil,” presumably
epilepsy: ”Some said she had the falling evil, for she, with the crying,
wrested her body, turning from one side to the other, and waxed all
blue and livid, like the colour of lead.” But mostly, perhaps because
so much of her behavior was focused on religious matters, people
assumed that she was either possessed by the Devil or was a heretic.
In 1417 she was brought to trial for heresy in the Church of All Hal-
lows at Leicester, but on examination she appeared orthodox and was
acquitted, saved from a possible death by fire.

Apparently a few people thought of Kempe as a holy woman, a
prophet, or visionary. According to her account, certain ”worthy and
worshipful” clergy urged her to make ”a book of her feelings and
revelations,” perhaps patterned on the book of revelations written by
a contemporary, Juliana of Norwich. Since she herself was illiterate,

204 THOMAS HENNELL

People appear differently, sometimes exalted, as saints or kings,
sometimes degraded or subhuman. And at the end of his stay in the
first asylum, Hennell describes his mental experiences as having been
”distinguishable states of consciousness, like rooms which open one
into another.” The visions and hallucinations Hennell experiences are
fascinating, a kind of travelogue. Even more interesting are his de-
scriptions of altered time and space and his claim to have entered
”distinguishable states of consciousness.”

William James, father of American psychology, publicly announced
as early as 1901 his conviction that unusual states of awareness or
consciousness were indeed real phenomena:

Some years ago I myself made some observations on . . . nitrous oxide
intoxication, and reported them in print. One conclusion was forced
upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever
since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness,
rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of conscious-
ness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there
lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go
through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite
stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, defi-
nite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of
application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality
can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite
disregarded.‘

Sleeping, dreaming, day-dreaming, and our ordinary waking con-
sciousness are several states of awareness that we all pass through in
our daily lives. But there are other states of awareness that are less
common—for example, those achieved through meditation, drugs,
or mystical experience. Some Eastern civilizations have elaborate sys-
tems to describe unusual states of awareness. And there are some
twenty nouns in Sanskrit to describe what we know in English as
”consciousness” or ”mind.”2

Certain unusual states of awareness or consciousness have an
adaptive function. Certain trance states, for instance, have tradi-
tionally been important in the healing arts. States induced by phar-
macological agents such as CO2, insulin, amytal, and LSD-25, have

‘James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 298.
‘Tart, Altered States of Consciousness, p. 3.

The Witnesses 205

been used widely to facilitate psychotherapy. Mystical experience has
often appeared to have religious or ethical functions. And some un-
usual states of consciousness have been said to enhance creative in-
sight, problem solving, and aesthetic leaming.3 However, we must
look at the negative side of all this: there are certain apparent non-
ordinary states of awareness or consciousness which seem to be mal-
adaptive and pathological. At least some experiences of madness,
some times, involve experiences of non-ordinary states of conscious-
ness.

In the early 19503 Dr. Humphry Osmond, a young British psychia-
trist, began experimenting with mescaline. It soon occurred to him
that his mescaline experiences were very much like the experience of
madness described in The Witnesses. He felt that it would be ”almost
perverse to ignore such remarkable similarities/'4 Jointly with a Dr.
John Smythies he published a paper in 1952 describing in great detail
the similarities, also noting that mescaline has a distinct chemical
resemblance to adrenalin, the hormone related to emotion. Osmond
and Smythies hypothesized that in certain stress situations when the
adrenalin system is overworked, a failure of metabolism might take
place which could produce some mescalinelike derivative of adrena-
lin—as an yet unknown substance which they called the ”M-
substance.”

Osmond, Smythies, and another colleague, Dr. Abram Hoffer, then
set out to find the M-substance. Within six months they had discov-
ered a derivative of adrenalin which could be produced in the human
body, and which did, like mescaline, bring about certain experiences
resembling Hennell’s descriptions of his madness. The derivative, a
dark crystal which forms in water a brilliant red solution, was called
”adrenochrome.” They determined the toxicity of adrenochrome on
animals, and then began testing it on humans—themse1ves, their
wives, and a volunteer. They noticed some unusual perceptual
changes even after small doses which seemed quite similar to the
perceptual changes described in The Witnesses.

Of course, their experiment did not prove much. But it did add an
important element to the theoretical model of schizophrenia, suggest-
ing that altered perception or altered consciousness might be another
important sign of schizophrenia and that the origin lay in somatic
biochemical processes. Throughout their work Hennel1’s The Witnes-

3Ludwig, ”Altered States of Consciousness,” in ibid., pp. 19-21.
‘Osmond, intro. to Thomas Hennell, The Witnesses, pp. 21, 22.

206 THOMAS HENNELL

ses was used as a basic source, a model for understanding the experi-
ence of madness. Osmond writes of Hennell: ”His vivid and moving
account of his illness spurred on our enquiries at times when they
might otherwise have flagged, suggesting new lines of attack which
we might not have considered and gave us reassurances that we were
on the right track at times when most of our contemporaries and
seniors were certain that we were on a wild goose chase/'5
Osmond never naively supposed that schizophrenia was merely an
extended mescaline intoxication. He insisted that mescaline and LSD
would merely help us understand some parts of the schizophrenic
experience. He eventually objected to calling LSD and mescaline
”psychoto-mimetic” (psychosis-mimicking) and instead coined the
more benevolent term ”psychedelic” (mind-expanding). It was clear
that the psychedelic drugs did produce dramatic alterations of con-
sciousness that sometimes seemed identical to perceptual changes in
schizophrenia, but there were too many differences between the two
types of experience which could not be explained in a direct compari-
son. For one thing, schizophrenia produces a thought disorder,
which does not appear in the psychedelic experience. For another, the
few genuine hallucinations experienced with the psychedelic drugs
are usually visual (such as seeing geometric patterns), while the hal-
lucinations of schizophrenia are usually auditory (such as hearing
voices). Finally, the human nervous system has a remarkably rapid
accommodation to the psychedelic drugs, so that continuous intoxica-
tion of that sort seems to be impossible beyond a few days.
Nonetheless, Osmonds’ experiments were tremendously impor-
tant and provocative. In essence, they added one more dimension to
those classical descriptions of schizophrenia given by Emil Krapelin
and Eugen Bleuler at the turn of the century.6 From now on the ideal
theory of schizophrenia would have to account for the symptoms
described by Kraepelin and Bleuler and would also have to include
the kinds of pervasive, subjective experiences of altered conscious-
ness as described in this psychiatric autobiography, The Witnesses.

Obviously, Dr. Osmond considered The Witnesses to be a document
of great significance. Beyond that, it is a finely wrought work of art.
The book has a marvelous symmetry. The madness grows slowly,
emerging gradually out of mundane experience, evolving into a tor-

5Ibid., p. x.
‘See Appendix II.

The Witnesses 207

nado of chaotic sensations, confused perceptions, extraordinary
awareness, and at last gradually returning to the experience of every-
day life. The transitions from sanity to madness and back again are
not marked by changes in style and distance—and the final effect is
powerful.

In the following excerpts from The Witnesses, the speaker’ s ordinary
world is collapsing and the reader is transported to a drastically
altered experience. As the first passage opens, the narrator is in jail.
Across from his cell he sees a man in a uniform, whom he calls
variously ”the Adversary,” ”the Principal,” and ”the Transfigured
Man,” and whose face goes through remarkable changes. Then the
narrator describes his experiences inside an asylum. The patients
appear to him in an exaggerated, perhaps archetypal aspect, either as
”glorified” into recognizable historical figures and ”kings and
saints,” or as ”sinister figures” and ”a strange rout of subhuman
beings.” We may be struck by the accuracy and evocative power of
the descriptions. Here are the marks of Hennell’s training as a paint-
er: strong details of fonn and color, a powerful visual sense, a quick
and easy leaping to visual comparison, to metaphor. Finally, Hen-
nell’s madness appears to be a positive, aesthetic experience as much
as it was painful and disturbing. There is awe, humor, fear, pleasure,
chagrin, but little agony—mostly an acceptance of a remarkable
transfiguration of aesthetic fascination. It is this attitude that gives the
work its particular style and color. The Witnesses is an amazing docu-
ment and a remarkable Bosch—1ike prose painting.

SPEECH SEEMED TO RETURN with primitive rudimentary sounds.
Then standing on my feet, I saw through the grate of the cell-
door that a man was seated opposite me in the guard-room,
across the passage. His elbows were upon the table, his head
rested forward upon them, and for a moment it seemed that he
was asleep, or rather that he was sightless. His hair was golden
or com-coloured—a long lock of it hung over his brow. He wore
the Air Force uniform, with bright silver buttons, and two nar-
row silver stripes on his right breast, beside the badge of wings.
At almost the same instant a man appeared in the passage
between my Adversary and myself: a negro who looked at me
and waggled his head sideways, so that it left an instantaneous

’ 2023 THOMAS HENNELL

suggestion of lapping water, seen in a round mirror. I waved
him violently away; he withdrew leftwards, by the way he had
come; then, as though with several voices at once, I shouted the
Name. His eyes opened, and his head moved slowly over from
left to right, mine following it from right to left, as if it meant to
twist off from my shoulders. "O my dear , I wish I could
have done it.” I

Between the Principal and the door, a burly, baldheaded man
in a dark blue uniform, with upright collar, was also sitting, at
that side of the table. An ink-bottle and some papers were by
him. He seemed intent on them. His knees were crossed under
the table, and his boots were round-ended and intolerably
brightly polished—they seemed symbols of the Bully.

”Take away that boot, take away that damned boot!” I yelled
at him. At first he seemed purposely to remain mostly out of
sight, the door-jamb of the guard-room intervening.

”How long have you been here?” inquired the Adversary in a
light and beautiful voice.

"All the time."

”Can you swim?”

“Yes!”

”How far?”

”Oh, twenty miles.” Indeed, in his presence, the feat seemed
possible.

He then stood before the cell-door (my eyes being fixed on
him) and inclined his forehead towards me, first the right part,
then the left. These became instantly changed in form and
appearance, they brightened to pure pale gold and assumed
classical form; his other features changed, so that, for an atom of
time, he was perfectly Apollo: the change went past this, he
grinned, became more burning and terrible, and was Jupiter.

It seemed that the guards stampeded rather, for there were
three loutish heads at the grate: the Adversary standing back so
that I could still see him, one of them spoke hastily:

”What’ s your belief? You've got some creed or other. Say it.”

I began to say the Apostles’ Creed in the loud and clear in-
tonation in which Bishop Raven had formerly been used to say
it, and it seemed with the same voice which then spoke it.

”That will do, that’ s enoug ,” one of them said, when I had

The Witnesses 209

got no further than ”suffered under Pontius Pilate”. ”N ow sing
some song or other.”

The Transfigured Man seeming to assent, I thereupon sang
(with more good-will than judgment) ‘'80 early in the morning,
the saflor likes his bottle, 0'’. (Archer being very fond of chan-
ties, we had practised them together.)

Then all three bundled into the room together, one holding a
tin cup, which he gave me to drink. It was boiling tea, and felt
like boiling lead, but I gulped it down to the last. The guards
began to struggle with me, but the inspiration was very strong;
two of them were thrown down, and the third, who just then
had assumed the likeness and actual presence of the Bully of
Central Europe (he whose boot I had cursed), was grappling
with me and trying to look me out of countenance. He neither
did this nor threw me down. It was as though sparks went out
from my eyes into his, so that he flinched at last and looked
away. The beaming Being upon the other side of the door
clapped his hands and laughed. It was instantaneous and com-
plete as an astronomical figure.

When the guards were outside again and had slammed the
door on me, he spoke again to them: ”Does he drink any wa-
ter?"

IINOVI

He laughed again. One of them asked me: ”What would you
like to eat?”

”A poached eye.”

This was about the limit of our understanding.

I sang again, by request, and this time another unforeseen
thing happened. I was aware of a small movement in the ceil-
ing, about two-thirds across the room towards the door, and
three-quarters of the width towards my left; the movement be-
came defined as a round depression, wide as a saucer, reverber-
ating and increasing to a regular cylindrical hole three inches
deep, and about eight in diameter. Scarcely aware of what I did
(still madly excited), I pitched my voice higher, and then whis-
tled, whereat the floor of this hole deepened and narrowed
gradually to a long, slightly twisted cone: whether or not there
was a pinhole opening to the daylight I could not tell.

During this time my Adversary was seated again, close before

210 THOMAS HENNELL

the door. He looked up at what was happening, and though no
longer regarding him directly, I was partly aware of his appear-
ance now.

It was supernatural, no longer like Apollo, Moses or Jove: he
looked up and I was aware of the extraordinary quality of his
eyes, of the rich colour of his mouth, now no longer smiling.
His hair seems to have become flame-like and standing up.
There was something more ancient in this aspect than Israel,
Greece, Egypt, perhaps Assyria, yet divine in all these ages, and
of them: to which the word ”magical” does not seem irreverent.

Presently the guard-room filled with other men. They seemed
police, army sergeants and officers in plain clothes; there were
many of them, and with them went out the man who had been
transfigured. And after that I saw him no more in the flesh, but
many times had the encouragement of his speech and magnif-

icent laughter.
3(- 3(- 3(-

'I7ze Temple

The day grew late: food was neither offered nor desired; but
there seemed to increase amongst us a certain sense of dis-
appointment, as though the thing we looked for was still de-
ferred. A strong after-current of emotion swept through my
mind, preventing it from seeking to rationalize its experience: bear-
ing images which still appeared anticipatory. There were half-
shaped ideas of resurrection: the croakings and mutterings
sounded as voices of almost extinct intelligence, murmurs of
departed spirits awaiting, yet not expecting release. A figure
from some book recurred to my mind in vivid form: a train of
successive generations of prophets and seers, heroes, poets,
martyrs; which cycle was renewed, with soaring armies of
ghosts, who trod and re-trod the paths of their earthly adven-
tures in the ebb and flow of time. This intensified till it was
dreadful, and yet with a nightshade splendour: among our lat-
ter generations, those who lived still were the writers, who
marched in the guise of characters which they had realized.

A great library was now to be built: friend Baker had designed
it, a great structure of steel, having many galleries which radi-
ated to a central domed and circular hall. In this place there

The Witnesses 211

would be statues and names inscribed of many famous men;
even now, as its geometric plan crystallized in my brain, I
seemed to lie in the midst, and yet this place was loaded and
dangerous: somewhat as a bundle of fireworks, or set-piece
waiting to be touched off. Were there not Gothic churches and
chapter-houses, all of catherine-wheels and rockets, at many
celebrations in Queen Victoria's honour? So this might typify a
great woman's apotheosis; what projections of stars had been
those of last night! Now I was within doors, and a strong sense
of calamitous danger had returned, though I was not physically
affected by fear; but rather in a spiritual apprehension.

When all grew dark, the religious atmosphere was still main-
tained; and yet there entered and passed before me some sinis-
ter figures; who wore a false air, as of comedians who have
failed to amuse, and desperately strive to be easy and self-
possessed. One may have had some account of me from the
taxi-party, for he spoke jeeringly, using words which are not
allowed among polite people. Here were some presences which
intended me no good, but now I scarcely marked them. So I fell
asleep, as it were, under the shade of wings.

During this night twice or thrice I was awoken by momentary
brilliant flashes, and for an instant, at each occasion, people
stood near. Here again some were jokers; some as bystanders at
a road accident; others stood as if in the presence of a spiritual
event, or speaking in hushes whispers: and I seemed to discern
several whom I knew.

”The Immaculate Conception,” said one.

Next morning, as if through wooden bars, were seen many
people in shirt-sleeves and coarse trousers sweeping out a large
airy room, and some in white night-shirts crossed the floor.
There was such a parlour in the House of the Interpreter, full of
dust, but, water being sprinkled, the room was swept and
cleansed with pleasure. And there too was a wall where a fire
burnt, which one man would quench with water, and another,
standing at the back of the wall, fed the flames with oil. So some
similar thing was here: for now I entered a brick tower or corner-
chamber, through the opening in whose door was seen a long,
beautiful room whose further end or head had three walls, with
windows. The early sunlight glorified the faces of some who lay

212 THOMAS HENNELL

upon the beds, their heads near the windows. They seemed to
be lifeless but waiting to be reanimated, and there were several
whom I knew as my friends. So I shouted and sang as loudly as
possible, to wake them up, and an increasing heat surged
through this place where I was, so that I was filled with the
agony of the fire but yet could endure it: the white flame made
rings on my head and body. It was an intensification of that
white spirit which had been apparent to my mind when I de-
parted from London. These coruscations passed as sparks into
the room and into the faces of three or four newly resurrected
men who sat close by. Two of these were well known by appear-
ance, for one was a poet and the other a revolutionary; both
honoured in their funerals according to the public taste and
economy of their respective nations. So they seemed to be here
as kings. The earth-shaker looked puzzled and was silent; his
grey hair bristled. But the poet's hair was long and white—part
stood erect, and part streamed out towards the door, as if struck
by the mingled influences of Phosphor and Saturn. If ever
amazement and incredulous delight shone in a face, they were
seen in his countenance at this moment. A confusion of histori-
cal speeches boiled together in my wits, finding fragmentary
utterance:

”Sugar, Mr Speaker!” I shouted at the likeness of Lenin.
”Sugar, sugar, sugar! Who will now dare to laugh at sugar!”

But he of the dissected brains looked, if possible, still more
puzzled at this text from the elder Pitt. A peak-capped guard
gave a wink, and asked:

  ”What is the name of your sweetheart?”

And five or six times the name ”Clarissa Firestone! Clarissa
Firestone!” was hurled across the room. The old man seemed to
catch a live spark from each repetition of this name, and to
throw it round the room from eye to eye of all his companions,
till it passed out by a passage to the left, where two women
stood in silence at a locked gate of iron, painted red. One of
these women was in dark clothes; the other in a white garment
seemed to be Jane Shore. They were the only women I ever
actually saw in this place. This gate was the entrance to a gar-
den, behind the left wall of our long room: and through the
windows could be seen other gates and trees; so that there

The Witnesses 213

seemed to be successive heavens, each more strange and im-
material, and their gates yet more impossible to open.

And later this momentary glimpse was grown into by fancies
and dream-mirage. The further landscapes were discerned to be
rocky and barren, yet intensely desirable: and upon the other
hand, in the open black gate, where the poet sat, a winter church-
yard was seen, its porch overgrown with cotoneaster, and an
open grave thereby. There had surely been a key upon the table
where the Adversary sat asleep.

There was a roaring and howling sound as of wild beasts,
round a double corner at the rear, as though some men had
been transformed into wolves and bears, for presently a strange
rout of subhuman beings came crowding across the room and
moved out by the steps to the left. As they went they laughed
and gibbered uncouthly, with curious antics, as though they
were betting and laying odds: some were ”borogoves”, spotted
newts or devfl’s-dice. It was shocking that they were let into the
presence of these kings and saints.

There were openings in the brick wall above the door, and
these seemed, with the fire and the shouting, to have been
changed in form and increased in number, somewhat as if it
were a pigeon-cote through whose openings the birds could fly.

”Quite hopeless, I'm afraid,” said the very old poet.

The door being now opened, I followed the unruly rout into a
long and mean passage which was crowded with such a dis-
orderly, shocking rabble as I never saw; worse than any beggars
or ruffians. It was like an underground refuge full of people
demoralized and dehumanized by an air-raid. Seeing some
stewards or officers pushing them hither and thither into their
places, I was willing to lend assistance—but they treated me as
if I were red-hot, and by no means to be closely approached. A
large safe or strong-room was opened: it was managed that I
should enter, and this door was instantly shut fast.

The Book of Margery Kempe 7

she dictated the original version of the long first part of her auto-
biography to an unknown amanuensis, possibly her son. Finished in
1432, that copy was poorly written, ”nor were the letters shaped or
formed as other letters.” In 1436 her second amanuensis, a priest,
began rewriting the original version of the first part of the Book, put-
ting it into recognizable English. By 1438 the priest had begun trans-
cribing a shorter second part as Kempe dictated it. The manuscript
later disappeared—for a few centuries—at last discovered in 1934, in
the home of Colonel William Erdeswick Ignatius Butler-Bowden, who
soon after published it in modern English.

As a picture of medieval life, Margery Kempe’s book is unparal-
leled. In at least two places, for instance, we are given rare descrip-
tions of seemingly ordinary fifteenth-century treatment of persons
who were recognized as mad. When Kempe was ”out of her mind,”
we learn that she ”was bound and kept with strength, day and
night,” to prevent her from biting and scratching herself. Later, she
visited a woman who had become ”alienated from her wits,” after
childbirth. The woman ”roared and cried” and would ”both smite
and bite”: ”Then was she taken to the furthest end of town, into a
chamber, so that the people should not hear her crying, and there was
she bound, hand and foot, with chains of iron, so that she should
smite nobody."

Margery Kempe’s Book is of greatest interest as the first fully de-
veloped example in English of autobiographical description of inner
experience—normal or abnormal. And it is from that perspective that
we might best examine the work.

Perhaps the most notable quality of Kempe’s inner experience is
her sense of her own separation from the origins of that experience.
She sees herself as a passive recipient, rather than an active origina-
tor. Thus she first loses her mind partly because the Devil placed in
her mind a fear of damnation. In describing her preparations for the
pilgrimage to Rome and the Holy Land, Kempe does mention that
she ”had a desire" to see those places, but almost immediately after,
in the text, we learn that before the desire was followed, it was
ratified by a spiritual command: ”as she was in these desires, Our
Lord bade her, in her mind . . . that she should go.” Such a separa-
tion of the self from the origins of thought and action is consistent
with the theocratic view of the psyche, and in the spiritual autobiog-
raphies to follow, we shall see this theoretical system repeated. But
Kempe seems to take it to extremes. All her unusual mental
experiences are described in passive form, denoting the intrusion of

1944*?»

Brainstorm, by Carlton Brown

In an introductory chapter, Carlton Brown says that Brainstorm is a
true story but that he has ghostwritten it for a friend who went
through an experience of ”manic-depressive psychosis” and was un-
able to transform his own notes, reminiscences, and letters into a final
coherent account} Actually, that ”friend” was Brown himself.

Brainstorm is a compelling journey of mood and imagination, begin-
ning with simple exuberance and progressing into higher and higher
levels of elation until at last the ordinary world takes on extraordinary
significance, and the narrator believes himself to be at the very center
of that new world—a new Messiah. The book contains some of the
clearest descriptions in existence of a particular type of madness marked
by mood elevation, heightening of the senses, loss of inhibition and
guilt, and exaggerated feeling of self—reference.

In the following representative chapter from Brainstorm, ”Michael
Kelley Jones” takes a trip out of New York City into the countryside to
visit his daughter. He examines a Chinese scroll painting on his wall,
takes a taxi and has a conversation with the driver, buys a new suit,
has a haircut, takes the ferry to Jersey City, has lunch, talks to the
waiter, boards the train, remembers his old girl friend Dina, observes
his fellow passengers, has a conversation with one, then at last steps
off the train at his destination. The events are held together with a
tight and compelling coherence told through a mood of abnormal
elation. The haircut is not just an ordinary haircut—it feels like a
priestly initiation. The lunch in Jersey City is a feast of ”nectar and
ambrosia.” The reader is transported from one event to the next with
a sense of urgency and destination. When Jones finally boards the
train, the motion and rhythm of the passage seem inexorable. At last,
on the last train ride, we are swept helplessly along in a powerful
current of consciousness and event and rhythm, of point and coun-
terpoint: Michael’s happy expectations, his urgency, the conductor’s
cries of ”Going home! Going home!" and the quickening and inten-
sifying pulse of the train whistle: more than four times the whistle
blows, first a ”great_ sad-happy shout,” then a ”mounting exultant

‘Carlton Brown, Brainstorm, pp. 3, 4.

214

Brainstorm 215

cry,” then crying ”victoriously,” and finally ”crowing like a Gargan-
tuan rooster awakening the universe to its glory.”

 :

HANGING ON THE KITCHEN WALL of my apartment was a Chinese
scroll painting, some four feet high, of a middle-aged woman,
seated, her hands tucked into the sleeves of her richly brocaded
robe of Vermilion, pink, green, ultramarine blue and gold, pat-
terned with dragons, waves, suns, a bird, clouds and flowers.
She wore a long necklace, jade earrings and an elaborately
beaded headdress. Except for her face, everything about the
portrait was formalized. I had bought a number of portraits of
this sort in China more than ten years before, and in all of them
the costumes might have been laid in with stencils, their details
varying according to the caste of the sitter, but all being serious,
formalized and extravagant Oriental versions of the props of an
amusement-park photographer, enabling the artist to attach the
poser’s head to any one of a number of stereotyped bodies.
One day in July I discovered that the features of the Chinese
lady had become suffused with the absolute semblance of life.
As soon as I had accustomed myself to the surprise of this
discovery, I consulted her eyes for verification of each of my
enraptured and increasingly convincing intimations of immoral-
ity, or for condemnation of the thoughts and actions that still
marked me as a mortal, and found what I sought in their vi-
brant, eloquent depths. Our communion was wordless but com-
plete. She was at once Judy’ s mother, my own, and Ann, the
friend with whom my daughter was staying in the country, a
warm, capable woman with two lovely children of her own. Her
eyes mirrored the soul of the eternal Madonna whose son I was
in the process of becoming, and from them I received implicit
instructions in the filling of my new role. She regarded me now
with melting compassion and love, now with some of the wrath
of God, now with warm tolerance, now with despair. She was
the reflection of my own conscience, miraculously extemalized.
She looked down in loving approval on the day that I set out
to visit my daughter and her playmates in the country. I packed

216 CARLTON BROWN

a lot of things to amuse them with—paper, pencils, crayons to
draw with, presents for each from the collection of curios I had
been assorting and arraying around the apartment, and, for my
daughter, a green sweater with red hearts on it, a cap to match,
and a little silver ring with tinkling bells hanging from it.

Children figured prominently in all my fantasies. They were
the only good people on earth, the only ones whose hearts were
pure and emotions unsullied. I felt that I was entering into a
childlike state, equipped with the wisdom of an adult but di-
vested of every trace of adult cynicism and world-weariness. I
was being reborn in the image of my own childhood ideal. After
”seven years of the locust,” I was finally to be admitted to a
heaven on earth inhabited by a fancied aristocracy of mind and
spirit. After bitter years of wandering in search of the key to it,
the door to my true home among the noblemen of earth and sky
was swinging wide to welcome me. One by one, the secrets of
the universe were being disclosed to me, and their possession
would secure peace and joy abundant beyond man's most
hopeful irnaginings, not to me alone but to the whole world.

By now I was imbued with the idea that the timing of my
movements was somehow being supervised from on high. If I
did a thing when it occurred to me, I would arrive on time for
appointments, catch trains, get telephone calls at just the right
time, and so on. If I didn’t—well, the cosmic schedule didn't
mean me to, and I would serenely wait for what it had in store.
My concept was infallible because of its allowance for change
without notice.

Thus it didn't disappoint me when, setting out to visit Sheila,
I missed an appointment for noon with the lawyer who was
arranging my divorce. Getting into a taxi on Seventh Avenue, I
told the driver to go uptown, and that I would tell him where to
turn off in the Forties. I didn't remember the lawyer’ s address,
but I knew the building. On the way, I gave the driver an ex-
uberant line of jabber about my being in on the secrets of the
universe.

”I’m playing a winning streak today, and I'll let you in on it.
It's a Seven day, see? It's the seventh month and the eighteenth
day. Take that eighteen and subtract one from eight and you get
seven. Then if you add up the numbers in 1940 you get fourteen;

~..i.

Brainstorm 217

divide that by two and you get seven again.” This sort of light-
ning numerology went on in my mind constantly, and was ap-
plied to telephone numbers and street addresses and all figures
that came into my ken.

”Hey!” I exclaimed when I had guided the cab to my destina-
tion. ”That’s the building and it's Number Seventy. And look at
your meter!” It registered seventy cents.

The lawyer’ s office was on the seventh floor and its number
was Seven Hundred. He had left fifteen minutes before, but my
trip had served to reinforce my numerological concept with an
amazing string of coincidences. I describe it exactly as it hap-
pened, but what I now see as a freakish run in the laws of
chance then gave absolute conviction to my oracular train of
thought. The taxi driver also was amazed, and gladly took my
name and address and agreed to play the extra dollar I gave him
on Number 700 in the Harlem policy drawing, plus an equal
amount of his own.

To garb my rejuvenated self suitably, I had bought a suit of
light-brown tweed and the gayest of accessories. I had had my
hair cut short, too, and after missing the lawyer, on my way to
get the ferry, I stopped at a barbershop on the lower west side
for a trim and a shave. The moment I entered the shop, I was
impressed by its unworldly quality. It had a somehow regal,
sanctified, ceremonial air about it. White marble washstands
with brass spigots stood along one wall, and in a cut-glass case
were shaving mugs with ornate gilt lettering on their surfaces.
Far more than a barbershop, it was a temple erected in the
previous century to the high, traditional tonsorial art. Here, I
thought, they would know how to apply leeches and practice
other lost arts of the days when barbers were chirurgeons. Dark,
mellow mahogany, cut-glass mirrors, shaving soap, lotions,
powders, steaming towe1s—it was altogether the celestial bar-
bershop, and its atmosphere was luminous, electric.

I asked the bald, old German who attended me for a crew cut,
and was furious when he gave it a Dutch effect, as though a
bowl had been put on my head and clipped around. He apolo-
gized abjectly and went on to shave me with what seemed a
touch of pure reverence. I felt that I was being anointed in the
religious sense; this old member of heaven's household staff

218 CARLTON BROWN

knew I was a golden boy-deity and handled me accordingly. As
I lay back in the chair and his too-gentle hands worked over my
face, a beatific feeling flowed over me and, I felt, transfigured
my expression. I sensed that my serene visage was meeting the
regard of a greater being than that which shone through the
eyes of the Chinese painting, and that He was finding me good
to look upon. But then, as the old man massaged me deftly,
too—tenderly, murmuring now and then, I became irritated by
what struck me as a cloying, fondling attention, as though he
did not want to let me out of his hands. I thought of him as a
monk or member of the priesthood assigned to preparing
neophytes for entry into the inner circle, and, now that he was
fairly finished with these preparations, I cut short his lingering
pattings and left.

I boarded the ferry and stood at the front of the lower deck, in
the exact center and further forward than the other passengers
and the cars. I was whistling a continuous blues hymn to the
poignant joy of living, a medley of tunes that had been the
emotional language of various eras of my life, and it all sounded
awfully good to my keenly self-appreciative ears.

As the boat put out into the Hudson toward Jersey City, I was
standing in a limber, springy stance, my weight shifting easily,
imperceptibly from one foot to the other, when I made the de-
lightful discovery that I was walking on the water. I was infused
with a supremely buoyant, bodiless feeling; I was in perfect
balance, with the motion of the boat rippling up through me,
becoming a part of my own inner rhythm. N o——the boat was no
more than a magnetic field through which my energy pene-
trated downward. I stood on nonmaterial stilts, like beams of
electric current or columns of atoms extending vertically be-
tween me and the water, and connected laterally with the pis-
tons that drove the boat. The action was something like that of
riding a bicycle, down with the right and up with the left, down
with the left and up with the right, and with each stroke came
that light, bodiless, Very real junction with the tides of the river.
I had no illusion that I had become physically elongated, no
hallucination that my supernatural stilts were there in any tangi-
ble form. Rather, the phenomenon told me that the miracle of
walking the waves was not intended to be taken literally. Any-

Brainstorm 219

one could accomplish it if he understood that it meant just this:
putting himself into transcendental harmony with the element
of water—a harmony, I was to discover, which could be estab-
lished with all the elements if one knew how to do it.

I danced effortlessly over the waves, directing currents of
motive power down through the boat's Vitals and up to its
helm, leaving the captain powerless to buck my magnetic will.
Several times, by a delicate tension of my muscles, 1 squeezed
the boat past other craft in the river by a matter of inches.
Several times, the whistle screamed in tumultuous exultation,
as though the boat were crying, ”You’re running away with me
and I'm scared silly but I love it!” It was alive like some great
whale whose nose I rode and whose churnings through the
water I guided with a firm rein attached to a ring in its snout.
Luckily for the captain and all aboard, I was headed for the
Jersey shore in a happy hurry, rather than for Albany or the
open sea. As I swung her safely into the slip, I looked down and
saw that the water was covered with an iridescent film of oil,
and as I looked, someone on the upper deck cast onto the water
a half a loaf of Italian bread.

As you enter the railroad station at Jersey City, there is an
enclosed bar and lunchroom to the left of the waiting room.
Here, after walking across the Hudson with the ferry in my
wake, I lunched on nectar and ambrosia, cunningly disguised,
to forestall the envy of ordinary mortals, as ham and eggs,
lettuce, French frieds, bread and milk.

The Negro boy who served me immediately recognized my
divinity, which was apparent to initiates in my beatific gestures,
if in no other way. His eyes were round with awe as he gazed at
the halo I had just had burnished and trimmed in the celestial
barbershop on Liberty Street, and his face lit up with a reflection
of my own seraphic countenance. Clearly he had been prepared
for my coming. The restaurant, like the barbershop, was part of
the heavenly chain of hotels that was welcoming a new guest of
honor. He observed reverently that I did not desecrate the pure
ingredients of my meal with catsup, mustard or butter; he scru-
pulously obeyed my injunction against French or Russian dress-
ing on my lettuce; and noted with beaming approval that I ate
my bread dry and used just a little salt for seasoning. In return

220 CARLTON BROWN

for this recognition, and because he was my brother and himself
a saint, I motioned the waiter closer to me and spoke to him in
low, impassioned tones.

”Tomorrow is The Day,” I told him, and read complete faith
and understanding in his expression. ”You are going to be set
free—-really free. All the good people, the humble people, the
beaten people, are coming into their own. You're going to see
miracles tomorrow—one big miracle that will sweep over the
whole world and change the face of it.”

I can reproduce no more than this faint echo of my evangelical
speech, but such was its tenor. I explained to my enrapt listener
the numerical significance of the day, and gave him the same tip
on the number that I had given the cab driver. By some system
that I do not recall, I now figured that perhaps 701 rather than
700 might turn up in the next drawing, and that it should be
played in combination, assuring winnings on 017, 071, 170, 107,
710 or 701.

As I gave the waiter this tip, I was careful to caution him that
it was not infallible. I made an abbreviated explanation of the
Rule of Three that had recently come to me by supernatural
inspiration. You played a hunch once, and if it didn't hit the first
time, you tried it a second and a third time. If it didn't hit by the
third time, you might give it up, or you might try it in two more
sequences of three times each, making a total of nine tries. Or
you might consider that the first hunch, tried three times, was
no good because it was the first of three hunches, of which only
the third, after it was tried three times, would pan out.

I did not elaborate my system to quite this confusing degree
to the waiter, but I indicated its elasticity so that he would be
spared any serious disappointment. It might even be that
tomorrow was not The Day, but merely a sort of dress rehearsal
for it. I gave him a dollar to play for himself and ten cents to play
for me, and left a fifty-cent tip besides. I also gave him one of the
patriotic lapel pins I had bought at the five-and-ten on my way
from the lawyer’ s office, for by now it was my conviction that
America's Christian soldiers would soon reinforce the world-
wide anti-Fascist resurrection with arms.

Before leaving to catch my train, I cautioned the waiter
against telling more than three people about Number 701. I

Brainstorm 221

wasn't quite sure about the importance of this injunction.
Perhaps it would be all right to tell everybody; perhaps telling
too many would spoil the spell. At any rate, I felt that it should
be given out only on the basis of personal friendship; if any
commercialization entered in, the whole thing would be called
off. On the way to the train, unable to abide by my own rules, I
stopped a porter and told him about the number, but did not
finance his playing of it. A moment later, I was sorry I had been
so impulsive; this last tip might be the one that would jinx the
thing.

My train left at some such significant time as 2:20—the in-
fluence and position of the sun were represented in the c1ocl<’s
hour and minute hands. I had some time to wait but I didn't
want to spend it in the waiting room. I remembered the hour
Dina and I, having missed the train on the way out to visit my
father, had spent there one winter day shortly after I got back
from France.

”I want to kiss you till you're black and blue,” I said. ”I want to
make love to you right here.”

”I’ll call the cops!” Dina laughed. I put an arm around her and tried
to kiss her, but she pulled away.

”I love you, Dina,” I said.

”Honest, Mike? I don't believe you do. You wouldn't have gone away
if you'd loved me.”

”Listen, can't we forget all that? Let's start all over, as though we'd
just met—shall we? I did come back, didn't I? And I am going to marry
you, aren't I?”

”I d’know, Michael.” She was silent for some time, her eyes turned
down and one eyebrow raised in that old austerely quizzical expression,
half real and half affected, that she may have used because I ’d told her it
made her look like Garbo. When she spoke again she didn't look at me,
and her voice was low and plaintive.

”Mike,” she said, ”I’ve got a confession to make. I don't know what
you'll think, but I can't go on pretending. I got married while you were
away-—but, darling,” she went on quickly, still avoiding my eyes, ”I
didn't love him. I dunno what happened—I was just so damn blue, and
this fellow came along, and I liked him pretty well, and I thought, well,
I'll just show that [ones louse I don't care about his old Michelle, or
whatever you call her, so we drove up to Greenwich and got married. It

222 CARLTON BROWN

was a horrible mess. We were tight, or I never would have done it. It
was right after you'd written me about that French girl of yours, and
nothing seemed to matter very much. We went down to Washington
that weekend for our honeymoon, and when I came back Mamma raised
holy hell, and I told her all about it and she promptly had the thing
annulled. Oh! It was such a mess, Mike! I don't know how I ever did
such a crazy thing.”

”Didn’t you love him, Dina, really?”

”I swear to God I didn't, Michael. It was just a crazy mess, darling,
but don't be too hard on me. I'm just getting over it now.”

”How do you mean?”

”You’re going to think I'm a terrible slut. But it wasn't my fault,
honest. I was so damned drunk I didn't know what I was doing. You
remember the night we spent at Bunny's, how I wouldn't let you kiss
me or anything? Well, I was just after having an abortion.”

I couldn't say a word. I stared ahead, shivering, the dirty, inhuman
aspect of the waiting room giving me a sinking feeling. I drew close to
Dina.

”I love you very much, Dina,” I said, looking steadily down at the
cement floor. ”Dina, let's get married—now, today—-—let’s not put it off
this time.”

”That goddamned lousy bastard! I didn't know there was any guy in
the world so damned dumb!” That wasn't what was in my mind, but
that was all I could manage to say. ”Who was he, Dina?” The only
thing I wanted to know was why it hadn't been myself, why I had been
cheated out of my fourth of Iuly. . . . I

I left the ghosts of Dina and a defunct me sitting in the wait-
ing room (pouring gin into paper cups full of Coca-Cola, the gin
making the cups soft around the bottom), and walked out into the
big glass-covered shed where the trains pull in and stand be-
hind high iron gates. The lights came down in dusty geometric
patterns formed by the framework above, and the dreamlike
atmosphere was heightened by the station's hush, clang, chug,
sound of feet and quiet voices and occasional oratorical call of
the train announcer.

The train I took was a streamliner appropriately called The
Crusader (”Clad in Shining Armor”), and though my ticket was
for coach travel, I made myself at home in a luxurious, air-
conditioned club car, with deeply upholstered lounge chairs,

Brainstorm 223

and ordered a Tom Collins. I had bought a bag each of white
grapes, cherries and dates at the station, and I arrayed them on
a smoking stand at my elbow and ate them in rotation, with a
sense of high ritual and with great relish for their color, con-
sistency, flavor and symbolism. Even the bleak, gray, smoke-
hung outskirts of Jersey City were a pleasant sight to me-
factories doing the world's work with a will, cheerfully making
things for man's enjoyment and well-being. As we rolled
through suburban towns, I enjoyed every detail of their life that
my eyes could take in—the ornate, old-fashioned houses, the
trim, standardized new ones, the people strolling the streets on
lively errands, the cemeteries waiting to tuck them lovingly in. I
saw poetry and art in the very billboards, with their promise of a
more abundant life which I knew was about to come true. I
waved to kids watching the train go by, sharing their wonder
and excitement . . .

Dina and I had gone along these tracks that day when we went to
visit my father. The sky was gray and smoky then, night just coming
on, and the train chugged out slowly, with factories and rubbish heaps
on either side, and desolate hovels along the tracks. Looking off into the
gloomy twilight, I was filled with nostalgia for every place in the world
but New York. ]ust to be off and away, to some new environment that
would hold no reproach for the self-cheating I had done, where there
lurked no reminders of past, seemingly happier days.

Tears of self—pity had welled in my eyes. I told myself that I was
incapable of winning the warm and enduring love that was part of the
life of normal people; and then I told myself that I was a sickeningly
sentimental fool. If I had stayed in New York and worked, worked at no
matter what, I would now have a decent position, my asking Dina to
marry me might be something other than fantastic. But I hadn't wanted
security and a safe, dull job, and Iwasn’t sure I wanted them now. . . .

But that was long ago, and those wraiths barely clung to the
blinds of the heavenly express that now hurtled me through the
suburbs of Nirvana.

Across the aisle, three portly well-dressed men of upper mid-
dle age and a young man who, from his uniform, might have
been a steward of the car, were talking about horse racing. I
wanted to tell them about Number 701, but something forbid-
ding, or at least imposing, in their joint fagade held me off. I

8 MARGERY KEMPE

spiritual forces onto the self. Even ordinary, minor mental events are
likely to be described in passive form: ”she was led to think” is as
likely a construction as ”she thought.”

The following excerpts have been selected for their interest and
clarity. In the first, the narrator describes Kempe’s experience of being
”out of her mind” (although she dictated her story, it is presented as
third-person narrative). In the second excerpt, we read of her
persecution in Canterbury, where she is accused of heresy and
threatened with death by fire. The third excerpt presents a descrip-
tion of many of Kempe’s visions and spiritual experiences; we might
compare them with some twentieth—century accounts of madness
such as Daniel Paul Schreber’ s Memoirs (1903) and the anonymous, I
Question (1945). In the last excerpt, the Devil tempts her with foul
thoughts for twelve days. We may note how passive Kempe’s mind
seems here. She becomes almost entirely the pawn and victim of
external spiritual forces.

 

WHEN THIS CREATURE was twenty years of age, or some deal
more, she was married to a worshipful burgess (of Lynne) and
was with child within a short time, as nature would. And after
she had conceived, she was belaboured with great accesses till
the child was born and then, what with the labour she had in
childing, and the sickness going before, she despaired of her
life, weening she might not live. And then she sent for her
ghostly father, for she had a thing on her conscience which she
had never shewn before that time in all her life. For she was
ever hindered by her enemy, the devil, evermore saying to her
that whilst she was in good health she needed no confession,
but to do penance by herself alone and all should be forgiven,
for God is merciful enough. And therefore this creature often-
times did great penance in fasting on bread and water, and
other deeds of alms with devout prayers, save she would not
shew that in confession.

And when she was at any time sick or dis-eased, the devil
said in her mind that she should be damned because she was
not shriven of that default. Wherefore after her child was born,
she, not trusting to live, sent for her ghostly father, as is said

224 CARLTON BROWN

glanced frequently in their direction, until as though by tacit
consent they all turned their club chairs around to face away
from me and out the window of the car. I was a little piqued at
this foursquare snub, but philosophically decided that they
were among the life-denying forces which were opposed to
such ebullience as I showed in my expressionistic eating, drink-
ing and looking.

I had bought one and then a second Tom Collins, and had
been enjoying the cushioned ease of the club car for perhaps a
half hour when the conductor came by to punch my ticket and
told me that I would have to move to one of the day coaches,
unless I wanted to make up the difference in fare. I was
approaching that point in my mental excursion at which I de-
cided to see how far I could get without money. I had been
spending too much on friends and strangers; now I would see
what they would do for me. I did not realize how barely Ann,
my kid's foster mother, as I regarded her, managed to meet
expenses, in spite of the urgent appeal she had made to me a
few days before for ten dollars, apart from the weekly payment I
sent her. If I had realized the extent of Ann's poverty, it might
have seemed to me a blessed state, but I wouldn't have compli-
cated it by arriving pemiiless at Medlow Farm, as I did.

I declined to pay the additional tariff to the conductor, and
though I was a little disappointed that he did not recognize my
sovereign right to ride in the club car at coach rates, I took it
with tolerant good grace. I picked up my small suitcase, my
camera, and my suit coat, which I had taken off and now carried
as though it were a ceremonial robe, and also my bags of fruit
and magazines. (I had just discovered how really glorious maga-
zines were, how they meant much more than they had seemed
to mean, how significant their very names were and every bit of
their contents. Now that I was a member of the universe's
directorate, they had become wonderfully illustrated bulletins
of what was going on in my domain, guides to its beauties,
wonders, strategies and campaigns.)

Carrying my unwieldy and conspicuous burden back to the
smoking car, I chose a seat next to a rather villainous looking
Negro wearing a dirty yellow suit, and stowed my things in the
luggage rack. I found in him an eager disciple for my Messianic

Brainstorm 225

jabber and a ready taker of my tip on Number 701. He ate some
of my dates and grapes and cherries, and I was thankful for his
acceptance of my ritual generosity. As we talked, we found
ourselves in general agreement in broad philosophic concepts-
the whole subject of how to live. I had some slight sense of
self-consciousness, unusual for me now that my introversions
were turned almost completely inside-out, but I outstared the
adjoining passengers, who seemed disapprovingly curious
about our conversation. Like most of my talks with strangers at
this time, this one was considerably one-sided. My companion
agreed with me that all things came to him who was patient and
good, but he said almost angrily that he wished his share would
hurry up and come.

The last lap of the journey was to have been by bus, but I had
misunderstood the ticket seller’ s instructions and took it that I
was to change to another train that would take me to my des-
tination. Therefore I missed the bus on which my ticket would
have been valid, and I had a long wait for a train that did not go
as far as I wanted to go. I had to pay another fare, which left me
with three pennies in my pocket——three pennies and three
golden keys to the contest at the Fair where cars were given
away every day.

It was a poky train of prestreamline build that I boarded next.
I took the last seat on the right-hand side in the front car, the
smoker. It was a hot day, and all the windows were opened
wide. In the short flights between stations, we passed through
beautiful country, stretches of pasture alternating with deep
woods, with occasional glimpses of rocky streams, cattle and
barns. I leaned back in the sooty plush seat and let the land-
scape roll in over me in a tide of lush color and air that was like
balm for every woe of the world.

At one station, a boy in overalls, carrying a lunch pail, got on
and took the seat in front of me. When he leaned his head back I
could see the uplifted visor and crown of his cap, with a sheen
of grease and grime completely covering the smooth fabric it
was made of. A couple of times the boy looked around. He had
a sad, emaciated face, with a bulging forehead and grieving
eyes.

Across the aisle and several seats ahead, sitting backward and

226 CARLTON BROWN

facing me, were a man and woman of vague middle age and a
sporty aspect not confined to their clothes. The man wore a
jaunty checkered cap and coat, vest and trousers that did not
match, and a horseshoe tiepin. The woman's hat had feathers
rising gaily out of it. The couple gave the impression of being on
a clandestine trip. I fancied them checking into some rural
boardjnghouse as Mr. and Mrs. John Smith, walking through
the woods gingerly so as not to get their city shoes wet, the man
pulling up his trousers to avoid bagging the knees when they
sat down in some secluded spot, spreading out his handker-
chief for the woman to sit on.

Their happiness was of the sort that cannot contain itself, and
we exchanged what seemed to me loving, compassionate
glances. One minute their heads were together in intimate talk,
the next they were flung back in mirth that verged on hysteria,
and then they would look at me with their eyes confessing their
helpless happiness.

The train passed a grove growing close to the track on the left,
and all at once there wafted in a warm fragrance more ethereally
lovely than any I have ever known. The woods it seemed to
issue from were primeval, paradisaical; looking into them I was
lost in vibrant, misty green of endless depth and variety. Yet the
fragrance was not alone of wood or blossoms. It was a com-
pound, as nearly as I can describe it, of the perfume Judy wore,
the smell of finger tips after smoking many cigarettes, the fra-
grance of the celestial barbershop, my new suit and clean
clothes, all diluted in the green-black-yellow, sunlit, shade-
cooled air of the summer woods. It was light but rich, complex,
heady, evanescent; sweetly simple as new—mown hay but with
sophisticated, musky overtones, and a suggestion of something
aromatic having been burnt——not the smoke itself but the es-
sence left behind it. It made me so happy that I could hardly
keep from crying. My mouth opened and as though to give
utterance to what it could not express, the great sad-happy
shout of the train’s whistle sounded to the skies and shook the
earth and made the trees dance.

With my eyes swimming and my ears wincing and my throat
tight and my nostrils flaring for more of that unearthly fra-
grance, I looked at the couple ahead. They were laughing in

Brainstorm 227

quiet convulsion, the woman dabbing at her eyes with a hand-
kerchief, the man with his head thrown back, unashamedly
letting the tears course down his face, his expression trans-
figured with excruciating bliss. He was like a man who, long
blind and deaf, has had his sight and hearing suddenly restored.
The couple looked at me with the open sharing of helpless joy
that roller-coaster riders exchange when, weak with fearful plea-
sure, they reach the end of a ride. I held back my tears no longer. I
had never been so happy—never anywhere nearly so happy. I
was filled with an ether that, if it did not escape somehow, would
waft me right out the window and up into the blue blue sky. The
boy in front of me turned and stretched his head up over the back
of the seat. His eyes were red and weepy, his expression un-
stable, precariously balanced between fear and delight, and he
looked at me as though searching for the source of some influ-
ence he felt but could not understand. A wave of tremulous,
awe-inspiring gladness flowed like a tangible fluid through the
car, like the sweet breath of the world's love made palpable.

The whistle gave another mounting, exultant cry. Again and
again it sounded, and each blast seemed to arise from my heart
and give expression to the great love of the world that welled up
within me. The wheels of the train sang the song of the world,
beat like the feet of a runner winning a race in a burst of super-
human energy. Again the whistle cried Victoriously.

”Going home! Going home!” the conductor sang out, coming
into the car from the rear. He was an elderly man with gold-
rimmed glasses and an expression of happy benevolence, as
though he thoroughly understood and approved, but was a
little aloof from, the phenomenon that was taking place in the
car. A daily rider on the Heavenly Local, I thought, he would

a naturally be less affected than those taking the trip for the first

time.

”Last stop!” he called, announcing the name of the town.
Again the whistle sounded, calling the countryside to celebrate
our arrival, crowing like a Gargantuan rooster awakening the
universe to its glory.

As the train pulled into the last station on the line, I gathered
up my things and led the way to the door, followed by the
red-eyed boy, who was now sniffling sharply, and the happy

228 CARLTON BROWN

couple, who were murmuring to one another and looking at me
with, I thought, complete admiration and love. Against the
pitch and roll of the train, I walked with a confident swagger, a
rhythmic, light-footed roll, as befitted a favorite son of the Lord
of Creation.

”M1nm! Mmm!” the conductor exclaimed as I bounded to the
platform. ”Somebody's going to pick some potatoes tonight!”

1945'~E-
I Question, Anonymous

Nearly all the autobiographical accounts of madness that have been
published in this century were influenced by a secularization of the
language and metaphor and concept of inner experience brought
about by psychoanalysis and modern psychiatry. I Question may be an
exception. It is a small, confusing book, written by an anonymous
patient in a Tennessee asylum and published in 1945 without copy-
right. It opens with a foreword by psychiatrist Dr. Frank Luton, who
says, with some irony, ”I can recommend these interesting pages as a
faithful record of the beliefs of a man who is sincerely looking for
truth.” Dr. Luton obviously expects the reader to consider I Question a
psychiatric document; at the same time he tries tactfully to avoid
contradicting the author, who clearly considers his work to be some-
thing of a philosophical treatise, a study of his own continuing con-
tact with the spiritual world.

Like the pre-twentieth-century spiritual autobiographies consid-
ered earlier in this history, I Question has as its central purpose the
portrayal of the connection between the human individual and cer-
tain intelligent powers of the cosmos. In places the work echoes
Margery Kempe’s description of her contact with spirits:

Sometimes she heard with her bodily ears such sounds and melodies
that she could not well hear what a man said to her at the time, unless
he spoke the louder. . . . She saw with her bodily eyes many white
things flying all about her on every side, as thick, in a manner, as
specks in a sunbeam.

In the anonymous questioner’ s words:

At the time of writing this, I have known of the spiritual world through
their voices, seeing their faces, and having certain spiritual feelings for
about two years. I am aware at times of seemingly thousands of souls
leaving the world. I get this not only in speech from them but also a
feeling of thickness in the air, either in an area below, above, or in some
other direction from me. Frequently there is within my own body an
area that seems thick like soup which leaves me with a feeling as one
might have after a dive in a pool followed by a cool sensation.

The questioner’s last sentence is particularly interesting because it
contains some striking, poetic imagery that is slightly illogical. We

229

230 ANONYMOUS

might assume that the author meant to describe the cool sensation of
diving into a pool, but the sentence does not quite say that. Perhaps
the sense of that sentence has less to do with a logical association
between ”pool” and ”cool sensation,” than it has to do with an asso-
ciation of sound between ”pool" and ”cool.” This kind of illogical
association occurs throughout the book and, in fact, the book is im-
mensely difficult to read, confusing and disorienting in the extreme.
Not only is the author apparently an unskilled word-manipulator, not
only does he string together words and phrases in some highly
idiosyncratic combinations, but, as he informs us, often his thoughts
are disturbed by the constant interruptions of voices from the spirit
world.

Like Kempe, Haizmann, Trosse, and Cowper before him, the ques-
tioner persists in believing that he maintains some special contact
with the spiritual world. He differs from them (particularly from
Trosse and Cowper) in that his special relationship with the cosmos is
wholly unorthodox and idiosyncratic. More than his predecessors,
the questioner’s self-importance verges on grandiosity: they are
priests, while he is a prophet. In the following excerpts, grandiosity
and confusion abound. Often there appears to be a thread of theme,
but just as often that thread snaps, and the subject changes abruptly.
Yet for all its incoherence, this spiritual autobiography remains im-
mensely interesting, drawing us closely into the thoughts and proc-
esses of a mind not quite of this world.

I HAVE MANY EXPERIENCES to relate in this book that are made
possible by my daily communication with the spiritual world.
For the past two years I have been able to converse with spir-
itual voices through my own thought and am able to actually
see persons in the spiritual world. In view of this special capac-
ity I often become aware of many things not known to the
average person. I do not know the reason for this, but I do know
that these perceptions are real to me. I hope that you will believe
much of what I tell you when these things occur.
31- X‘ 3(-

Law of the Universe

There is a law of the universe. This law of the universe is the
law of God and the law of the Goddess. There are undoubtedly

I Question 231

three Goddesses just as there are three Gods; it follows then that
you are known to God if you are a male and to the Goddess if
you are a female.

It has been the will of God and the Goddess that at death
one’s spirit leaves this world instantly. If they refuse to do so,
their penalties mount rapidly and they become more embit-
tered. Those that have anything on the right side lose it rapidly.

At the time of writing this, I have known of the spiritual
world through their voices, seeing their faces, and having cer-
tain spiritual feelings for about two years. I am aware at times of
seemingly thousands of souls leaving the world. I get this not
only in speech from them but also a feeling of thickness in the
air, either in an area below, above, or in some other direction
from me. Frequently there is within my own body an area that
seems thick like soup which leaves me with a feeling as one
might have after a dive in a pool followed by a cool sensation.
This feeling of coolness at a distance seems strange. I also have a
sensation of pain at a distance.

Personal Experiences

My trouble first started back about 1919 when I had a physical
breakdown. That is when Communism started in Russia, too.
Communism struck fear into my soul because it meant not only
destruction of all our ideas of economic life but it also meant
destroying our faith in God and offering nothing but beastliness
in exchange for it. I went down to Florida with my family on a
vacation at the time. I had a breakdown there. It lasted about
thirty days or so—my heart raced and beat heavily.

About eight years ago, while on a pleasure trip to North Caro-
lina, a remarkable experience occurred. On one of our side trips
we seemed to drive into the end of a rainbow—a small one that
looked as if it might be two or three hundred feet long. It
appeared to end just in the road ahead of us a little to the right. I
stopped the car, as a matter of fact, with the radiator parked
right in the end of the rainbow.

About two days after this, a friend of mine, a doctor, told me
without any apparent reason that I was getting ready to go
through a serious change. I feel that he really got it from the
other world although he was not aware of it. My reply was:

232 ANONYMOUS

”Well, Doctor, I hope to take it in its stride.” Possibly two years
prior to that time he had told me that I was a type similar to
Pasteur and some others who, after deep thought or work,

would ask to be voluntarily confined. He told me that my type

of personality is one which is productive of great achievement
and tends to keep the world from standing still. At another time
he had told me of his belief in immortality. He looked upon it as
a kind of living through our children and not through ourselves.
My reply was that if we are worthy of immortality through our
children, then why not ourselves as well.

I returned to Nashville about August of that year. One day
while playing golf my heart suddenly started racing, skipping
and pounding to the point that it felt as if it might jump out of
my body. Shortly after that I went to a hospital for observation
and a check-up. I stayed there about three weeks and my heart
again went through the same similar experience, following
which I went to Madison Sanitarium. During my two weeks
stay there I was filled with an overwhelming depression.

I want to describe a peculiar incident that happened while I
was at Madison. I noticed that a tree on the grounds seemed to
shed rain. On examination of the tree, the side I stood under did
not seem to have any rain coming down, but I could see it on
the other side, and finally could feel a few drops on my side.
This so upset and puzzled me that I looked for a pipe up the
side of the tree, thinking water might be coming down through
that. I noticed the same phenomenon later when my wife and I
were sitting out under a tree in the back of our home. It also
rained, but not to the extent of the other one.

On a later occasion while in Florida I had something like a
breakdown. On the advice of a physician I went to Johns Hop-
kins in Baltimore for observation. The journey was made by
train and when we passed by the Indian River I saw two rain-
bows that symbolized the existence of both Gods and Goddes-
ses. The reason they give me for our ignorance of a Goddess is
of heavy sins in the soul world as all suffered to live perfectly on
earth.

When I got to Johns Hopkins I walked into the doctor’ s office
and everything suddenly went black and I knew nothing more
for about two weeks or so. I remember just for a moment being

I Question 233

in the clinic, and when I became clear I was in another ward. My
mind worked very rapidly but disconnectedly. I remembered an
experience that happened at the age of seven when I saw a
swallow strike a telephone wire and fall to the ground. I picked
it up, laid it on the backsteps of my home, where it finally re-
vived and flew away. I recalled that on the same day there was
an article in the paper about the sun being faceted like a di-
amond with two small facets on either side. This is something I
did not see myself, and so far as I can recall I had not thought of
it since that time. The recollection of these early memories was
strange to me because of my memory being poor as a rule.

In some way I attributed this whole experience to some pre-
diction from God about the ending of this earth. Voices from the
other world have indicated that it meant that God willed that
this world is to be vacated by mankind in one hundred fifty
years. In connection with this experience, however, I came later
to think how foolish it was to place any significance in the idea
that the sun looked like a diamond, but I did think it strange
that I remembered it in conjunction with the swallow. This clar-
ification of my thinking came one day whfle I was going home
in my car and upon driving into the garage there was a swallow
who apparently had become confused and could not get out.
This coincidence made quite an impression on me.

While I was at Iohns Hopkins, after my period of amnesia, I
refused to eat anything for days, not wishing to die but just
waiting for some reason—not knowing why. The doctor finally
told me that if I refused to eat, they would have to feed me
forcibly. I told them that would be all right, and submitted with-
out opposition to their inserting a tube in my nose which went
down into my stomach. I was fed night and morning in this
manner.

Two years ago when I was in Palm Beach there would be a
group of Chinese that came down and stayed awhile and then
left. Other groups that I cannot recall just now also came and
left. At times there would seem to be small snakes that would
stick out of the pupils of my eyes—all these things had a mean-
ing—and I would have to pull them out. There would be devils
that would be in my side and then would appear in the shape of
bags like a blownup hog b1adder—just horrible things that I

The Book of Margery Kempe 9

before, in full will to be shriven of all her lifetime, as near as she
could. And when she came to the point for to say that thing
which she had so long concealed, her confessor was a little too
hasty and began sharply to reprove her, before she had fully
said her intent, and so she would no more say for aught he
might do. Anon, for the dread she had of damnation on the one
side, and his sharp reproving of her on the other side, this
creature went out of her mind and was wondrously vexed and
laboured with spirits for half a year, eight weeks and odd days.

And in this time she saw, as she thought, devils opening their
mouths all inflamed with burning waves of fire, as if they would
have swallowed her in, sometimes ramping at her, sometimes
threatening her, pulling her and hauling her, night and day
during the aforesaid time. Also the devils cried upon her with
great threatenings, and bade her that she should forsake Christ-
endom, her faith, and deny her God, His Mother and all the
Saints in Heaven, her good works and all good virtues, her
father, her mother and all her friends. And so she did. She
slandered her husband, her friends and her own self. She said
many a wicked word, and many a cruel word; she knew no
virtue nor goodness; she desired all wickedness; like as the
spirits tempted her to say and do, so she said and did. She
would have destroyed herself many a time at their stirrings and
have been damned with them in Hell, and in witness thereof,
she bit her own hand so violently, that the mark was seen all her
life after.

And also she rived the skin on her body against her heart
with her nails spitefully, for she had no other instruments, and
worse she would have done, but that she was bound and kept
with strength day and night so that she might not have her will.
And when she had long been laboured in these and many other
temptations, so that men weened she should never have
escaped or lived, then on a time as she lay alone and her keep-
ers were from her, Our Merciful Lord Jesus Christ, ever to be
trusted, worshipped be His Name, never forsaking His servant
in time of need, appeared to His creature who had forsaken
Him, in the likeness of a man, most seemly, most beauteous and
most amiable that ever might be seen with man's eye, clad in a

234 ANONYMOUS

would have to pull out of my side. There would be octopuses,
crocodiles, horrible creatures of all kinds. I saw these things—
and without being intoxicated, too! All of that has cleared
up now.

I happened to be in Florida at the time of the radio broadcast
of the ”Invasion from Mars.” This broadcast upset many peo-
ple, which I believe was entirely due to coercion from the spir-
itual world. Even the authorization of it by Orson Welles came
from the spiritual world, and I also believe that at this same time
there occurred an invasion of the spiritual world by souls from
Mars. They say the Martians caused the upset so that mankind
would think twice before having children.

31- 3I- 3(-
The Influence of Spirits

The spirits of the other world have a strange effect on me.
They do this with me: they make me turn suddenly to look at a
woman or a man in a place where I might be unaware of that
person's presence. This happened to me once while I was in
Florida. I had forgotten someone’s name and had started out
with the letter ‘W’ trying to remember it. I don't remember just
what reaction I was to get from the other world, but then I went
to B, C, D and so on, until they let me know which was the right
letter. I did this until I had spelled out the entire name.

Some people call this spiritualism, but this is incorrect, as man
has thought of it. Spiritualism is an instrument of the devils. So
far as this is concerned, all religions are instruments of the
devils. It is my feeling that even in the use of prayer we deal with
an ineffective instrument. I do not mean that there is no God,
but that God does not answer our prayers because He knows
nothing of them, as far as being able to grant them and they
would if proper even before the request. In a perfect world one
would not dare pray for anything.

In a religion such as Christian Science, any apparent benefit
that a patient might receive is due to the releasing of the evil
souls in the spiritual world from the patient by Scientists there.
The same thing is true, just as if you pray for somebody and the
person gets well. Just think how often you pray for a person and
the person does not get well. We might use Rickenbacker as an

I Question 235

illustration. What happened to him is that he was frightened, so
it brought him to his senses and the realization that there was a
God, and those in the other world allowed the Supreme Beings
to send rain.

During my first trip to the sanitarium in Baltimore, I got the
idea that I was Jesus Christ. I laid down in a tub and baptized
myself several times in the water. It was John the Baptist making
me do it; I had part of his soul. Also while there, I was lying on
my cot writhing for days, feeling as if my body were full of static
electricity. My muscles had become so drawn that I would have
to put my foot over the side of the bed and touch the metal in
the bed, which seemed to relieve my body of the current that
seemed to be there.

I was lying in bed one night having in my mind an accounting
to God of my many frailties and claiming one trait that I thought
I had of honesty, when almost in a delirium I asked God if in
return for my honesty He would allow me to rule the universe
for a day.

On the night of December 31st at midnight I heard some
cannon firing and sounds of a celebration which I thought
meant that there was some warfare taking place. This caused
me to have a crack-up, and I remember jumping up and down
on the bed. The next morning, although I was very weak physi-
cally, I made up my mind that I would make every effort in my
power to recover and carry on the best I could. I seemed to
make rapid progress from then on, and regained my equilib-

r1um.
x- x- at-

Des Wasser Des Vergebens

German for the Water of Forgetfulness expresses well the
meaning of Baptism in Hell in contrast to baptism in which they
pull a mental block on a sinful soul to forget the many evils of
the past which include for each soul all diseases, lusts, wars and
premature aging of all bodies of every nature. I was just told this
morning that this is the last world in the Universe, that those on
earth do not know of both Gods and Goddesses.

I am told that there have been many civilizations here that
were better than the one we now have. The fall of these civiliza-

236 ANONYMOUS

tions has been due to either at their deaths in disgust, realizing
their thievery in stealing to not be perfect did not pay, giving up
what they had stolen or staying stubbornly on and going down
in sure defeat.

The Opera La Boheme was composed really by a couple in the
soul world who were French, the wife having died of tuberculo-
sis while on earth, but it was not composed for the nobleless of
the tuberculosis germ. A group of negroes gave me the thought
that the expression, ”The road to hell is paved with good inten-
tions,” really means in the soul world that they think often of
giving up and accomplishing much and in delaying doing so
they face what they call Hell which is judgment. But I under-
stand that judgment is not as unpleasant as that which they face
there. So, I believe, even delay leaving for that reason and be-
come deranged in so doing.

In all perfect worlds they, having suffered, know of sin some-
what to understand as the Supreme Beings themselves under-
stand and to understand one another meaning mankind and all
other life and the Supreme Being.

Moles Are of Negroes Sold in the Soul World

A raised mole is part negro in the soul world and part hog and
other forms of life that reflect in the body. I want negroes to
understand that no negro is a perfect soul and only about 2,500
humans are perfect beings on this earth; they are all as I under-
stand to be perfect again. No negro will ever be a Gentile or a
Jew, a Jew or Chinese or any other race what they have been for
sometime because you should know that they would and could
not give birth but to perfect souls all of one kind. The expression
”Hells Bells” that I just heard from the soul world means Christ-
mas bells for Christ which are evil for those there and for you if
you follow unreason still. The soul world suddenly grew worse
about the start of the first World War when the Supreme Beings
were first able to start placing real pressure on all there to vacate
the most damnable place of all time. They started sinning more
heavily in retaliation by war, lust, or babies, crime and insanity.

It is said in the soul world that one of the thieves who was
crucified with Christ was a perfect soul, but it is strange that

I Question 237

souls in the other world refuse to know and refuse to let this
world know the truth.

It is strange, indeed, that a Supreme Being of the Universe
would send a son of his here to this world and have a female dry
his feet with her hair. God would not create any form of life to be
degraded in such an act upon himself.

All flowers have given themselves the names they are called
by as well as trees and other vegetation, although man on earth
may think otherwise. I was in my bathroom a moment ago and,
looking out the window, I could see faintly a dinosaur which
they told me was about the last one there and was turned loose.

The Bible (which they often want me to write with a small
letter) speaks of the Son of God being tempted on the Mount.
Can you with any reason at all believe that the son of God could
be tempted? I cannot. They tell me that just as man on earth
thinks it only will have eternal life with their foolishness of
religion so in your denial in thought through those in supposed
Heaven the poor animals, birds, fish, microbes, and vegetation
on earth do not know of immortality on earth and so much of it
there. They take the position that all build character on dark-
ness, ignorance and crime. Deranged souls in the soul world
take in every form of life there, and if mankind weremot de-
mented no other soul could be. They tell me, which seems
strange, that if you know their greatness, all vegetation speaks a
language, even here, to one another something like a radio
wave. It is strange in a way unless one understands that in a
sinful soul world souls cannot keep from sinning equally; for if
one permits the other to sin, saying, ”I will not sin myself,” you
sin as much in so doing.

This may have a tendency to weaken my book with readers,
but a ”tumble bug” in the soul world played the best game of
bridge that has ever been played, and you will know it some
day and the reason for it. It was permitted by the Supreme
Being to show that an obedient soul with their help can do
better than the stolen wisdom of Gentiles, Jews and others. I do
not know that grown people play any game as the great out-
doors and thought of it as well as perfect humor and what we
think of as deep thought which with them is simplicity itself.

1946'~E+=
The Snake Pit, by Mary Jane Ward

While the population of the United States in 1944 had little more than
doubled that of 1880, the number of psychiatric patients in state in-
stitutions increased twelve times—to more than half a million.‘ The
number of institutions increased as well: from 13 in 1830, to 190 in
1945. The trend toward centralization also continued: by 1945 there
were 33 federal institutions. But the most notable change over the
century was in the size of the institutions themselves. Asylums in the
first half of the nineteenth century had capacities of one or two hun-
dred. New York State's Willard Asylum broke with all tradition when
it opened in 1866 with an astonishing 1,500 beds. By 1945, however,
several American psychiatric institutions had become the size of small
cities, with thousands of patients. Perhaps the three largest were
New York Central Islip State Hospital with more than 7,000 patients,
the Georgia State Hospital at Milledgeville, with 9,000, and New
York's Pilgrim State Hospital, with a capacity of 10,000.

Were these mid-century institution-cities any better than their
nineteenth-century predecessors? Nineteenth-century asylums were
notable for the physical abuse of patients. We read again and ‘again in
patient writings of beatings, overt abuse, and tyranny over patients
by attendants. Furthermore nineteenth-century institutions were
almost wholly custodial, with no serious plans for treatment. Nurses
were usually poorly trained, and attendants were untrained. The
heads of these institutions called themselves ”medica1 superinten-
dents,” and were invariably occupied with problems of management
rather than concerns about treatment. Their management was typi-
cally narrow and authoritarian. The non-restraint system, popular in
England, took hold much more gradually in America, in large part
because of the continued resistance of the Association of Medical
Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane (now the
American Psychiatric Association). A patients’ rights association, the
National Association for the Protection of the Insane and the Preven-
tion of Insanity, founded in 1880, lasted only four years, largely be-
cause of the antagonism of this group of superintendents? In the

1Deutsch, The Mentally III in America, p. 507.
2Ibid., p. 313.

238

The Snake Pit 239

18703, however, the first courses in psychiatry were introduced in
some American medical schools, and in 1882 the first permanent
school of psychiatric nursing was established at the McLean Asylum
in Massachusetts.

Conditions within American psychiatric institutions did improve
somewhat during the first decades of the twentieth century. Most
crucial in this improvement was the National Committee for Mental
Hygiene, established in 1909 by Clifford Beers, a former mental pa-
tient and author of the protest A Mind That Pound Itself (1908). The
National Committee promoted research, legislation, hospital care
studies, information programs, and community guidance centers.
During the Depression, the committee lobbied in Washington for
WPA money for state institutions, influencing the flow of more than
ten million dollars.

The depression and World War II—with all the concomitant short-
ages of personnel and supplies-—reversed much of that earlier im-
provement. In 1945 historian Albert Deutsch made a two-year survey
of mental institutions in America and witnessed ”scenes that rivaled
the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps—hundreds of naked
mental patients herded into huge, barn-like, filth-infested wards, in
all degrees of deterioration, untended and untreated, stripped of ev-
ery vestige of human decency, many in stages of semi-starvation.” He
discovered ”hundreds of sick people shackled, strapped, strait-
jacketed and bound to their beds” and ”mental patients forced to eat
meals with their hands because there were not enough spoons and
other tableware to go around.” He found ”dormitories filled with
twice or three times their normal capacity.” He saw ”in institution
after institution, cold unappetizing food placed before patients at
mealtime—food that patients either wolfed down to get the ordeal
over quickly or else left untouched/'3

Probably the most significant improvements over the century have
been in therapy. The lack of therapeutic treatment in nineteenth-
century asylums has been replaced by an abundance of therapies in
our time. We can divide these therapies into two types: the
psychotherapies and the somatic therapies.

The psychotherapies are the least radical and the least divergent
from nineteenth-century treatment. At the beginning of the
nineteenth century Pinel and others recommended the use of ”moral

3Ibid., p. 449.

240 MARY JANE WARD

treatment,” which was essentially a form of psychotherapy in which
the unspoken assumption was that madness was an ailment of the

personality that could be corrected by judicious interaction with a

healthy personality. The rise of psychoanalysis led to a number of
other therapies that were essentially refinements of moral treatment.
Freud himself thought that mad people were not accessible to
psychoanalysis and did not work with institutionalized patients. But
psychoanalysis has been tried in many American clinics and institu-
tions. Dr. John Rosen in 1947 claimed to have successfully treated
thirty-seven cases of chronic schizophrenia by a method he called
”direct analysis,” a relationship therapy in which the therapist first
establishes emotional contact with the patient by participating in the
patient’ s fantasies and then gradually draws the patient into a more
realistic model of the world.4 Dr. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann used a
similar approach with schizophrenic patients with some positive re-
sults; one of her patients, Joanna Greenberg, wrote a best-selling
novel about her recovery, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1964).
Unfortunately, in spite of the impressive publicity surrounding the
psychotherapies based on traditional Freudian psychoanalysis, their
actual impact on institutional populations has been minor. Other
psychotherapies include behavior modification and various forms of
group interaction. But probably the most lasting and important result
of psychoanalysis and other twentieth-century versions of moral
treatment has been an increased emphasis upon the need for humane
and reasonable—psychologica1ly positive—interactions between the
patient and his or her keepers.

The therapies which have most distinguished twentieth-century
American institutions, however, for better and for worse, have been
the somatic therapies: shock, lobotomy, and chemotherapy.

It has been known since 1928 that chemically induced convulsions
could cause some improvement with certain mental patients. Some-
times patients were put into a coma with large doses of insulin, and
there is one patient’s autobiographical account of her dramatic remis-
sion from five years’ severe depression, after a short course of insulin
shock treatments In Rome in the early 19305 Dr. Ugo Cerletti decided
to try inducing convulsions with electricity to see if he could get
similar results. With the permission of a Professor Torti, director of a

“Ibid., pp. 491, 492.
5McCall, Between Us and the Dark, 1947.

The Snake Pit 241

large Roman slaughterhouse, Cerletti first experimented on pigs so as
to differentiate between lethal and non-lethal shocks. Cerletti then
proceeded to human subjects, first working with a vagrant, a forty-
year-old madman whose identity and home were unknown, who
talked in ”an incomprehensible gibberish made up of odd neolo-
gisms.” The patient was put into bed and two electrodes were attached
to his temples with an elastic band. The first jolt was given, but it was
too low a voltage to produce a coma. As the doctor prepared for the
second shock at a higher voltage, the patient sat up and said his first
comprehensible words: ”Not a second. Deadly!” Dr. Cerletti ignored
the patient’s wishes, however, and proceeded; the second shock did
cause a seizure, after which, according to Cerletti, the patient im-
proved rapidly. He stopped talking gibberish, was eventually able to
give information about himself, began to be interested in his sur-
roundings, and after eleven complete treatments, was discharged in
’’complete remission.” 6

In 1938 Cerletti demonstrated his invention at the Rome Medical
Academy. Within the year electroshock therapy was being used on
mental patients in America, quickly achieving popularity, partly be-
cause of its cheapness and ease of administration. Electroshock is
sometimes effective for reversing severe depression, for unknown
reasons; but at first, and for many years, electroshock was used in
American institutions indiscriminately. Although it was supposedly
therapeutic and painless, patients were terrified of it. Without ques-
tion, during the height of its popularity as a treatment, there were
many cases of foolish and abusive practices.

Lobotomy was introduced in 1936 by Egas Moniz of Portugal.
Moniz believed that mad behavior could be reduced or cured by a
simple cutting of certain nerve pathways in the frontal lobes of the
brain. In his first operation Moniz drilled holes in a patient’s skull,
then inserted a hypodermic needle into the brain, injecting at several
fixed points cell-destroying alcohol. Because the dispersement of the
alcohol was too imprecise Moniz invented a cutting instrument which
was essentially a hollow needle with a retractable wire loop at the tip.
The instrument was inserted into the brain and then extended and
rotated once in a circle, cutting out a small core of tissue. The loop
was then retracted and the needle taken out. Four to six cores would
be cut out in the same manner. On his first twenty patients, Moniz
reported seven recoveries, seven cases of improvement, and six cases

‘Cerletti, ”Old and New Information about Electroshock," pp. 90, 91.

242 MARY JANE WARD

of non-improvement.7 In 1939 the doctor was shot and nearly killed
by one of his patients. He was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1949.

After Moniz’s promising reports in 1936, lobotomy was tried in
America. It quickly became popular, at first enthusiastically used as a
miracle cure for chronic cases. As with electroshock, however, its
initial cures led to excessive, incautious use and abuse. Between 1936
and 1949 over five thousand lobotomy operations were performed in
the United States, on patients as young as sixteen. Lobotomy often
had positive results—some patients experienced lowered tension and
agitation after the operation, some were well enough to leave their
institutions. Often enough, however, the operation produced irre-
versible negative surprises. From 2 to 5 percent of the patients died on
the operating table, and 5 percent had convulsions from brain scar-
ring. Many patients considered ”overactive” before the operation
were ”underactive” afterward and vice versa. In short the results
were erratic and unpredictable.8

Perhaps one of the worst things about both shock and lobotomy
was their effect on the imagination: their simple existence and the
very images they called up brought an atmosphere and mythology of
terror and brutality to American institutions. In terms of actual, tan-
gible, effects, electroshock and lobotomy, like psychotherapy,
did not significantly decrease the large institutional populations of
the 1940s and 1950s—especially when compared to the third major
somatic therapy, chemotherapy.

Since the beginnings of medicine, there have been various
chemotherapies available to mad people. But traditionally these have
been, at best, simplynarcotics and sedatives designed to tranquilize
and induce sleep. Opium derivatives were long used in American
institutions, and in the last two or three decades a number of other
powerful tranquilizers have come into use. In the 1950s, however, an
entirely new class of medicines was introduced. These new ”anti-
psychotic" medicines (among them, the phenothiazines and lithium
carbonate) can control and actually eliminate some of the more dis-
turbing and disabling experiences of madness.

Sometime during the 1940s Mary Jane Ward was confined to
a public institution near New York City. Her several months’ res-

7Freeman and Watts, Psychosurgery: Intelligence, Emotion and Social Behavior Following
Prefrontal Lobotomy for Mental Disorders, p. 13.
8See Greenblatt, Studies in Lobotomy.

The Snake Pit 243

idence there provided the basis for a highly successful auto-
biographical novel, The Snake'Pz't. The book is unlike any protest
we have seen so far. For one thing, it is the first fictionalized account
we have examined. Though the basic elements of the story are true,
and the descriptions of the institution, called Juniper Hill, seem whol-
ly taken from real life, the entire work is constructed in the fonn of a
novel——with scenes, extended dramatic dialogue and flashbacks. Un-
like most of the protests we have seen so far, there is no attempt to
establish the veracity of the narrator. There is no prefatory statement
about ”the unvarnished truth.” There is no editorializing against asy-
lum conditions in general. Nonetheless, The Snake Pit operates only
partly as an experience of fiction. In large part the book works as a
detailed, realistic, convincing study of a mid-twentieth-century
American psychiatric institution. And the book's ultimate effect was
as a protest. The expression ”snake pit,” now commonly used to
describe the worst sort of mental hospital, was brought into the lan-
guage in the 1940s, apparently by the appearance of Ward's novel. A
movie based on the book, released in 1947, won fifty-two awards and
was the largest-grossing A picture of the year. The coauthors of the
screenplay received the award of the year for the best dramatic
screenplay from the Screenwriters’ Guild. And, according to Millen
Brand, one of the coauthors, the film ultimately inspired greater state
appropriations for mental institutions.9

During much of the novel the main character, Virginia Cunning-
ham, is confused and disoriented. She cannot see well; her glasses are
missing. Nor can she remember much; her memory is wholly unreli-
able (one common effect of electroshock). As the novel begins, she is
sitting outside, enjoying the warmth of the sun. We observe her
thoughts, as they wander randomly over past events and through
confused present perceptions. Though she is actually sitting some-
where on the grounds of an institution, she thinks she is sitting in a
park. When a woman orders Virginia and others back inside, she
concludes she is visiting a school for delinquent girls, doing research
for a novel. As she enters the hall the sight of wire mesh screens and
the pungent smells suggest she may be at a zoo. However, the
women in authority treat her and others harshly, curtly, as if they
were criminals: so Virginia thinks she might be investigating a prison
for a prison novel. She finally comes to the shocking realization that
she is an inmate in a mental institution.

9Personal letter from Millen Brand, May 2, 1974.

10 MARGERY KEMPE

mantle of purple silk, sitting upon her bedside, looking upon
her with so blessed a face that she was strengthened in all her
spirit, and said to her these words:—

”Daughter, why hast thou forsaken Me, and I forsook never
thee?”

And anon, as He said these words, she saw verily how the air
opened as bright as any lightning. And He rose up into the air,
not right hastily and quickly, but fair and easily, so that she
might well behold Him in the air till it was closed again.

And anon this creature became calmed in her wits and
reason, as well as ever she was before, and prayed her husband
as soon as he came to her, that she might have the keys of the
buttery to take her meat and drink as she had done before. Her
maidens and her keepers counselled him that he should deliver
her no keys, as they said she would but give away such goods
as there were, for she knew not what she said, as they weened.

Nevertheless, her husband ever having tenderness and com-
passion for her, commanded that they should deliver to her the
keys; and she took her meat and drink as her bodily strength
would serve her, and knew her friends and her household and
all others that came to see how Our Lord Jesus Christ had
wrought His grace in her, so blessed may He be, Who ever is
near in tribulation. When men think He is far from them, He is
full near by His grace. Afterwards, this creature did all other
occupations as fell to her to do, wisely and soberly enough, save
she knew not verily the call of Our Lord.

31- 36- 3(-

On a time, as this creature was at Canterbury in the church
amongst the monks, she was greatly despised and reproved
because she wept so fast, both by the monks and priests, and by
secular men, nearly all day both forenoon and afternoon also, so
much indeed that her husband went away from her as if he had
not known her, and left her alone amongst them, choose how
she might. Further comfort had she none of him that day.

So an old monk, who had been Treasurer with the Queen
whilst he was in secular clothing, a rich man, and greatly
dreaded by many people, took her by the hand, saying unto
her:—

244 MARY JANE WARD

The most striking thing about The Snake Pit is the detailed, precise
picture of one institution at a particular time in history. Surprisingly,
perhaps, we see almost no actual violence in the institution. But its
very atmosphere is : brutal. Patients are lied to. A nurse speaks to
them ”as if they and she were separated by a thick wall.” Sometimes
the nurses seem to think that ”the patients were unable to hear any-
thing that was not shouted.” A request to see the doctor is evaded
rather than straightforwardly answered. Patients are treated ”as if
they were criminals,” or ”like cattle.” The power of the staff is often
used arbitrarily. In one ward that Virginia enters the nurse forbids
patients to walk on a new rug in the dayroom.

Very little attention is given to patients’ personal appearance.
Quick showers are permitted twice a week. There is no laundry ser-
vice, so patients wear the same clothes indefinitely. Once a week is
”fine-comb night,” when the nurse goes through each patient’s hair
with a fine comb, searching for lice. On some wards, women's hair is
cut short, for the convenience of the institution. Restraints such as the
straitjacket and the ”wet pack” are seen by the patients as humiliating
rather than helpful. Treatments often look and feel more like punish-
ment than therapy, while the very physical layout of the institution
seems almost expressly designed to depress, humiliate, and abrade
individuality. In at least one ward the walls, floors, and curtains are
either brown or dirty. In the lavatory there are no doors to the stalls
and no toilet paper. Clothes are stamped with a number. There are
four wash basins for a ward of forty or fifty patients and two shower
stalls. In one of the wards the furniture consists of four of five long
benches. There are shortages of mattresses, linen, toilet paper, and
tissue; patients use rags for tissue.

During the novel's progress we closely follow Virginia's mental
processes, confusion, and forgetfulness. At the same time we can
look slightly beyond her limited awareness and see the larger world
of Juniper Hill. The difference in viewpoints, so skillfully handled,
lends a great dramatic tension to the entire work. Virginia is an inno-
cent, a sheep among wolves—we are sympathetic, and apprehen-
sive. We see the dangers and the hardness. When her point of view at
last converges with our greater awareness and when she more fully
recognizes her position, that recognition is the beginning of her pro-
gression toward health. She sees at last that she is in a ”snake pit” and
the shock of that perception seems to give her the strength and clarity
and will to survive: ”Long ago they lowered insane persons into
snake pits; they thought that an experience that might drive a sane

The Snake Pit 245

person out of his wits might send an insane person back into sanity.
. . . They had thrown her into a snake pit and she had been shocked
into knowing that she could get well."

That particular conceptual or psychological turning point is very
dramatic. I know of no such ”snake pit” treatment in the past
(although there may have been something similar at the ancient
Greek healing temple at Epidaurus). But the idea that mad people
could be shocked out of their madness is an old one. Eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century treatments included the ”bath of surprise,” in
which the unsuspecting patient was dropped through a trap door
into a pool of ice-cold water. Some physicians recommended the
”we11-cure” in which the patient would be chained at the bottom of a
well, with water gradually dripping in. According to Albert Deutsch,
one American physician, a Dr. Willard, became known at the begin-
ning of the nineteenth century for his own particular variation of the
well-cure. At his private asylum in New England, Willard kept a black
coffin with holes in it. The newly admitted patient would be sealed
inside the coffin, then submerged in a water tank until all the air had
bubbled out of the holes.” And we recall Ebenezer Haskell's descrip-
tion of the harrowing ”spread-eagle cure” with ”douche bath.”

It is not at all clear that the coersive treatments and degrading
environment at Juniper Hill were deliberately and consciously
planned to shock the patients ”back into sanity.” That idea is more
dramatic than accurate. Nonetheless, Mary Jane Ward's Juniper Hill is
an accurate portrait of a typical American psychiatric institution of the
mid-twentieth century.

The following excerpts from The Snake Pit are meant to give a com-
posite reproduction of Juniper Hill. In the first excerpt we follow
Virginia's progress through a maze of locked doors and halls to the
lavatory. She is then given electroshock treatment. To her, the atten-
dants are guards, the doctor and his assistant are diabolical conspir-
ators, the treatment itself is electrocution. In the third and fourth ex-
cerpts, Virginia undergoes ”hydrotherapy,” extended baths in ”the
room”; then she is wrapped in a wet pack for the night; she manages
to escape and finds a dry bed to sleep in. In the fifth entry, she rushes
to dinner with the rest of her ward through the underground tunnels
connecting buildings. And in the final entry, Virginia comes face to

“Deutsch, The Mentally III in America, p. 82.

246 MARY JANE WARD

face, in the tunnels, with a straitjacketed patient who had been her
friend several months earlier when she first entered ”the snake pit."

THEY LINED UP in front of the dining-room door. When the door
was unlocked they marched out. Miss Cut-the-Shoving was
checking on her board. To see if any of them had died of the
meal?

They marched up the brown hall and stopped at the door at
the end of it. Miss Hart unlocked the door and they went into
the waiting room. They crossed that room and paused at
another door. Miss Hart unlocked the door. They went into
another hall. They stopped at another door. When it was un-
locked they went into a room that was stunningly different.

It was a large light room. There was tile on the floor, tiny
octagonal pieces of tile charmingly fitted together and so white
and clean. The walls had the two-color paint job but they
seemed more cheerful. It was a lovely room. Virginia studied
the floor as if it was an exceptional mosaic and she thought
suddenly of her beautiful Kelim rug and had then to suppress a
ridiculous and unexpected sob. Don't be a baby. Suppose you
had to stay here.

IfI had to remain in this prison I would choose this room, she
thought. But presently her enthusiasm waned. There were four
booths. The women stood and waited for their turn. Anyhow,
that was the idea. Your turn wasn't necessarily when you
thought. It depended a good deal on where Miss Hart was. The
pushing was done quietly and with no hard feeling. Virginia
changed from line to line but it was no use; none of the booths
had a door.

When at last it was her uncontested turn she discovered that
an even more vital accessory was missing. There was no
wooden seat and the old joke about not falling in was in this
case no joke. But she forgot how frightful this was when she
saw there was no toilet paper, no toilet tissue as you would call
it in Evanston. There wasn't even an empty container. Nor any
holes to indicate that there had ever been a dispenser. She was

The Snake Pit 247

about to call to her next neighbor, but then she remembered the
cleansing tissues in her handbag.

When she left the booth she peered at the walls of the other
three. None of them had paper. This must be reported.

As a rule she held back and let others do the reporting but
now she was angry and she went to Miss Hart to say what is the
idea of not providing these women with toilet paper. When she
reached Miss Hart she saw that the woman was providing toilet
paper. Miss Hart was the dispenser. If you required paper you
asked her for it in advance and she doled it out for you.

36 1- 3(-

”Good morning, ladies."

Who had got into the room? Stealthily she groped for Robert.
I must put my hand over his mouth so he won't speak out. But
the bed was narrow and she was alone. The room was dark but
she saw pale shapes rising up. One of the shapes said her name
and then she remembered that she was not at home. February
to August.

”Yes,” she said. She got out of the cot, fumbled for the bag
under the bed and then put on her shoes.

’’Hurry up.”

”I am.” Always the command to hurry and you hurried no-
where, you arrived nowhere. The shoes were cold and clammy
and they squished up and down when you walked.

After she had followed Grace into the hall she remembered
the letter and so she went back and took it from under the
pillow. When she returned to the hall Grace had vanished but
there were other ghosts that rushed in the dimness. It was far
too dark to be morning and she wondered if this might be a fire
drill.

She followed the shapes into the washroom. Although it was
the same room it had been moved to the other end of the hall.
She would not give them the satisfaction of commenting on the
change. She found her hanger and began to dress.

”Virginia! You don't take breakfast this morning."

Then why not let me stay in bed, fool? She turned and there
was another guard, not Miss Hart, a smaller one but with a big
voice. Not that I took dinner last night, but thank you just the
same for saving me the bother of the trip. ”All right,” she said.

248 MARY JANE WARD

Perhaps Robert is coming to take me away. She continued to
dress.

Now this one that was not Miss Hart came over to her and
took her by the shoulders and shook her. ”You put your clothes
right back on that hanger.” This guard had puffy cheeks and her
rouge was in purple splotches and her hair was scooped into a
black-silk net and she looked as if she had been up all night.
"You know you go for shock. Hurry up or you'll be late.”

It was quaint of the guard to think you had to go elsewhere
for a shock. But Virginia put her clothes back on the hanger and
again got into the grotesque nightgown.

’’You’ll have to concentrate,” whispered Grace. ”It makes her
so mad when you forget. And it counts against you.”

”Where am I going?”

”For shock. You remember.”

Do I? I remember it no more than I remember the house
where I was born and the little window. Going for shock. An
odd, foreign expression. Sensation seekers go to be shocked; I
never heard anyone say go for shock, as if it was a commodity
like the morning milk.

Presently she and the guard were the only ones left in the
washroom. The guard handed her a gray terrycloth robe. ”Put
this on,” she said. ”Put your nightgown back on the hanger.
Hurry up.”

In the hall the guard turned her over to another one in blue
and white, one who hadn't put on any rouge this morning.
Virginia and the pale one went through the large room and they
reached the outer corridor in time to trail along with the last of
the breakfast ladies, but they did not go into the dining room
with the breakfast ladies.

As they turned at a door just beyond the dining room door
Virginia noticed a third door. It had gold letters on it. It looked
familiar but shewas unable to make out the letters. The pale one
unlocked the door she had selected and they went into a cement
stair-well and started to climb. After several flights the pale one
unlocked another door and they went into another brown corri-
dor. The pale one escorted her to a small room and left her there.
All of this was done without any comment. Well, I don't feel like
talking before I've had my coffee either.

There were wooden benches around the walls of the small

The Snake Pit 249

room and there were two windows. Virginia tried to open one
of the windows and was surprised to find that she could. The
window opened down the center to make two slits. They might
as well have had bars. It was beginning to get light. The sky had
a sick, lemon cast at the horizon.

Three robed women were ushered in. One of them sat down;
the other two stood in the center of the room. No one said
anything.

After a while a guard came and took one of the robed women
away. There was pink in the sky now. The pink was turning to
red when another woman was taken away. It was nearly light
when Virginia was taken.

She was taken down the hall to a little room and the moment
she saw that room she knew she had been shocked previously
and that she did not care for another helping. The room smelled
like her old electric egg beater and there was a dull red glass eye
in the wall. ”I think I'll go back downstairs,” she said.

”You go right on in,” said the guard.

”Good morning, Virginia.” This was quite a different voice. It
was so pleasant that it was silly. It dripped the sort of cheery
good will that is hard to take any morning, especially a morning
when you have a formaldehyde hangover.

”Good morning,” said Virginia in a tone which she meant to
indicate that she wished not to discuss it further.

There was a high table, like an operating table, and she knew
she was supposed to get up on it. She got on it and the woman
with the silly voice fussed around her. This woman was in an
R.N. uniform and the room had somewhat the appearance of an
operating room. I'd forgotten I was to have an operation. You
don't eat before an operation, of course. I should have remem-
bered. I wonder what I am being operated on for. What haven't
I had removed? I believe I still have my gall bladder.

”Well, Jeannie. And how is Jeannie this morning?”

It was he, the Indefatigable Examiner, come out from the
bushes. He was wearing a white coat. He had blue eyes and a
hawkish nose and a very slender face and his hair was fair and
curly, like Grace's, only shorter.

”And did you enjoy being outside in the park yesterday?” He
said this with a heavy accent that you had never been able to
place. It wasn't German, French, Italian or Scandinavian.

250 MARY IANE WARD

Polish, perhaps. He began to talk at great rate but you could tell
he didn't care if you translated or replied. He and the silly
woman were busy with their hands. Evidently it was to be a
local anesthetic.

They put a wedge under her back. It was most uncomfort-
able. It forced her back into an unnatural position. She looked at
the dull glass eye that was set into the wall and she knew that
soon it would glow and that she would not see the glow. They
were going to electrocute her, not operate upon her. Even now
the woman was applying a sort of foul-smelling cold paste to
your temples. What had she done? You wouldn't have killed
anyone and what other crime is there which exacts so severe a
penalty? Could they electrocute you for having voted for
Norman Thomas? Many people had said the country was going
to come to that sort of dictatorship but you hadn't believed it
would ever reach this extreme. Dare they kill me without a trial? I
demand to see a lawyer. And he—he always talking about hear-
ing voices and never hearing mine . . . He, pretending to be so
solicitous of me and not even knowing my name, calling me
Jeannie. IfI say I demand a lawyer they have to do something. It
has to do with habeas corpus, something in the Constitution. But
they and their smooth talk, they intend to make a corpus of
me-—they and their good mornings and how are you.

Now the woman was putting clamps on your head, on the
paste-smeared temples and here came another one, another
nurse-garbed woman and she leaned on your feet as if in a
minute you might rise up from the table and strike the ceiling.
Your hands tied down, your legs held down. Three against one
and the one entangled in machinery.

She opened her mouth to call for a lawyer and the silly
woman thrust a gag into it and said, ”Thank you, dear," and the
foreign devil with the angelic smile and the beautiful voice gave
a conspiratorial nod. Soon it would be over. In a way you were

glad.
3(- if 3(-

Occasionally she was aware of being moved from a tub to a
bed. From a wet hammock to a wet bed. During this long period
there was no normal eating. The tube business happened again
and again and eventually she understood that it was a way of
feeding her. When she neared the top of the hole and found the

The Snake Pit 251

tube in her nose she wanted to tell the Young Jailer she would
gladly eat if he would give her an opportunity, but she was
unable to speak. The quicksand of the hole pulled her down and
stifled her attempts at speech.

Then gradually she began to come out of it; gradually the
periods of being out of it lengthened and now she walked from
bed to tub and from tub to bed. And the time came when she
went to a small room that had a table and two long benches and
there, along with several other robed creatures, she ate meals of
gravy and gruel. She ate eagerly. The food was revolting look-
ing and tasting stuff but she had learned that by eating it she
avoided the tube feeding.

Sometimes the real Robert came to see her. She tried to talk to
him, to tell him how cold she was, but all she could do was cry.
She wept while Robert talked quietly to her. She liked to hear
his voice, but she never knew what he was saying. It was terri-
ble when he went away. He went away and the old routine of
tub and bed and meals in the little room was resumed.

An icy draft blew in around the windows at the end of the tub
room. In front of the windows a nurse sat at a desk and marked
on papers. She wore a sweater and had a coat over the back of
her chair. All of the nurses in the tub room wore sweaters but
the patients went from tub to tub in sheets or in cotton robes.
When the wind was blowing hard and cold the tub water, when
you first got into it, felt good. It always cooled, though. The
nurses said not, but by the time you had to move on to another
tub the water seemed as cold as the winter wind.

3(- if 3(-

After the meal the nurse came and took them away. Usually
two nurses called for Virginia. Great strapping women with
large arms, they lifted her up to a bed as if she was a baby. They
bounced her on the wet sheets and expertly wrapped her into
the frigid cocoon.

”That’s quite a trick,” she said to them one night. ”A dirty
trick.”

The nurses looked at each other. “Well,” said one of them,
”it’s nice to know you can talk. You are always so quiet.”

They spread a dry sheet over her. Why? No bit of the dry
sheet touched her. It was not to be endured. Hurry and get out,
you two, so I can hurry and get out.

252 MARY JANE WARD

She watched with a purpose this night but they worked too
rapidly. She was unable to memorize the motions that created
the cocoon. It was not, however, to be endured. So when the
nurses left she began to get out of the mummy trappings.

It took a long time.

First she wriggled under the wide binder that was tucked
between the mattress and springs. This took a very long time.
For a whfle, when her head was under the binder, she thought
she would never manage it; it was like crawling out of your own
skin. Free of the binder she twisted her body until she could
swing the lower part of it over the side of the bed. After sliding
to the floor it was comparatively easy. Using her teeth, good
strong teeth and none missing, she loosened the twists that
went over her shoulders and then swayed from side to side
until the sheets unwound.

She stood naked and free in air that felt comfortingly warm.
She took the dry sheet to the radiator and made herself a tent.
To be warm in winter. One of the very finest things in life.

When she became sleepy she went back to the bed. She
shoved the wet sheets way down to the foot of the bed and,
wrapped in her dry sheet, curled up on the rubber mattress. She
would, she promised herself, wake up early enough to rewrap
herself in the wet sheets but instantly a voice was screeching.
”Virginia—how on earth! Who put you in pack last night? ”

”I don't know,” said Virginia.

”How did you get out?”

”I was cold.” Why had morning to come so quickly?

“Well,” said this morning nurse, ”I’ll attend to your pack
myself tonight and that’ s for sure.”

Yes, this one who thought she was so smart, this one
attended to Virginia's pack that night and maybe it did take
Virginia longer to get out of it. Maybe it did. But she got out and
she had another comfortable sleep. And the next night they put
a large canvas spread over her bed and they laced this spread
under the springs in some way. The spread had one hole in it,
for your head.

1- 1- 3(-

”Supper, ladies,” shouted Miss Vance. She was an amazon of
a woman. There was a nurse, a long time ago, that I thought
was large; I hadn't seen anything.

The Snake Pit 253

The ladies scrambled over to Miss Vance. Virginia tried to
keep a little air between herself and the others. However, such
foul-smelling air was undoubtedly as thick with germs as were
the ladies.

”I don't know yet,” the nurse was saying. ”Wait a sec.” She
cocked her head in the direction of the hall and then she bel-
lowed, ”Tunnel!”

She unlocked the door and the ladies sped down the stairs.
Virginia had a hard time keeping up with them. They raced into
a basement and then into a tunnel.

The tunnel was something for a horror story. There were
lights but the pale glow they gave off was swallowed in the
midnight pools between the lights. The walls were cement pat-
terned with cracks. Water seeped slowly from some of the wider
cracks and on the uneven floor were puddles of dark water.

The tunnel was divided into two lanes. The dividing wall was
of some sort of heavy chicken wire and on the other side of it
ladies scurried along like gray-blue rats. Now and then there
was a lady in a canvas jacket laced up the back. Virginia saw her
breath in the pale light as she panted to catch up with her
crowd.

They came to a staircase. This also was divided into two parts
but the dividing agent in this case was merely a railing made by
two iron bars. A very fat old lady crawled between the bars and
went up the other side. It made no difference. You all came out
on the same landing.

At the door was a nurse, oh, such a large nurse. She unlocked
the door, but she held an arm across the opening and the ladies
shoved against her. When she dropped her arm the ladies
spilled into an enormous room and rushed for a line that was
forming on one side.

39 31- 3|-

Virginia was thinking this as she went back through the tun-
nel. She was not able to think and to hurry at the same time and
so now she fell behind the crowd that was running back to the
ward. She was pretty much alone when she saw Grace.

Grace, the fair girl who had worn a hoover apron, the girl
who had been almost well enough to go back to her job on the
newspaper. ”Oh, Grace,” wailed Virginia.

The girl on the other side of the wire partition stopped when

The Book of Margery Kempe 11

”What canst thou say of God?”

”Sir,” she said, ”I will both speak of Him, and hear of Him,”
repeating to the monk a story of Scripture.

The monk said:——”I would thou wert enclosed in a house of
stone, so that, there, no man should speak with thee.”

”Ah! Sir,” she said, ”ye should maintain God's servants. Ye
are the first that hold against them. Our Lord amend you.”

Then a young monk said to her:—”Either thou hast the Holy
Ghost, or else thou hast the devil within thee, for what thou
speakest to us here is Holy Writ, and that hast thou not of
thyself.”

Then said this creature:——”I pray you, sir, give me leave to tell
you a tale.”

Then the people said to the monl<:—”Let her say what she
will.”

Then she said:—”There was once a man who had sinned
greatly against God, and when he was shriven, his confessor
enjoined him as part of his penance, that he should for one year
hire men to chide him and reprove him for his sins, and he
should give them silver for their labour. And one day he came
amongst many great men, such as are now here, God save you
all, and stood among them as I do now amongst you, despising
him as ye do me, the man laughing and smiling and having
good game at their words. The greatest master of them said to
the man:—

”’Why laughest thou, wretch? Thou art greatly despised!’

”’Ah! Sir, I have great cause to laugh, for I have many days
put silver out of my purse and hired men to chide me for remis-
sion of my sin, and this day I may keep my silver in my purse. I
thank you all.’

”Right so I say to you, worshipful sirs. Whilst I was at home
in my own country, day by day with great weeping and mourn-
ing, I sorrowed because I had no shame, scorn or contempt, as I
was worthy. I thank you all, sirs, highly for what, forenoon and
afternoon, I have had in good measure this day, blessed be God
for it.”

Then she went out of the monastery, they following and
crying upon her:—

254 MARY JANE WARD

Virginia called her name. She stood very still and looked
through the fence.

”But I thought you'd gone home,” said Virginia. ”Months
and months ago.”

Grace stared at her.

”I’m Virginia. You remember me. We were good friends. We
used to sit in the sun and talk. Remember? It was in Ward
Three, Grace. You used to tell me where my bed was and what
number my hanger was and things like that. I was always
forgetting everything but you always knew.”

Grace's eyes were nearly black in the dim light of the tunnel.
They were fixed on Virginia but they seemed not to see.

”They have cut your pretty hair so short," said Virginia. She
put her hands up to her face to brush her tears away. ”I’m sorry.
I'm really glad to see you. Of course I'm not. You know what I
mean. I'd thought you were back home.”

Grace said absolutely nothing.

And then Virginia noticed that her friend was wearing one of
the canvas jackets. She had seen many of these jackets since
coming to Building Five and she supposed they were what are
called strait jackets. Previously she had thought a strait jacket
was something that covered all of you but perhaps the kind she
was seeing here was semi-formal. They looked like lumberjacks.
The armlike appendages were crossed and fastened in the back.
The whole contraption was laced up the back. It looked as if
there might be straps or something for the patient to rest her
arms in, at any rate the arms did not dangle. The ladies who
wore these jackets went directly to seats in the dining room and
nurses took them trays and fed them. Just yesterday Virginia
had sat next to a lady who was being fed. Between bites she told
the nurse about a trip she had had in Europe some years back.
She was an aristocratic-looking woman with a Best Bostonian
way of speaking. The nurse appeared to be listening to her with
interest and respect. Both of them gave the impression of being
too well bred to notice that one was being fed by the other.
Virginia had seen this Boston woman many times and always
the woman was wearing a canvas jacket. You were tortured by
curiosity. It was impossible to imagine that so dignified a person
needed to be tied up.

The Snake Pit 255

Grace started to move away from the barrier. ”Don’t go,” said
Virginia. ”Come back, Grace. Turn around and maybe I can
reach through and unfasten that thing. It is ridiculous for them
to . . . I never knew a kinder person, a more gentle person. As if
you would . . .”

Grace paused long enough to give Virginia a look which made
her grateful for the jacket and the fence. Yes, it was as if she
would. Even the thought of Robert's coming visit failed to re-
move the memory of Grace's parting glare.

1952*?»
Wisdom, Madness and Folly, by John Custance

Though he had suffered previous bouts of depression and one experi-
ence of unusual elation, John Custance’s first severely abnormal men-
tal experience happened in 1938 when he was thirty-eight years old.
On Armistice Sunday, he attended a church service commemorating
England's heroic dead. Suddenly he knew the meaning of the mil-
lions of war deaths in Europe. They were part of a Divine Plan and
Custance realized he was to have a part in that plan. He began to
notice unusual physical sensations: ”shivers” in the spine and ”tin-
gling of the nerves,” and that night he experienced his first ”true”
hallucination:

How shall I describe it? It was perfectly simple. The great male and
female organs of love hung there in mid-air; they seemed infinitely far
away and infinitely near at the same time. . . . I was not sexually ex-
cited; from the first the experience seemed to be holy. What I saw was
the Power of Love—the name came to me at once—the Power that I
knew somehow to have made all universes, past, present and to come,
to be utterly infinite, an infinity of infinities, to have conquered the
Power of Hate, its opposite, and thus created the sun, the stars, the
moon, the planets, the earth, light, life, joy and peace, never-ending.

After that vision his entire life changed. His sense of sin and guilt
vanished, and his experiential world seemed transformed into a gar-
den of extraordinary beauty and pleasure. He felt in love with the
universe, and believed he had found the solution to all problems:
love. Custance concluded that love was the force of attraction in the
universe, the essence that causes spirit and matter to cohere, while its
opposite, hate, causes repulsion, the essence that disintegrates spirit
and matter. Furthermore, he concluded that the traditional Christian
antithesis between sacred and profane love was false, that sexual
attraction was indeed an essential element of spiritual attraction.
What landed him in an asylum was not that insight, however, but the
actions he justified by it. He was wandering the streets of London
when a prostitute came up to him. He considered her solicitations to
be a call for love which he could not refuse; he felt he loved her and
wanted to express that love. Consequently he went with her to her
room, read the Bible with her, gave her five pounds, and left. Within

256

Wisdom, Madness and Polly 257

a short time Custance had given away all his savings, some three
hundred pounds, in similar enterprises. Since he saw himself as di-
vinely inspired, he approached a Christian Science church for more
money to help another prostitute. When they refused Custance tried
to destroy everything in the church within his reach, hoping to make
himself a martyr, ”and thus showing up the meanness and hypocrisy
of churches in general.” The police came and Custance was put in a
mental hospital for three weeks. During the next fifteen years—while
in and out of asylums undergoing treatment for recurring ”manic-
depressive psychosis”—Custance wrote Wisdom, Madness and Polly,
the story of his mad experiences and philosophy.

In large part Wisdom, Madness and Polly is presented as a psychiatric
document. The foreword describes the book as ”a first-hand docu-
ment for the study of . . . psychosis.” There are appendices describ-
ing Custance’s reactions to specific psychiatric treatments and the
results of two psychometric examinations. Much of the book‘ lists in
clear, methodical fashion the qualities of manic-depressive madness
as Custance sees them. What is most striking is Custance’s con-
tinuing insistance that his madness brought to him ”an intense emo-
tional religious experience.” Surely Custance is not writing a
”spiritual autobiography,” as we understand the term. He seems
neither aware of nor interested in the traditional forms of such an
autobiography; and before speaking about matters of the soul and
spirit, he carefully justifies his new vector by invoking the authority of
Jung and William James. Yet finally Custance persists in describing his
unusual experiences as akin to or identical with religious experience
and discussable in those terms.

It may be relevant here to consider why, given all the advantages of
scientific thought, so many mad people continue to speak of their
experiences in spiritual terms. In the first place it is probably a mis-
take to assume that science and religion are antithetical. Science is
one particular discipline for confronting reality, but it has limitations.
It is biased towards the atomistic, rather than the holistic vision. It
seems most effective when dealing with tangible and measurable
material reality. And for all the successes of scientific method, we can
still see its beginning in some unanalyzable assumptions and its end
in some unanswerable questions. What is consciousness? What is the
origin and destiny of ”I” and ”Not-I?” What is infinity?

It is part of the function of the brain to limit awareness, to filter, to
systemize in some coherent fashion the raw, infinite chaos of reality.
It may be that all ways of knowing serve as part of that complex filter.
And the mind, confronted with infinity, gropes for the dark glass of

258 JOHN CUSTANCE

system—both the mythic and metaphorical system of religion, and
the logical system of science-—in a response not much different from
the flower seeking light. What some mad people and some mystics at
times may have in common is a temporary or permanent, whole or
skewed, loss of the ordinary biological and cultural filters, and a
naked encounter with reality in its infinite form. Having passed
through the gates of perception, having encountered reality in some
unusual and perhaps overwhelming form, they return and begin
speaking of old truths in new or reconstructed systems—logical, or
mythic and metaphorical. We may find their mythic expressions both
strangely different from and strangely like traditional religious sys-
tems; but I believe we will find them meaningless only if we try to
comprehend the mythic by logic, or the logical by myth.

Following are three excerpts from Wisdom, Madness and Folly. First,
Custance describes, in summary form, what ”manic-depressive
psychosis” is like for him. In the next entry, his first serious attack of
mania is portrayed. In the final excerpt he describes an experience of
mad depression in great detail. His feeling of despair becomes so
overwhelming that he concludes his soul has been taken by Satan.
The reader may want to compare this account, and the mythical
thinking that leads him to ideas of demonic possession, with George
Trosse’s eighteenth-century description of his mad depression.

WE ALL KNOW the type of individual who is ”up in the air” at
one time and ”down in the dumps” at another. Psychologists
call this kind of temperament ”cyclothymic”; it is quite com-
mon, and only when there is serious nervous disturbance does
it lead to true manic-depressive psychosis. When elated, either
for genuine reasons to be found in external circumstances, or
sometimes for no apparent reason at all, the subject sees the
world through rose-coloured spectacles. He feels particularly fit;
his reactions to his environment are rapid and well-defined; he
has an inner certainty that he will succeed in any plans he may
have formed in embryo in his mind; the world, in fact, is his
oyster. When depressed, on the other hand, he feels more or
less ill; he looks on the black side of everything; he is convinced
he will fail in anything he undertakes; he is uncertain and
doubtful, particularly about himself; he cannot concentrate

Wisdom, Madness and Folly 259

properly; his reactions are slow, though often his mind is re-
volving very rapidly about his own troubles and fears.

When the nervous system is thoroughly deranged, the two
contrasting states of mind can be almost infinitely intensified. It
sometimes seems to me as though my condition had been spe-
cially devised by Providence to illustrate the Christian concepts
of Heaven and Hell. Certainly it has shown me that within my
own soul there are possibilities of an inner peace and happiness
beyond description, as well as of inconceivable depths of terror
and despair. Normal life and consciousness of ”reality” appear
to me rather like motion along a narrow strip of table-land at the
top of a Great Divide separating two distinct universes from
each other. On the one hand the slope is green and fertile,
leading to a lovely landscape where love, joy and the infinite
beauties of nature and of dreams await the traveller; on the
other a barren, rocky declivity, where lurk endless horrors of
distorted imagination, descends to the bottomless pit.

In the condition of manic-depression, this table-land is so
narrow that it is exceedingly difficult to keep on it. One begins
to slip; the world about one changes imperceptibly. For a time it
is possible to keep some sort of grip on reality. But once one is
really over the edge, once the grip of reality is lost, the forces of
the Unconscious take charge, and then begins what appears to
be an unending voyage into the universe of bliss or the universe
of horror as the case may be, a voyage over which one has
oneself no control whatever.

if 3(- 3(-

It began in the autumn of 1938, when I was just 38 years of
age. For some years I had suffered from bouts of nervous de-
pression, and I had had one attack of elation. None of these had
been really serious, however; at any rate I had not had to be
confined in a Mental Hospital or Asylum. I had been free of

trouble for rather more than a year and had settled down in a

congenial job.

The first symptoms appeared on Armistice Sunday. I had
attended the service which commemorates the gallant dead of
the ”War to end Wars”. It always has an emotional effect upon
me, partly because my work has had a good deal to do with the
tragic aftermath of that war in Europe. Suddenly I seemed to see

260 JOHN CUSTANCE

like a flash that the sacrifice of those millions of lives had not
been in vain, that it was part of a great pattern, the pattern of
Divine Purpose. I felt, too, an inner conviction that I had some-
thing to do with that purpose; it seemed that some sort of rev-
elation was being made to me, though at the time I had no
clear ideas about what it was. The whole aspect of the world
about me began to change, and I had the excited shivers in the
spinal column and tingling of the nerves that always herald my
manic phases.

That night I had a vision. It was the only pure hallucination I
have ever experienced; though I have had many other visions,
they have always taken the form of what are technically known
as ”illusions”. I woke up about five o'clock to find a strange,
rather unearthly light in the room. As my natural drowsiness
wore off, the excited feelings of the day before returned and
grew more intense. The light grew brighter; I began, I remem-
ber, to inhale deep gulps of air, which eased the tension in some
way. Then suddenly the vision burst upon me.

How shall I describe it? It was perfectly simple. The great
male and female organs of love hung there in rnid-air; they
seemed infinitely far away from me and infinitely near at the
same time. I can see them now, pulsing rhythmically in a circu-
lar clockwise motion, each revolution taking approximately the
time of a human pulse or heartbeat, as though the vision was
associated in some way with the circulation of the blood. I was
not sexually excited; from the first the experience seemed to me
to be holy. What I saw was the Power of Love—the name came
to me at once—the Power that I knew somehow to have made
all universes, past, present and to come, to be utterly infinite, an
infinity of infinities, to have conquered the Power of Hate, its
opposite, and thus created the sun, the stars, the moon, the
planets, the earth, light, life, joy and peace, never-ending.

3(- if 3(-
In my previous states of depression I had never really lost my

grip of reality. I had begun to slip off the table-land down the I

slope to the left, but there was still as it were a ridge in front of
me which might hold me up. I was utterly miserable and
wanted to die, but my fears, troubles and worries were of nor-
mal human mischances which might happen to anybody. I
feared poverty, failure in life, inability to educate my children,

Wisdom, Madness and Folly 261

making my wife miserable, losing her, ending up in the gutter as
the most revolting type of beggar and so on. My fears had in fact
become so overpowering as to appear to me like certainties, but
they were only earthly, human fears. Beyond the ridge border-
ing this ordinary universe of common human experience
unending horrors awaited me. But I did not know; I had not
crossed it, at any rate in that direction.

Had I had anything like the insight into my own mind that I
have now attained, I should have known what to expect, for
during the foregoing manic period I had crossed the ridge down
the slope to the right of the plateau. I had experienced unearthly
joys; I had imagined myself in Heaven; in the padded cell at
Brixton I saw vision after vision, and though I rather doubt
whether orthodox Roman Catholics would allow those visions
the predicate ”beatific”, they were undoubtedly my particular
form of the Vision Beautiful.

If you are a saint, you may, I suppose, aspire to see the
Beatific Vision without experiencing its opposite, which I will
call the Horrific Vision. You struggle and sacrifice and mortify
your flesh; you pass through the ”Cloud of Unknowing” and the
Dark Night of the Soul when you feel, like St Theresa, that God
has deserted you, but you need not necessarily go through the
terrors of Hell. None the less, many famous religious leaders——
Martin Luther and John Bunyan are notable cases in point-
have experienced something of the kind, and for the ordinary
sinner it is sound Catholic doctrine that Heaven without Purga-
tory is inconceivable.

Thus, since I had had experience of Heaven, it was only
reasonable to expect that I should be shown Hell in due course.
Let me try to summon up all my descriptive powers to give
some idea of the pass to which conscience can bring a human
soul, once it has slipped over the ridge to the left of the narrow
plateau and lost its foothold on reality.

I lay in my bed in the ward of the Hospital dominated above
all by an overpowering sense of fear. At first I did not know
exactly what it was that I feared, except of course that my mind,
which I strove as hard as I could to keep blank, would insist on
working about the ordinary, human fears I have outlined above.
Wisely, no attempt was made to get me up, and I lay as motion-
less as I could, covering my head as a rule with the bedclothes,

262 JOHN CUSTANCE

partly to shut out the sights and sounds of the ward, and partly
as a sort of instinctive reaction.

Dr W. H. R. Rivers in his suggestive work Instinct and the
Unconscious has given one of the probable reasons for this
attitude. It was the reaction of the animal who under the
compulsion of the fear-emotion remains absolutely immobile,
”paralysed by fear” as the popular locution has it. It does so, of
course, because in the course of evolution immobility, ”lying
doggo”, has proved a sound means of defence. The reaction is
what Rivers calls an ”all or nothing” reaction, because for
gregarious animals it is absolutely essential that all the members
of the group should remain equally immobile; if one moves, the
whole purpose of the reaction is defeated.

About the second reason I am not so clear. I believe, however,
that to cover oneself up with the bedclothes suggests, at any
rate to some extent, the safety of the mother's womb, the ulti-
mate refuge, according to good Freudian doctrine, towards
which so much psychological striving is directed.

Anyway, there I lay for some days, only putting my head
outside the clothes to eat my food, take my drugs, and for
absolutely necessary purposes. Gradually, however, the sounds
if not the sights of the ward forced themselves in on my
consciousness.

In the bed opposite me there lay, also in a state of extreme
misery and dejection, a patient named Bar-——. He moaned
unceasingly; I could not help hearing what he said. He only said
two words, at least I never remembering hearing him say any-
thing else. Those words were, ”no hope, no hope, no hope,”
ceaselessly repeated in a hollow moan. I soon learnt his name; it
began with the fatal syllable Bar.

I was barred, my mind began to repeat to me, barred from
hope, there was no hope for me. The obvious association soon
followed. I do not know much Italian, but I had once made an
attempt to read parts of Dante's Inferno in the original.

Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate.

So that was where I was going was it? No, I tried to argue
with myself, it was impossible. There must be some hope, some

Wisdom, Madness and Polly 263

escape from Hell. A Creator who condemned his creatures to
eternal punishment, whatever their sins, would be a monster,
and the God of Jesus was a God of love. This reasoning, I may
say, represents a considered view that I have always held. It
comforted me for a time.

There was a very charming Anglican parson in the ward,
whom I will call G.G., as he may prefer me not to mention his
name. On various occasions he had done me little kindnesses,
and though I hardly talked to anybody, I did now and then talk
to him. As the subject of Hell was getting on my mind, I
broached it to him in an endeavour to get some reassurance.

G.G., however, was not impressed by my reasoning. He
brought his little Bible along and produced texts to prove his
thesis that an eternal Hell was a part of God's purpose and
Word, and that Iesus Christ explicitly endorsed this view.
"Everlasting fire prepared for the Devil and all his Angels”,
”and these shall go away into eternal punishment, but the righ-
teous into eternal life”, and so on. How could I argue away the
plain meaning of the words concluding the great parable of the
sheep and the goats?

I tried hard; G.G. did not defeat me in argument. But unfortu-
nately the inner voice of conscience told me that he was right.

Forgiveness of sins, G.G.—a most human person—went on
to explain, could be attained by those who truly repented. I
need not, indeed I should not worry about my sins; all I had to
do was to repent of them. This did not comfort me in the least.
My reasoning went roughly like this.

First of all, I had by now become quite convinced that I was
finished for good and all. There was no possible chance of my
coming out of the Hospital alive. In fact though not actually
dead, I was as good as dead. For some inscrutable reason,
perhaps because I had committed ”the unforgivable sin” or just
because I was such an appalling sinner, the worst man who had
ever existed, I had been chosen to go alive through the portals of
Hell, in an ordinary English lunatic asylum. Therefore it was
obviously too late for repentance. It was, I knew, quite unsound
theology to imagine that people got another chance after they
were dead. Obviously when they saw what they were in for
they would repent; anybody would. But they would be cast into“

12 MARGERY KEMPE

”Thou shalt be burnt, false Lollard. Here is a cartful of thorns
ready for thee, and a tun to burn thee wit .”

And the creature stood outside the gates of Canterbury, for it
was in the evening, many people wondering at her.

Then said the people:--”Take and burn her!”

She stood still, trembling and quaking full sore in her flesh,
without earthly comfort, and knew not where her husband had
gone.

Then prayed she in her heart to Our Lord in this manner:—-

”Here came 1, Lord, for Thy love. Blessed Lord, help me and
have mercy on me."

And anon, after she had made her prayer in her heart to Our
Lord, there came two fair young men, who said to her:-—

”Damse1, art thou neither heretic nor Lollard?”

And she said:—”No, sirs, I am neither heretic nor Lollard.”

They asked her, where was her inn. She said she knew not
what street; nevertheless it would be at a Dewchman’s house.
Then these two young men brought her home to her hostel, and
made her great cheer, asking her to pray for them, and there she
found her husband.

And many people in N . . . had said evil of her whilst she was
out, and slandered her over many things she was said to have
done whilst she was in the country.

Then, after this, she was in great rest of soul a long while, and
had high contemplation day by day, and much holy speech and
dalliance with Our Lord Jesus Christ, both forenoon and after-
noon with many sweet tears of high devotion, so plenteously
and continually, that it was a marvel that her eyes endured, or
that her heart should last, without being consumed with the
ardour of love, which was kindled with the holy dalliance of
Our Lord, when He said to her many times:—

”Dear daughter, love thou Me with all thy heart, for I love
thee with all My heart and the might of My Godhead, for thou
wert a chosen soul without beginning in My sight and a pillar of
Holy Church. My merciful eyes are even upon thee. It would be
impossible for thee to suffer the scorn and contempt that thou
shalt have, were not My grace supporting thee.”

3!‘ 3|‘ 3|‘

264 IOHN CUSTANCE

outer darkness and the Lord would not bother about them any
more, however much they wept and gnashed their teeth. I
knew what I was in for; I had been before the Bar (Bar——); I
had been told there was no hope of a reprieve; and that was the
end of it.

All this I kept to myself, of course; I did not argue with G.G.
about it. Nor did I tell the doctors. They were not particularly
sympathetic and did not invite confidences; moreover I was
quite astute enough to realise that to talk on these lines would
be regarded as further proof of insanity; I might even be cer-
tified. As long as I was voluntary, there was perhaps just the
faintest chance that I might get out and succeed in making away
with myself.

My wife, who visited me nobly at least twice a week for the
whole eleven months of my confinement, never could under-
stand the logic of this attitude. She was the only person to
whom I dared confide my horrors, and I tried hard to show my
train of reasoning. Roughly it was that I was a sort of opposite of
Jesus Christ. Satan's job had been to catch a man, get him to sell
his soul to him completely and utterly, like Faust, and then take
him down alive into the pit. That was a sort of necessary coun-
terweight to the resurrection of Jesus and the elect. I was the
man. But if I could only kill myself, it might blow up the whole
Universe, but at least I would get out of eternal torture and
achieve the oblivion and nothingness for which my soul craved.
I did in fact make three attempts at suicide, the most serious of
which was when I tore myself from my attendant and threw
myself in front of a car, with my poor wife, who was visiting me,
looking on.

Although my attempts at suicide failed, they had one satisfac-
tory effect; the doctors increased my drugs. As long as I was
able to attain unconsciousness at night (with the aid of three or
four doses of paraldehyde), and to maintain a fairly soporific
state during the day (with anything up to four tablets of allonal),
I could just keep the horrors at bay. My whole conscious effort
was now directed towards the aim of putting off the moment
when I would disappear finally into Hell. I visualised this pro-
cess as happening quite naturally. Some day, at some moment,
the iron control I kept on my terrors would break. I should start

Wisdom, Madness and Folly 265

shrieking in agony. Naturally the attendants would then shut
me up in a side-room, probably in one of the worse wards. After
that the process of torturing a human soul in the living flesh
would just go on. I should shriek, but so do many lunatics;
nobody would do anything for me; they would naturally think
my pains were imaginary. But they would be real pains; anyway
I knew that the philosophical distinction between real and imag-
inary was Very difficult to make. It did not matter much when I
”died” in the body. I might spend days, months, or years
shrieking in my side-room before they buried me. For me, it
would all be the same process of eternal, progressively increas-
ing torture.

Progressively increasing, that was the appalling part of the
picture; It seemed to me as I brooded on the problem, that the
ancient prophets, thinkers and poets, including of course
Dante, must be wrong in regarding Hell, eternal punishment,
as something static. Nothing in the Universe seemed to be
static; why should Hell be so? Nor, in fact, could Heaven be
static either. It was borne in upon me that the creative process
was all one, really. The vast evolutionary process, from the
whirling spiral nebulae to man, superman, God, was a progres-
sive movement forwards, or upwards, if you prefer it. But there
must always be balance, otherwise nothing would work. So the
progressive movement forwards or upwards must be compen-
sated by a regressive movement backwards or downwards.

The progressive revolutionary movement upwards had its
counterpart in the world or worlds outside space and time. This
was ”Heaven”. The regressive movement backwards (I was not
quite clear what it actually was in the physical world, but I knew
it must exist somewhere) had its counterpart in Hell. In Heaven,
the souls of the just, of the ’’elect’’, progressed towards increas-
ing enjoyment, knowledge, power, love, life. In Hell, the souls
of the unjust, Satan's elect—probably an approximately equal
number to those of the just, in order to maintain balance-
regressed down an equally infinite scale first of mental, then of
physical torture. It was a remarkably logical picture, given the
premises; I am sure it would have delighted Calvin to see his
views so scientifically worked out.

About the time I had reached this point in my compulsive

266 JOHN CUSTANCE

train of reasoning, possibly three months or so after my arrival
in the Hospital, I was lying one aftemoon—I can't remember
when; it was after I had begun to get up after breakfast—in the
company of an old patient. As if specially sent by the Powers of
the Universe to confirm my train of thought, he began to recite,
in a monotonous but rhythmic voice:—Opposites, opposites;
down, up; backwards, forwards; clockwise, anti-clockwise;
push, pull; hot, cold; black, white; earth, air; fire, water. I don't
remember exactly how many opposites he mentioned, but that
gives the general idea. Jung, incidentally, regards the ‘oppo-
sites’ as an important part of the Unconscious, and I have often
heard mental patients refer to them in their delusionary or com-
pulsive trains of thought.

Perhaps I might just remark here in parenthesis that gradually
all the associations of my environment came to confirm the
ideas which were being forced upon me. When the wireless
happened to be on, it often seemed to be speaking to me; some-
thing would be said to confirm or increase my fears. This is of
course a common delusion. The fact is that the whole mecha-
nism of ‘association’, to which reference has been made in the
previous chapter, automatically came to work in the same
direction as my thoughts. Every word, almost every letter, of a
newspaper I might chance to look at, would contain some dire
message of evil.

To illustrate this, I will try to put myself back in the condition
of mind I was in at that time, and then take the first suggestive
association that comes to hand. In front of me is a pad of Basil-
don Bond writing-paper, blue. Looking at it with my eyes of
eight years ago I see St Basil damning me (D) ON a blue bond.
Blue stands for Heaven, which is BLasting me (i.e. yoll) Eter-
nally. I hope this makes the associations clear. They are, of
course, typical of certain types of mental disease.

In such a state of mind any normal behaviour becomes vir-
tually impossible. Yet at about this time I began to lead a rather
more normal life, getting up, as I said, after breakfast, playing
croquet, billiards, badminton, and so on. This was partly due to
my wife's persuasive efforts, partly to the efforts of the atten-
dants, and most of all, I think, to the fact that even with the
drugs I was taking I was no longer able to keep myself in a state

Wisdom, Madness and Folly 267

of drowsiness. Bed, alone with my horrors, thus became intoler-
able, and occupation did keep my mind off them for the mo-
ment. Even though my incorrigible mind related everything,
even billiards and croquet, to my terrible predicament, as long
as I could get through the time somehow without losing control
and thus starting my eternal punishment, that was something
gained.

I used to concentrate on getting through the intervals be-
tween my wife's visits and seeing her again. As she left me,
each time, I would tell her that she would not find me there
when she came next time, and as the door shut behind her,
something clanged in my soul and I felt sick to death. But I used
to pull round and concentrate on being there for the next visit.

By this time, say four or five months after my arrival, I had
evolved a definite technique to help me in this effort of getting
through the days and nights. I had frankly admitted my posi-
tion. God had turned I-Iis back on me and left me to Satan, but
perhaps I could persuade Satan to put off the evil day a bit. That
was all I asked for, and it seemed to me I stood a chance of
getting some postponement if I could worship Satan really
properly. So I evolved my own little rituals—they incidentally

have little to do with genuine Satanism, which is obviously

much more closely associated with my manic periods.

Every night I said the Lord's Prayer backwards, letter by let-
ter, smoking three ritual cigarettes as I did so. By that time the
drug I had taken used to begin to work, and I always got to
sleep before I had finished the prayer. Letter by letter, beginning
with NEMA (AMEN), and continuing REVE DNA REVE ROF
(for ever and ever), and so on, the Lord's Prayer is very compli-
cated indeed. It probably takes about twenty minutes, and I
cannot recall that I ever finished. I am sure Mr C. S. Lewis's
Screwtape enjoyed the performance; it must have gratified him
immensely; anyway neither he nor his master seemed to bear
me any ill-will for not finishing.

This superstition was a great help. My mother is very super-
stitious; she has a horror of magpies, thirteen at a table, and so
on. I evolved little superstitions which helped to build up my
self-confidence. One was that if, as I left any room, I fixed my
eyes on something red (Satan's colour), he would manage to get

268 JOHN CUSTANCE

me back to that particular room or place again. I was thus certain
to be preserved from eternal punishment until I went back to
that room. This was the most reassuring of my superstitions,
and I did not abandon it, nor for that matter did I dare to pray
the right way round, till long after I had got back home again.
There were many others; some depending on pure suggestion,
like an idea I had that as long as I had a box of dates, I could be
sure of having a date with my wife. Many were connected with
my games. For example in billards God was represented by the
plain ball and the devil by spot. In no game in which I was
concerned, therefore, could I allow plain to win. As long as spot
won the devil would save me. If spot looked like losing I would
make some excuse and leave the game.

Further details would only be wearisome. I come now to the
central feature of my whole experience. Somehow I want to find
adequate words to describe the dawn of what I may call the
Horrific Vision.

I am not quite sure when it began to break in upon me, but it
was certainly within the first month or so, when I was still in
bed. Thereafter it progressed pari passu with my ideas; it never
left me for an instant.

A crumpled pillow is quite an ordinary everyday object, is it
not? One looks at it and thinks no more about it? So is a
washing-rag, or a towel tumbled on the floor, or the creases on
the side of a bed. Yet they can suggest shapes of the utmost
horror to the mind obsessed by fear. Gradually my eyes began to
distinguish such shapes, until eventually, whichever way I
turned, I could see nothing, but devils waiting to torment me,
devils which seemed infinitely more real than the material ob-
jects in which I saw them.

They had names, too. There was the god Baal, with a cruel
mouth like a slit (a wrinkle in the side of a bed), waiting to
devour me as a living sacrifice. There was Hecate, who used
generally to appear in pillows, her shape was, I think, the most
horrible of all. When I went out I saw devils by the hundred in
trees and bushes, and especially in cut wood, generally in ser-
pent form. Even now, I can still see them on occasion; the trick
of illusion by which they appeared remains with me to some
extent; and now that I am depressed again I cannot help

Wisdom, Madness and Polly 269

wondering if they will reawaken the sense of utter terror that
they did when they first appeared. I thought I had exorcised
them, but now I am not so sure.

With these visions surrounding me it is not strange that the
material world should seem less and less real. I felt myself to be
gradually descending alive into the pit by a sort of metamorpho-
sis of my surroundings. At times the whole universe seemed to
be dissolving about me; moving cracks and fissures would
appear in the walls and floors. This, incidentally, is a phe-
nomenon which I have often noticed in the opposite state of
acute mania, though it has then, of course, a totally different
underlying feeling-tone. The climax of this sense of unreality
was an extraordinary vision which is difficult to classify under
the normal head of ”illusion”, though it was not a hallucination
or apparition either. It seems to me to have interesting philo-
sophical and psychological implications.

There was a series of sporting prints round the walls of the
ward day-room. They were so placed that, if you sat in an
arm-chair with your back to the large windows, and facing the
prints, you could see, reflected in the picture-glass, the build-
ings of N o. 9 ward, on the opposite side of the small lawn on to
which the windows looked out.

I used generally to sit concentrating on a novel—that was
another good way of keeping the horrors at bay—with my back
to the windows; there seemed to be fewer devils in the ward
than there were outside, somehow. Little by little, over a period
of about a month or six weeks probably, the reflection of N o. 9
ward was distorted. The chimneys left the vertical plane and
moved round to the horizontal, eventually to forty or fifty de-
grees below the horizontal, while the reflection of the building
itself became correspondingly curved, until the whole vertical
structure fonned a sort of inverted U. This puzzled me greatly; I
don't think I was horrified at first. What could it mean? My
vision was otherwise quite normal; I could play badminton,
billiards, and so on. But whenever I sat in one of those chairs
and looked at the prints, I could see this strange phenomenon.

Certainly I was bewitched. But that was no new discovery; it
did not frighten me more than I was frightened in any case.

Then, suddenly, the answer came. Bishop Berkeley was right;

270 JOHN CUSTANCE

the whole universe of space and time, of my own senses, was
really an illusion. Or it was so for me, at any rate. There I was,
shut in my own private universe, as it were, with no Contact
with real people at all, only with phantasmagoria who could at
any moment turn into devils. I and all around me were utterly
unreal. There in the reflection lay proof positive. My soul was
finally turned into nothingness—except unending pain.

1955 '~B~
Voices Calling, by Lisa Wiley

Superficially Lisa Wiley’s Voices Calling seems an unremarkable work.
It has no medical or psychiatric introduction. The book caused no
particular controversy, nor was it particularly successful or even re_-
printed. The experience of madness described there is not half so
dramatic as that in Schreber’s account or many others. It is an obscure
psychiatric autobiography, yet Voices Calling is an unusually truthful
and unembellished account—a good antidote to the romanticization
of madness. It is also one of the most detailed self-studies of schizo-
phrenia covering an extended period of time (two decades). It also
renders an unusually clear picture of a slow, insidious onset of
schizophrenia. Finally, the schizophrenic experience detailed here fits
unusually well traditional models of schizophrenia and one recent
biochemical model.1

Lisa Wiley expected early to be an asylum inmate. When she was
three her father became a mental patient. She was raised from that
age to the age of fifteen by an emotionally cold, old-fashioned grand-
mother who often compared Wiley to her mad father. At six she
became, as she described it, ”acutely aware of the terrifying forces in
life,” and instituted rituals to keep those forces under control. She did
things in groups or multiples of four. She would rub or knock on
doors or furniture four, eight, or twelve times. She would look behind
herself or step on a corner of a rug four times.

She often visited her mother who, unfortunately, pressed upon her
an excessively rigid moral code. The young woman developed great
feelings of guilt. Her mother permitted no swearing or slang, and
though Lisa tried to uphold_her mother's demands, slang and obscen-
ities intruded upon her mind. When she was approximately eleven,
she began to have absurd, blasphemous thoughts: ”inwardly I began
calling God a devil and Jesus a prize fighter.” She tried to keep such
thoughts under control, but the harder she tried, the more she be-
came aware of them.

‘Interestingly enough, some of Wiley’s overt behavior, the uncontrollable mutterings
and blasphemies, must have resembled medieval ideas of a typical case of possession;
superficially at least, it also may have resembled a disease known today as Tourette’s
Syndrome (see chapter 2).

271

272 LISA WILEY

In the seventh grade Lisa sensed her own isolation and her differ-
ence from her peers. As if to aggravate that isolation her mother made
her dress in outmoded styles. She did unusually well in school but in
the ninth grade began to have trouble with homework, having to
reread sentences and parts of sentences because she was disturbed by
compulsive, threatening, and blasphemous thoughts. One morning
upon waking she called God ”a damn fool.” Thereafter such thoughts
seemed to come upon her with increased intensity. She felt she hated
God and the words of the Bible; at the same time, she maintained a
mask of docility and conformity to her mother’ s harsh standards of
piety. In high school her thoughts and fantasies began to take on
sexual significance: ‘'1 ascribed to God all the organs of a man and
handled them.” Eventually, these feelings were transformed into ex-
ternal voices and visions that were almost possible to control. She
heard voices instructing her to do certain things and avoid others, and
saw threatening visions of God's face. Even music, previously a
source of comfort, now became a part of her torment: ”The words and
hymns more and more became twisted and turned around and grad-
ually I could not sing anything without wanting to concoct some
swearing or obscene expression.” '

She went away to college, hoping to start a new life and overcome
her problems. Instead, the stresses of college merely intensified
them. At last, on a June day of her junior year, she had a crisis, what
she describes as ”the final crash.” The voices seemed to take over,
telling her to ”turn against God." For five weeks she went through
”just one big mass of hellish, sexual thoughts and inward mutterings
without a break night or day.” She felt her ”will and self-control
snap” and an ”emotional poison took entire possession.” She felt her
brain crack and sputter and hiss; intense pain wracked her body; she
had a feeling of an emotional death spreading through her. She felt
she had committed a profound ”spiritual suicide.”

The sensation of an active mind faded away, and I discovered I was
dead and had no God-consciousness. Although I could still think and
knew what I was doing, my thoughts were lifeless. These thoughts
compared to real thoughts were as a whisper is to a loud voice. I
noticed that I was losing my faculties one by one. When I tried to play
the piano no longer could I look ahead mentally as before. Strange to
say, my fingers just didn't want to move ahead nor could I anticipate
actively what was coming. All feeling seemed to have gone out of my
fingers. Materials all felt the same. The sensitivity of immediate distinc-
tion was not there. Each day I mentioned that I had lost one more
faculty. I told Mother that my soul had gone, and she said one’s soul
didn't leave the body until physical death. Therefore, I declared I must

Voices Calling 273

have a dead soul. It dawned upon me that I had committed a spiritual
suicide, for I had no sense of personality or character.

At twenty-two Lisa Wiley entered a mental hospital. For several
months, during the most acute phase of her madness, she was tor-
mented by voices, visions, confusion; but her continual and most
profound complaint was of an emotional or spiritual death: ”I wasn't
sick, I was dead.” Despite the severity of her experience, and the
prolonged encroachment of /madness, Wiley did get better. In the
hospital she underwent psychotherapy and a program of resocializa-
tion. Gradually, she reentered the outside world, took a job, lived
with her psychiatrist’s family for two years, and returned to school.
She finally cut all ties with the hospital and struck out on her own,
apparently cured.

Wiley herself suggests that certain events and insights taking place
during psychotherapy had an importance in her recovery: she came
to realize that a recurring, threatening vision of God's face was really
a visual memory of her grandmother’ s face. She also suggests that
guilt over masturbation was ”the very core of my trouble," and that
the kind reassurances of her psychiatrist were of great importance. At
another point, Wiley describes her psychiatrist’ s theory about the
self-healing course of her madness: ”He said that it was impossible to
help me until I had broken completely and the emotional area was
deadened and they could get hold of my reason and intelligence.”
But the most striking thing about Wiley’s therapeutic treatment is the
consistent, long-term, stable, supportive, and mutually responsible
relationship with her psychiatrist.

Wfley’s description of her early family life recalls some theoretical
descriptions of the schizophrenogenic family? But perhaps most re-
markable is the young woman’s descriptions of her madness in ways
greatly reminiscent of the early Bleuler and Kraepelin models of
schizophrenia. Though Wiley describes hallucinations, strange be-
havior, unusual thoughts and perceptions, she most particularly
emphasizes that horribly disturbing ”emotiona1 deat ”——which
echoes both Kraepe1in’s description of the ”dementia”'in ”dementia
praecox” and Bleuler’ s description of the ”disturbance of affectivity”
in his concept of schizophrenia.

Other elements in Bleuler's mode1—-”autism" and ”ambiv-
alence"—are quite vividly presented in Voices Calling. There is
also a ”disturbance of association” in the description of Wiley’s dif-

‘See, for instance, Laing, Self and Others.

The Book of Margery Kempe 13

As this creature was in the Apostles’ Church in Rome on Saint
Lateran’s Day, the Father of Heaven said to her:—

”Daughter, I am well pleased with thee, inasmuch as thou
believest in all the Sacraments of Holy Church and in all faith
that belongeth thereto, and especially because thou believest in
the manhood of My Son, and for the great compassion thou
hast for His bitter Passion.”

Also the Father said to this creature:—”Daughter, I will have
thee wedded to My Godhead because I shall shew thee My
secrets and My counsels, for thou shalt live with Me without
end.”

Then the creature kept silence in her soul and answered not
thereto, for she was full sore afraid of the Godhead; and she had
no knowledge of the dalliance of the Godhead, for all her love
and all her affection were set in the manhood of Christ, and
there-of she had knowledge, and she would not for anything be
parted therefrom.

She had so much affection for the manhood of Christ, that
when she saw women in Rome bearing children in their arms, if
she could ascertain that any were men-children, she would then
cry, roar, and weep as if she had seen Christ in His childhood.

And if she might have had her will, oftentimes she would
have taken the children out of their mothers’ anns and have
kissed them in the stead of Christ.

If she saw a seemly man, she had great pain in looking at him,
lest she might have seen Him Who was both God and man.

And therefore she cried many times and often when she saw
a seemly man, and wept and sobbed full sore on the manhood
of Christ, as she went in the streets of Rome, so that they that
saw her wondered full much at her, for they knew not the
cause.

Therefore it was no wonder if she was still and answered not
the Father of Heaven when He told her that she should be
wedded to His Godhead.

Then said the Second Person, Christ Jesus, Whose manhood
she loved so much, to her:——

”What sayest thou, Margery, daughter, to My Father of these
words He spake to thee? Art thou well pleased that it be so?”

274 LISA WILEY

ficulties with homework and piano playing: ”When I tried to play the
piano no longer could I look ahead mentally as before. Strange to say,
my fingers just didn't want to move ahead nor could I anticipate
actively what was coming.” It may be that with her emotional death,
the loss of emotional connection to her life in the present, Wiley also
lost any sense of anticipation—the desire for and emotional connec-
tion to the future. This loss of goal-directed activity can account at
least partly for the disturbance of association described by Bleulerz
perhaps in the same way that Wiley lost her ability to play the piano
because she could not plan ahead, other schizophrenics lose their ability
to plan out logical, sequential sentences and thoughts.3

One recent biochemical theory of schizophrenia, developed by
Larry Stein of Wyeth Laboratories in Philadelphia, particularly
emphasizes the abnormal absence of emotional connection or plea-
sure and the loss of pleasure anticipation or goal-directed activity.4
Stein believes that the loss of emotionality and the resulting loss of
goal-direction can be related to an hereditary enzyme deficiency.
Through a complex biochemical chain the ordinary person continual-
ly produces certain crucial chemicals in the pleasure center of the
brain which enable the normal transmission of nerve impulses. In the
schizophrenic, however, low levels of an essential enzyme cause
inadequate production of crucial neurotransmitters and the subse-
quent production of a toxin. The lack of crucial nerve impulse trans-
mitters combined with the production of a toxin cause a temporary or
permanent demise of a part of the brain associated with pleasure and,
consequently, an ”emotional death” and loss of goal-directed activity.
Stein also believes that one by-product of the abnormal chemical reac-
tion is an hallucinogen, thus accounting for some of the perceptual
changes associated with schizophrenia.

In the following excerpt from Voices Calling, Wiley describes the
final crisis which brought about her emotional ”death” and subse-
quent hospitalization.

MONDAY MORNING was a beautiful day—roses, peonies, sun-
shine and the chirping of birds—a lovely day for Commence-
ment. Young men and women one year ahead of me in college

3See Appendix II.
“Stein, ”Neurochemistry of Reward and Punishment," pp. 345-61.

Voices Calling 275

were to go out into a new world———some on to further schooling
and some were anticipating the joys of marriage. A day of days
when all seemed exceedingly happy!

I drew in the aroma from the roses and peonies, just as if the
fragrance would disappear and not be so lovely next year. Sud-
denly I heard a strange and uncanny voice say, ”You’ll never get
the wonderful delight from roses and peonies again.”

What was the meaning of this? What was the omen? It left me
with a Very depressed and empty feeling. Never before had I
experienced such a wierd and strange sensation, and it haunted
me as I trudged over to the college to practice with the choir
before the service.

At Baccalaureate the previous day I had sung especially sin-
cerely, ”Create in me a clean heart, 0 God, and renew a right
spirit within me.” I had a desperate feeling of wanting to hang
on and be helped, but didn't know why the need for help
seemed so urgent.

After the Commencement exercises I registered for two sum-
mer school courses in English—two that I could not have hated
worse—poetry and Shakespeare. Though I hated the very
thought of these courses, I needed the credit as so much of my
time during the year had been spent on music and I wanted to
take still more music in the fall.

About the middle of the afternoon I lay down to rest a while,
but just before touching the bed something seemed to rush
through me saying, ”Go ahead, it's O.K. Do it this summer,”
meaning it was an opportune time to turn against God. Another
very tender voice seemed to answer, ”Don’t, you'll wish you
hadn’t.” I obeyed the first voice and lay down on the bed,
starting the worst siege of blasphemy inwardly anyone could
imagine.

This time I turned against the whole Trinity with all the vehe-
mence and hate I could bring forth and with especial emphasis
on the third part. I was going to get this dreadful urge over once
and for all. All my life though I had called Jesus and God
strange things, I had been able to refrain from attacking the
Holy Ghost. I had read how bad it would be to do that, and
knowing my weakness, had felt I would certainly yield to the
urge someday. My greatest fear from the age of fourteen years

276 LISA WILEY

was that someday I might attack the Holy Ghost sexually.
Though I had tried to make myself like songs about the Holy
Ghost, I felt the Holy Ghost hated me and would never save
me. I couldn't stand even to see the name without trembling
from head to foot. If only that terrifying power didn't have to
be. Not being able to develop proper appreciation for God's
greatest gift to mankind and because I was afraid I might some-
day attack this power, every year I planned activities that would
keep my mind off the Holy Ghost. I covered up the name and
gritted my teeth every time I saw it to keep from doing any-
thing. But seven years of such strain had sapped my will and
energy to the point I finally felt I'd have to let it come. I was
bound and determined to get everything out of my system and
have it over with.

There was no rhyme or reason to any of my willful concoc-
tions, nor was there any established order or series as before. It
was just one big mass of hellish, sexual thoughts and inward
mutterings without a break night or day for five solid weeks. No
longer was I making any effort to stop. Previously my thoughts
were just thoughts without consciously made mental pictures.
The mental pictures that had been present had always forced
their way through the unconscious and I had tried to hold them
back. Now I consciously made up all the screwy pictures imag-
inable. Rain always made me think of urination. I made a man
out of God and spit on Him, kicked Him and beat Him. It was a
joy to see Him fall back helpless as I beat Him, and I laughed
and hissed inwardly. I attached the name of the Spirit to every-
thing imaginable, vile and otherwise, eggs, apples, even to
square roots in Geometry problems. Thoughts and pictures
seemed to be forming at the rate of a million a minute, mostly of
excretory functions and of the nose, too. I knew I was guilty but
was unable to care. I knew I was actually to blame and was
doing all this very willfully. With these thoughts was a voice
that seemed to say, ”It’s your own fault this time.”

The first week of the siege was something similar to that of
seven years earlier. I was not greatly concerned. The only differ-
ence at first was that I actually went at it as if I were making of it
sort of a project like one country starting to invade another. But
by the end of the week things were beginning to happen. I had

Voices Calling 277

expected a depressed feeling but not the particular kind that
was taking place. It seemed serious enough that I felt I had
better say something to my sister about it. I had her go walking
with me on Sunday afternoon and told her how I was going
through what I had seven years earlier. I didn't tell her exactly
what it was, but asked her to pray for me and asked her
whether or not she felt I should tell Mother.

This was all very new and strange to Beth, so I didn't say
much. I had just more or less wanted consent to be able to go
ahead with my ”project” anyhow. Two days later I felt I'd better
tell Mother—sort of feel her out so she wouldn't be too shocked.
I approached her in quite a childish fashion, so it wouldn't
upset her, and I received a rather silent consent to continue.
Mother was very nice and sweet to me for a while. I didn't tell
her enough to let her know what was going on, but just enough
to get some sympathy, so I cannot exactly blame her for all that
followed.

I told Beth and Mother that I always felt this way when I took
English courses. To myself I felt that because I was having to
take the hated Shakespeare, my behavior was somewhat jus-
tified. How could I be expected to control myself at such times?
When summer school would be over perhaps I could get control
over myself again. Little did I know that the psychic bell was
tolling for me.

The greatest difference between this siege and that of former
years was that now I was suffering intense physical pain. At the
age of fourteen the worry and mental agony were terrible and I
felt weak and depressed, but there was no headache or pain
other than that which came from crying. But during the summer

of 1937 I suffered the worst physical pain, in addition to mental .

torment, that anyone could possibly endure. The pain at first
was not severe, but by the end of the second week so great was
it that I had to go to a doctor, and he gave me some medicine to
calm my nerves and make me sleep. Because of the bombard-
ment of thoughts all night, too, I could sleep only a few hours.

The visit to the local physician did no good because I wasn't
intending to cooperate with anyone. The reason I went to him
was that I didn't like the bad headaches. However, he tried to
help me and asked about my thoughts. When I told him I was

278 LISA WILEY

calling God names, he wondered what my attitudes toward
God were and what I actually thought about heaven. He tried to
straighten out my thinking, but after a few interviews he could
see that it was impossible to reason with me. After all, I was as
versed in theology as I cared to be, and wasn't seeking further
information. What surprised me was that he didn't interpret the
Bible literally, nor did Mother, to tell you the truth. Although I
was pitting my very soul against God, still I stuck up for the
truth of the whole Bible from cover to cover.

I was too acutely ill to cooperate, though I did not think of my
behavior as illness. Just as an appendix bursts and sends poison
through the whole system, so did my will and self-control snap
and the emotional poison took entire possession of me.
Although I knew exactly what I was doing and saying and can
remember to this very day, still my ordinary personality had
temporarily been side—tracked and I had no command of the
situation. I was a person with a great deal of energy and when I
made up my mind to do anything, I did it regardless of the
consequences. As long as I could be assured that I'd come out
O.K. I felt it was all right to continue with my evil thoughts and
mutterings.

I kept asking Mother to pray for me and told her to ask God if
it was all right to do it and asked her if He would think of me as
a child or as just crazy, and she said He would. Then I told her
that she was just making that up, for God didn't really say
anything to her. Also I asked her if she thought I'd better de-
scribe for her the type of things I was thinking so that she would
know, and she said that she didn't think I needed to for she had
always had a pure undefiled mind and didn't want it to be
spoiled by what I would say.

The front that I was putting up concealed the real truth even
from the doctor. All that I said was true but I didn't say enough.
I wasn't willing to say what I was thinking about God, but did
say that I was thinking bad things. He asked about some of my
sex habits, but I quickly passed that by so he didn't go into that
deeper. He told Mother that possibly I would have to go to a
hospital, but she would not consent to that as my father already
had been taken from her, and thus he did not push the matter.

Every day brought more physical suffering and mental tor-

Voices Calling 279

ment. My brain cracked and sputtered and hissed as never be-
fore, and it seemed that my mind was caving in just as a brick
building would crumble and faH. Severe pain shot through my
entire body. One evening while mowing the lawn, it seemed
that my brain cracked right through the middle and divided into
two sections. I could hardly stand it. I thought I was slowly
dying. In fact one night about two or three o'clock in the mom-
ing I went into Mother’ s room and told her I was dying, for
there was a strange jumping around my heart. Even before I
went to a doctor, the physical change that I noticed decidedly
was that intense darkness was setting in at the back of my head.
This darkness enclosed my entire mind very slowly but com-
pletely in a period of about two and one-half weeks. The light of
life had gone. When this darkness began to creep in, a feeling of
deadness came over me, for I found I was losing emotion little
by little. The first time I saw the doctor I told him I felt sort of
dead in the upper part of my body, ”dead” in a sense that I had
little emotional sensation, but of course he thought I just
imagined that. However, the feeling of pulsing, vibrant life had
gone.

Every time I would inwardly say something bad about the
Spirit, it seemed that a fierce dart would shoot through me and
life gurgled out of me like water gurgles out of the narrow neck
of a bottle when you hold it upside down. Sometimes it oozed
out. Each of these ”ka thuds” left me empty, and I was emo-
tionally dying inch by inch until by the end of five weeks I had
no feeling at all.

While my brain was cracking and sputtering I noticed that no
longer did I have a strong consciousness and subconsciousness.
The partition had broken down and it was all one. The sensa-
tion of an active mind faded away, and I discovered I was dead
and had no God-consciousness. Although I could still think and
knew what I was doing, my thoughts were lifeless. These
thoughts compared to real thoughts were as a whisper is to a
loud voice. I noticed that I was losing my faculties one by one.
When I tried to play the piano no longer could I look ahead
mentally as before. Strange to say, my fingers just didn't want to
move ahead nor could I anticipate actively what was coming.
All feeling seemed to have gone out of my fingers. Materials all

280 LISA WILEY

felt the same. The sensitivity of immediate distinction was not
there. Each day I mentioned that I had lost one more faculty. I
told Mother that my soul had gone, and she said one’s soul
didn't leave the body until physical death. Therefore, I declared
I must have a dead soul. It dawned upon me that I had commit-
ted a spiritual suicide, for I had absolutely no sense of personal-
ity or character.

While all this was going on I continued in school. At the end
of two weeks I wanted to quit, but Mother thought I should
continue for it would give me something to occupy my mind.
When I told her I had always called Jesus names when I read,
she thought that was very silly. My aunt helped me with the
lessons this time so I wouldn't have to do the actual reading, but
even this did not help for the battle was on and I had lost all
ability to control my thoughts at any time.

In the English classes I paid very little attention and my mean
thoughts registered all over my face. I looked like the most
dejected of earthly creatures. I'll never understand how the pro-
fessor put up with me and why he didn't suggest that I leave.
But not a word was said. He just let me sit there and make faces
when some terrible sex thought passed through my thinking. I
began telling people in the classes about how awful I was and
what freaky things were taking place. I told them I was doing
something that couldn't be forgiven, that I was always afraid I
would do it and now I really was.

Lady Macbeth’s hands were lily white compared to mine. She
had murdered only a man. I was beating up and attacking sex-
ually the whole Trinity. Not even if 10,000,000 people got down
on their knees and begged God to forgive and restore life for me
would He do it—not even if every person in the United States-
not even all the people in the whole world! God would never
again have anything more to do with me. I had ”murdered
sleep” forever.

No one sensed what was going on and no one did anything
about it. I was slipping right through humanity before their very
eyes. And God was protecting everyone from the knowledge of
what was happening to me.

Trees and everything went around in circles while my mind
was sputtering and trying to adjust to the darkness that was

Voices Calling 281

closing in. No longer did I have the feeling of attachment to
Nature as before, and my sense of perspective seemed to have
departed. I could see everything and saw it as it was, but it was
all a dead, lifeless mass. I was dead mentally, having no con-
science of anything and having no emotion. I could still think
and apparently reason but it was all silent thoughts.  

Even in respect to time I was dead. There was no future and
no past. Everything was just an endless black nothingness. Ex-
cept for the physical pain that had not gone away yet, I was not
suffering actually. The only quiet agony came when I thought
back to the time when I was alive. I could still remember that I
once did have feelings and that it once was light, but the farther
away I went the harder it was to remember, until finally I lost all
sensation that there ever had been light and life. After I lost all
feeling (emotional drive) I quit calling God names, for there was
no urge. It was over!!! Just a few days before I finished, it
seemed something said ”Etemal darkness” and then for days I
was tantalized by the thought that I didn't have to do all that. I
could have stopped if I had wanted to.

The acute siege during which time the actual battle took place
and also the physical changes lasted somewhat over five weeks.
This period was followed by a continuation of the intense
physical pain. The last of the pain didn't go away until the
middle of August.

After the summer session at college, I went to a church camp
at a lake for a week in July. I didn't see any point in going for I
knew it was useless, but I wanted to please Mother, so I went.
She felt I'd get a new vision. Although I had told her all that was
taking place, she figured that it was my imagination, as did the
doctor, and although worried she wasn't greatly concerned. She
was blind to all that was happening and had happened because
her firm faith in God made her believe that her children would
be protected from any very serious trouble, inasmuch as she
had always been a faithful servant to the Lord.

What a week was ahead! The classes and lectures meant noth-
ing, but I did take notes religiously so that my folks at least
would benefit from my going. The young folks there treated me
kindly, but it was very evident to them that I was not well. I had
told Mother I would try to control myself and not talk, but I

282 LISA WILEY

couldn't. I talked to every person I could about what had taken
place. I was batting around in a sea of inner darkness without
an ounce of emotional motivations, and the pain in my head
was so great I thought I might be dead physically any day. I
could not sleep well at night on account of the pain and really
felt like telling my minister to tell Mother that I would be dead
soon. The pain in my head was not like an ordinary headache,
for normally I was not subject to headaches, and the actual
sensation of mental torture was over for I had no feeling. This
excruciating pain was what remained after the crackling and
sputtering ceased—after all these other physical changes had
taken place.

Some of the counselors in the group took an interest in me
and were greatly concerned. Mrs. Clark, unlike some of the
others, was not telling me to keep still, but seemed keenly in-
terested and wanted to know more and really help me. The first
day she met me she didn't think things were serious, but the
more I told her the more she realized that it was not theology
alone that was bothering me. My whole outlook was warped in
more ways than one.

The pain was so great and nothing was being accomplished
by being at camp as far as acquiring this spiritual revelation that
Mother thought I was going to get was concerned, so I began to
contemplate physical suicide. I didn't wish to return to Mother
in the same condition as I left. But I was afraid to commit
suicide, for I didn't want to see God any sooner than absolutely
necessary. So I didn't know what to do. When I told Mrs. Clark I
didn't want to go home, she told me maybe I could find work
somewhere away from home. I hadn't thought of that. Well,
time passed and we didn't say more about that. However, she
did say that she knew someone who could help me and she
would talk to this person when she got back home.

Just before leaving the camp I told Mrs. Clark not to worry
about me or try to find help for it wouldn't do much good. But
her parting words to me were that she'd find a way out. A few
weeks later she came to my home and asked me to go home
with her for a few days.

Mrs. Clark had made an appointment for me with a psychia-
trist. During the time that had elapsed after coming home from

Voices Calling 283

camp I had begun asking God to perform a miracle and give my
feelings back to me and the light. I had enough sense to know
such a thing couldn't happen so kidded myself into thinking
God could do it while I was asleep. I spent most of the day
sleeping and waiting for a miracle to take place. I thought
maybe this psychiatrist had a miraculous something or other
that could help. Mrs. Clark said she thought he could. However,
she didn't know what I was after.

The interview with the psychiatrist was very disappointing,
for I knew more than he did—so I thought. It was very brief. I
told him what I had done and about the voices that I thought I
heard at the first of the summer and that there was no hope for
me. I told him I had been dead for a good many weeks. He
didn't take me Very seriously for he was used to people telling
him all kinds of things like that. Mrs. Clark, too, was a bit
disappointed, for she thought the doctor would say something
that would give me a ray of hope—but I knew no such thing
could be. After all, a psychiatrist was just a human being and
wasn't endowed with divine power to perform miracles. What
was gone was gone and could not be brought back.

When I went home I didn't tell Mother about the interview,
for she wouldn't have permitted me to go to such a place.
However, a few days later a letter came from this hospital saying
that the doctors felt I needed a period of hospitalization to get
over my nervous conditions, and Mother would have to go
through some red tape to get me in. Mother was Very cross at
me. She said, ”See what you've done.” It disgraced her terribly.
I told her that it was too late now; she should have thought
about that earlier. She should have made me stop being such a
devil earlier in the summer.

CONTEMPORARY COMMUNITY HEALTH SERIES

14 MARGERY KEMPE

And then she would not answer the Second Person, but wept
wondrous more, desiring to have still Himself and in no wise to
be parted from Him. Then the Second Person in the Trinity
answered to His Father for her, and said:—

”Father, hold her excused, for she is yet but young, and not
fully learned how she should answer.”

And then the Father took her by the hand, (ghostly) in her
soul, before the Son and the Holy Ghost; and the Mother of
Jesus and all the twelve Apostles and Saint Katherine and Saint
Margaret and many other saints and holy virgins with a great
multitude of angels, saying to her soul:—

”I take thee, Margery, for My wedded wife, for fairer, for
fouler, for richer, for poorer, so that thou be kindly and gentle to
do as I bid thee. For, daughter, there was never a child so gra-
cious to its mother as I shall be to thee, both in weel and in woe,
to help thee and comfort thee. And thereto I make thee surety.”

Then the Mother of God, and all the saints that were present
in her soul, prayed that they might have much joy together.
And then the creature with high devotion with great plenty of
tears, thanked God for His ghostly comfort, holding herself, in
her own feeling, right unworthy to any such grace as she felt,
for she felt many great comforts, both ghostly comforts and
bodily ones. Sometimes she felt sweet smells with her nose.
They were sweeter, she thought, than ever was any sweet
earthly thing that she smelt before, for could she ever tell how
sweet they were, for she thought she might have lived thereby,
if they had lasted.

Sometimes she heard with her bodily ears such sounds and
melodies that she could not well hear what a man said to her at
that time, unless he spoke the louder. These sounds and melo-
dies had she heard nearly every day for the term of twenty-five
years, when this book was written, and especially when she
was in devout prayer, and also many times while she was at
Rome and in England both.

She saw with her bodily eyes many white things flying all
about her on every side, as thick, in a manner, as specks in a
sunbeam. They were right subtle and comfortable, and the
brighter the sun shone, the better might she see them. She saw
them many divers times and in many divers places, both in

1964*?»

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden,
by Joanne Greenberg

Joanne Greenberg’s immensely popular novel, I Never Promised You A
Rose Garden, was first published in 1964 under the pseudonym,
Hannah Green. It is the story of an adolescent girl, Deborah Blau, who
is hospitalized for something called ”schizophrenia.” She is finally
cured through the love and therapy of her physician, Dr. Fried.
Although much of the novel's popularity has arisen from the presump-
tion that Rose Garden is a first—hand account of madness based upon
autobiographical experience, I believed the opposite, that Rose Garden
was simply a well-wrought piece of fiction, based upon historical re-
search, written by a professional novelist.

In fact the basic plot of Rose Garden appears in the writings of the
well—known psychoanalyst, Dr. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. In her
essay, ”Psychotherapy of Schizophrenia,” Fromm-Reichmann tells
the story of a young schizophrenic patient of hers, who had been
”living for eleven years in an imaginary kingdom which she popu-
lated by people of her own making and by the spiritual representa-
tions of others whom she actually knew. They all shared a language,
literature, and religion of her own creation.” In a parallel fashion the
main symptom of Deborah's schizophrenia in Rose Garden is her with-
drawal into a fantasy world, the Kingdom of Yr, which is peopled
with beautiful, powerful, sometimes threatening gods, who speak to
her in a special language called Yri. In the essay Fromm-Reichmann
says that her patient suffered from a compulsion to burn her skin
with matches and lighted cigarettes. In the novel the same happens
with Deborah Blau. Fromm-Reichmann warned her patient against
”expecting life to become a garden of roses after her recovery.” Coin-
cidentally, Deborah's therapist, Dr. Fried, similarly insists: ”I never
promised you a rose garden.“

Further, Deborah Blau’s schizophrenia closely resembles Fromm-
Reichmann’s theoretical concepts. Fromm-Reichmann believes that
schizophrenia may be caused by unsatisfying or traumatic rela-
tionships with parents experienced as an infant. Normal infants go

‘See Bullard, Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, pp. 204-07.
284

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden 285

through alterations of euphoria and low-level anxiety according to
variations in the relationships with the parent-figures around them.
Normally the parents have a love relationship with the infant that gives
him messages of an acceptance of his essential ”self,” his individual
being. In the pre-schizophrenic infant, however, there is a warp in the
relationship; the parents do not love or accept the infant in some
essential way, and the infant experiences that lack with massive anxi-
ety. This failure in the primary parent-infant relationship produces a
weak, flawed sense of self in the growing child. The child becomes
abnormally sensitive, unresilient, incapable of handling the ordinary
vicissitudes and rebuffs of everyday relationships with people. The
original warp of the primary infant/parent relationship repeats itself in
later relationships——and to such a painful, anxiety-producing degree
that at last the person retreats into a schizophrenic break. The break
can be marked by such experiences as hallucinations and delusions,
but it l;unctions primarily as a withdrawal from the too painful real
world.

Deborah's schizophrenia fits that theoretical pattern very well. It is
made clear that her relationship with her parents was in some way
flawed. ”How did we share in the thing? What awful things did we
do?” her mother asks. But the cause of the original warp is too deeply
buried and never fully brought to light. However, as Deborah grows,
she remains abnormally sensitive to the problems of growing up-
jealousy of a sister, lack of friends, lies by adults, an operation. Three
different summers her parents send her to a camp which turns out to
be anti-Semitic. Deborah is Jewish. She begins to enter a fantasy
world, the seductive Kingdom of Yr: ”Its gods were laughing, golden
personages whom she could wander away to meet, like guardian
spirits.” This withdrawal into fantasy is so necessary for Deborah that
she finds she cannot do without it. What originally began as some-
thing akin to a normal childhood fantasy becomes filled with such
emotional energy that it becomes more real than the real world: it
takes over and Deborah becomes ”schizophrenic."

Eugen Bleuler felt that there were four central symptoms of schizo-
phrenia: disturbance in association, disturbance in affectivity, au-
tism, and ambivalence. But Fromm-Reichmann believes that autistic

2See Bullard, ibid., and Fromm-Reichmann, Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy.
Fromm-Reichmann can be considered an ”interpersonalist,” following and elaborating
upon the teachings of Homey and Sullivan.

286 JOANNE GREENBERG

withdrawal into a fantasy world is really the core symptom and that
the other symptoms can be explained in terms of that withdrawal.
The disturbance in association, for instance, may be the result of
regression to an earlier magical level of thought which does not test
reality and therefore primarily serves to reinforce the withdrawal into
fantasy. The Verbal productions of that disturbance in association,
”schizophrenic speech,” can function as verbal evasive action, de-
signed to throw about a protective screen of confused, thwarted com-
munication between the schizophrenic and the outside world.

This is all certainly true of the picture of Deborah's schizophrenia.
Her central symptom is that self-protective withdrawal into the autis-
tic world of Yr. Her attacks of ”schizophrenic thought” are seen as
sudden dissolvings of previously learned reality-testing concepts, to
enable withdrawal into magical thought and fantasy: ”A1l direction
became a lie. The laws of physics and solid matter were repealed and
the experience of a lifetime of tactile sensation, motion, form, gravity,
and light were invalidated.” Her schizophrenic speech—the use of
the Yri language—is also seen as a protective withdrawal: ”English is
for the world—for getting disappointed by and getting hated in.”

In Fromm-Reichmann’s theory the function of the therapist is sim-
ply to reverse the process of the schizophrenia, to break through that
protective withdrawal and to provide the schizophrenic with what he
or she most longs for but is most afraid of: a relationship with another
human being. Freud had assumed that psychoanalysis could not
reach mad people because they were supposedly regressed to a nar-
cissistic state and were incapable of forming relationships with other

people, including the psychoanalyst. But Fromm-Reichmann insists,

that schizophrenics are capable of, and desperately need rela-
tionships with others and that it is a primary goal of the therapist to
form—slowly, with sensitivity, consistency, honesty, and direct-
ness—a relationship with the patient, to be ”a bridge over which he
might possibly be led from the utter loneliness of his own world to
reality and human warmth.”3 And with Deborah and Dr. Fried, ex-
actly that form of therapy is pursued. Insight is sought—and finally
achieved-—but the real therapeutic battle of the book is an emotional
one which ends with Dr. Fried’s success at forming a secure rela-
tionship with Deborah.

Joanne Greenberg has written three novels other than Rose Garden

3Ibid., p. 119.

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden 287

which may have in common some similar approach. One is a histori-
cal novel about love and anti-Semitic persecution in medieval England;
another is a novel about two deaf people; and the third is about a
social worker and his clients. What all three appear to have in com-
mon is the historical approach to creating fiction. At least in the novel
of medieval England, Greenberg might have begun with a small core
of historical data which she embellished and dramatized. It seems
likely that the other two novels began in the same way. One certainly
looks as if it had its origin in the case histories of a social worker.

Knowing something of Greenberg’s habits as a novelist and know-
ing that a case history by Fromm-Reichmann almost exactly parallels
Rose Garden, I originally assumed that I Never Promised You a Rose
Garden was simply a skillfully written historical novel based upon
research into the writings of Fromm-Reichmann. So many people
have assumed for so long that Rose Garden is an authentically auto-
biographical account, however, that I felt compelled to pursue my
suspicions further. I wrote a letter to Joanne Greenberg, in care of the
publisher, asking about the origins of the book; I received a response
from the author’ s literary agent telling me politely that it was none of
my business. I wrote a similar letter directly to the publisher; they
suggested I write the author. I wrote letters to two physicians who
had been associated with Fromm-Reichmann while she treated her
”rose garden” patient, asking if Greenberg had been that patient;
both declined to answer my question. I interviewed another physi-
cian who knew Fromm-Reichmann well; he did not know the pa-
tient’s identity. I composed a second letter to Greenberg, carefully
worded, asking once again if the book was autobiographical. Shortly
thereafter I received an unsigned note, informing me in cryptic and
rather circuitous terms that the book was indeed based upon autobio-
graphical material. This response so upset my expectations that I wrote
Greenberg again asking very directly if she had been Fromm-
Reichmann’s rose garden patient, br if the book was autobiographical in
a more general sense. I received a note from her with a phone number,
asking me to call. I did and almost immediately it became clear that she
had indeed been Fromm-Reichmann’s ”rose garden” patient.

Nonetheless, we should keep in mind that well over a decade
passed between the original experience and the telling of it. We
might notice, also, how different Deborah's schizophrenia is from
many other subjective accounts of madness which might be called
”schizophrenia.” Her hallucinatory experience of the Kingdom of Yr

288 JOANNE GREENBERG

is remarkably coherent and stable, radically different from the wild
hallucinations of Mark Vonnegut (1975) or the ever-changing posses-
sion of E. Thelmar (1909).

I have selected the first chapter and part of the second to reproduce
here because all the dramatic elements of the book are immediately
introduced and juxtaposed in these first pages: the failed parents, the
great and humane physician, the flawed child, and the enticing world
she has made for herself. The movement of the book consists in the
struggle and resolution of these four elements. In these first few
pages we can get a good sense of Greenberg’s portrayal of Deborah's
inner experience of madness. It involves a profound fragmentation of
the material world and an entry into an amazingly coherent fantasy
world.

 

THEY RODE THROUGH the lush farm country in the middle of
autumn, through quaint old towns whose streets showed the
brilliant colors of turning trees. They said little. Of the three, the
father was most visibly strained. Now and then he would place
bits of talk into the long silences, random and inopportune
things with which he himself seemed to have no patience. Once
he demanded of the girl whose face he had caught in the rear-
View mirror: ”You know, don't you, that I was a fool when I
married—a damn young fool who didn't know about bringing
up chfldren—about being a father?” His defense was half
attack, but the girl responded to neither. The mother suggested
that they stop for coffee. This was really like a pleasure trip, she
said, in the fall of the year with their lovely young daughter and
such beautiful country to see.

They found a roadside diner and turned in. The girl got out
quickly and walked toward the rest rooms behind the building.
As she walked the heads of the two parents turned quickly to
look after her. Then the father said, ”It’s all right.”

”Should we wait here or go in?” the mother asked aloud, but
to herself. She was the more analytical of the two, planning
effects in advance—how to act and what to say—and her hus-
band let himself be guided by her because it was easy and she
was usually right. Now, feeling confused and lonely, he let her

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden 289

talk on—planning and figuring—because it was her way of
taking comfort. It was easier for him to be silent.

’’If we stay in the car,” she was saying, ”we can be with her if
she needs us. Maybe if she comes out and doesn't see us . . .
But then it should look as if we trust her. She must feel that we
trust her. . . .”

They decided to go into the diner, being very careful and
obviously usual about their movements. When they had seated
themselves in a booth by the windows, they could see her com-
ing back around the comer of the building and moving toward
them; they tried to look at her as if she were a stranger, someone
else’s daughter to whom they had only now been introduced, a
Deborah not their own. They studied the graceless adolescent
body and found it good, the face intelligent and alive, but the
expression somehow too young for sixteen.

They were used to a certain bitter precocity in their child, but
they could not see it now in the familiar face that they were
trying to convince themselves they could estrange. The father
kept thinking: How could strangers be right? She's ours . . . all
her life. They don't know her. It's a rnistake—a mistake!

The mother was watching herself watching her daughter.
”On my surface . . . there must be no sign showing, no seam——
a perfect surface.” And she smiled.

In the evening they stopped at a small city and ate at its best
restaurant, in a spirit of rebellion and adventure because they
were not dressed for it. After dinner, they went to a movie.
Deborah seemed delighted with the evening. They joked
through dinner and the movie, and afterward, heading out
farther into the country darkness, they talked about other trips,
congratulating one another on their recollection of the little
funny details of past vacations. When they stopped at a motel to
sleep, Deborah was given a room to herself, another special
privilege for which no one knew, not even the parents who
loved her, how great was the need.

When they were sitting together in their room, Jacob and
Esther Blau looked at each other from behind their faces, and
wondered why the poses did not fall away, now that they were
alone, so that they might breathe out, relax, and find some

290 JOANNE GREENBERG

peace with each other. In the next room, a thin wall away, they
could hear their daughter undressing for bed. They did not
admit to each other, even with their eyes, that all night they
would be guarding against a sound other than her breathing in
sleep—a sound that might mean . . . danger. Only once, before
they lay down for their dark watch, did Jacob break from behind
his face and whisper hard in his wife's ear, ”Why are we send-
ing her away?”

”The doctors say she has to go,” Esther whispered back, lying
rigid and looking toward the silent wall.

”The doctors.” Jacob had never wanted to put them all
through the experience, even from the beginning.

”It’s a good place,” she said, a little louder because she
wanted to make it so.

”They call it a mental hospital, but it's a place, Es, a place
where they put people away. How can it be a good place for a
girl—almost a child!”

”Oh, God, Jacob," she said, ”how much did it take out of us
to make the decision? If we can't trust the doctors, who can we
ask or trust? Dr. Lister says that it's the only help she can get
now. We have to try it!” Stubbornly she turned her head again,
toward the wall.

He was silent, conceding to her once more; she was so much
quicker with words than he. They said good night; each pre-
tended to sleep, and lay, breathing deeply to delude the other,
eyes aching through the darkness, watching.

On the other side of the wall Deborah stretched to sleep. The
Kingdom of Yr had a kind of neutral place which was called the
Fourth Level. It was achieved only by accident and could not be
reached by formula or an act of will. At the Fourth Level there
was no emotion to endure, no past or future to grind against.
There was no memory or possession of any self, nothing except
dead facts which came unbidden when she needed them and
which had no feeling attached to them.

Now, in bed, achieving the Fourth Level, a future was of no
concern to her. The people in the next room were supposedly
her parents. Very well. But that was part of a shadowy world
that was dissolving and now she was being flung unencum-

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden 291

bered into a new one in which she had not the slightest concern.
In moving from the old world, she was moving also from the
intricacies of Yr’s Kingdom, from the Collect of Others, the Cen-
sor, and the Yri gods. She rolled over and slept a deep, dream-
less, and restful sleep.

In the morning, the family started on its trip again. It occurred
to Deborah, as the car pulled away from the motel and out into
the sunny day, that the trip might last forever and that the cahn
and marvelous freedom she felt might be a new gift from the
usually too demanding gods and offices of Yr.

After a few hours of riding through more brown and golden
country and sun-dappled town streets, the mother said,
”Where is the turn-off, Jacob?”

In Yr a voice shrieked out of the deep Pit: Innocent! Innocent!

From freedom, Deborah Blau smashed headlong into the col-
lision of the two worlds. As always before it was a weirdly silent
shattering. In the world where she was most alive, the sun split
in the sky, the earth erupted, her body was torn to pieces, her
teeth and bones crazed and broken to fragments. In the other
place, where the ghosts and shadows lived, a car turned into a
side drive and down a road to where an old red-brick building
stood. It was Victorian, a little run-down, and surrounded by
trees. Very good facade for a madhouse. When the car stopped
in front of it, she was still stunned with the collision, and it was
hard to get out of the car and walk properly up the steps and
into the building where the doctors would be. There were bars
on all the windows. Deborah smiled slightly. It was fitting.
Good.

When Jacob Blau saw the bars, he paled. In the fact of this, it
was no longer possible to say to himself ”rest home” or ”con-
valescent care.” The truth was as bare and cold for him as the
iron. Esther tried to reach him with her mind: We should have
expected them. Why should we be so surprised?

They waited, Esther Blau trying still to be gay now and then.
Except for the barred windows the room was like an ordinary
waiting room and she joked about the age of the magazines
there. From a distance down the hall they heard the grate of a

292 JOANNE GREENBERG

large key in a lock and again Jacob stiffened, moaning softly,
”Not for her—our little Debby. . . .” He did not see the sudden,
ruthless look in his daughter’ s face. i

The doctor walked down the hall, and steeled himself a little
before entering the room. He was a squared-off, blunt-bodied
man and now he dived into the room where their anguish
seemed to hang palpably. It was an old building, a frightening
place to come to, he knew. He would try to get the girl away
soon and the parents comforted enough to leave her, feeling
that they had done the right thing.

Sometimes in this room, at the last minute, the parents, hus-
bands, wives, turned with loathing from the truth of the awful,
frightening sickness. Sometimes they took their strange-eyed
ones away again. It was fear, or bad judgment well meant
enough, or—his eyes appraised the two parents again—that
straying grain of jealousy and anger that would not let the long
line of misery be severed a generation beyond their own. He
tried to be compassionate but not foolish, and soon he was able
to send for a nurse to take the girl to the wards. She looked like
a shock victim. As she left, he felt the wrench of her going in the
two parents.

He promised them that they could say good-by to her before
they left, and surrendered them to the secretary with her pad of
information to be gotten. When he saw them again, leaving
after their good-by, they, too, looked like people in shock, and
he thought briefly: wound-shock—the cutting-away of a daughter.

Jacob Blau was not a man who studied himself, or who looked
back over his life to weigh and measure its shape. At times, he
suspected his wife of being voracious, picking over her passions
again and again with endless words and words. But part of this
feeling was envy. He, too, loved his daughters, though he had
never told them so; he, too, had wished confidences, but was
never able to open his own heart; and, because of this, they had
also been kept from venturing their secrets. His oldest daughter
had just parted from him, almost eagerly, in that grim place of
locks and bars, turning away from his kiss, stepping back. She
had not seemed to want comfort from him, almost shrinking

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden 293

from touch. He was a man of tempers and now he needed a
rage that was cleansing, simple, and direct. But the anger here
was so laced with pity, fear, and love that he did not know how
he could free himself of it. It lay writhing and stinking inside
him, and he began to feel the old, slow waking ache of his ulcer.

They took Deborah to a small, plain room, guarding her there
until the showers were empty. She was watched there also, by a
woman who sat placidly in the steam and looked her up and
down as she dried herself. Deborah did what she was told duti-
fully, but she kept her left arm slightly turned inward, so as to
hide from sight the two small, healing puncture wounds on the
wrist. Serving the new routine, she went back to the room and
answered some questions about herself put to her by a sardonic
doctor who seemed to be displeased. It was obvious that he did
not hear the roaring behind her.

Into the vacuum of the Midworld where she stood between Yr
and Now, the Collect was beginning to come to life. Soon they
would be shouting curses and taunts at her, deafening her for
both worlds. She was fighting against their coming the way a
child, expecting punishment, anticipates it by striking out wildly.
She began to tell the doctor the truth about some of the
questions he was asking. Let them call her lazy and a liar now.
The roar mounted a little and she could hear some of the words
in it. The room offered no distraction. To escape engulfment
there was only the Here, with its ice-cold doctor and his note-
book, or Yr with its golden meadows and gods. But Yr also held
its regions of horror and lostness, and she no longer knew to
which kingdom in Yr there was passage. Doctors were sup-
posed to help in this.

She looked at the one who sat fading amid the clamor and
said, ”I told you the truth about these things you asked. Now
are you going to help me?”

”That depends on you,” he said acidly, shut his notebook,
and left. A specialist, laughed Anterrabae, the Falling God.

Let me go with you, she begged him, down and down beside
him because he was eternally falling.

So it shall be, he said. His hair, which was fire, curled a little in
the wind of the fall.

The Book of Margery Kempe 15

church and in her chamber, at her meat, and at her prayers, in
the fields, and in town, both going and sitting. And many times
she was afraid what they might be, for she saw them as well at
night in darkness, as in daylight. Then, when she was afraid of
them, Our Lord said to her:—

”By this token, daughter, believe that it is God Who speaketh
in thee, for, wheresoever God is, Heaven is, and where God is,
there be many angels, and God is in thee and thou art in Him.
And therefore be not afraid, daughter, for these be tokens that
there are many angels about thee, to keep both day and night so
that no devil shall have power over thee, nor evil men to harm
thee.”

Then from that time forward, she used to say, when she saw
them coming:—”Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini.”

Also Our Lord gave her another token which endured about
sixteen years, and it increased ever more and more, and that
was a flame of fire, wondrous and hot and delectable, and right
comfortable, not wasting but ever increasing, of love; for though
the weather were never so cold, she felt the heat burning in her
breast and at her heart, as verily as a man could feel the material
fire if he put his hand or his finger therein.

When she first felt the fire of love burning in her breast, she
was afraid thereof, and then Our Lord answered to her mind
and said:—

”Daughter, be not afraid, for this heat is the heat of the Holy
Ghost, which shall burn away all thy sins; for the fire of love
quencheth all sins. And thou shalt understand by this token
that the Holy Ghost is in thee, and thou knowest well that
wherever the Holy Ghost is, there is the Father, and where the
Father is, there is the Son, and so thou hast fully in thy soul all
the Holy Trinity. Therefore thou hast great cause to love Me
right well; and yet thou shalt have greater cause than ever thou
hadst to love Me, for thou shalt hear what thou hast never
heard, and see what thou hast never seen, and thou shalt feel
what thou hast never felt.

”For daughter, thou art as secure in the love of God, as God is
God. Thy soul is more certain of the love of God, than of thine
own body, for thy soul shall part from thy body, but God shall
never part from thy soul, for they are united together without

294 JOANNE GREENBERG

That day and the next she spent on Yr’s plains, simple long
sweeps of land where the eye was soothed by the depth of
space.

For this great mercy, Deborah was deeply grateful to the Pow-
ers. There had been too much blindness, cold, and pain in Yr
these past hard months. Now, as by the laws of the world, her
image walked around and answered and asked and acted; she,
no longer Deborah, but a person bearing the appropriate name
for a dweller on Yr’ s plains, sang and danced and recited the
ritual songs to a caressing wind that blew on the long grasses.

For Jacob and Esther Blau the way home was no shorter than
the way to the hospital had been. Although Deborah was not
with them, their freedom to say what they really wanted to say
was even more circumscribed than before.

Esther felt that she knew Deborah better than her husband
did. To her, it had not been the childish attempt at suicide that
had begun this round of doctors and decisions. She sat in the
car beside her husband wanting to tell him that she was grateful
for the silly and theatrical wrist-cutting. At last a dragging suspi-
cion of something subtly and terribly wrong had had outlet in a
fact. The half-cup of blood on the bathroom floor had given all
their nebulous feelings and vague fears weight, and she had
gone to the doctor the next day. Now she wanted to show Jacob
the many things he did not know, but she knew she could not
do it without hurting him. She looked over at him driving with
his eyes hard on the road and his face set. ”We’ll be able to visit
her in a month or two,” she said.

Then they began to construct the story that they would tell
their acquaintances and those relatives who were not close or
whose prejudices did not allow for mental hospitals in the fam-
ily. For them, the hospital was to be a school, and for Suzy, who
had heard the word ”sick” too many times in the past month
and had been puzzled too often and deeply before that, there
was to be something about anemia or weakness and a special
convalescent school. Papa and Mama would be told that every-
thing was fine . . . a sort of rest home. They already knew about
the psychiatrist and his recommendation, but the look of the
place would have to change in the telling, and the high, hard

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden 295

scream that they had heard from one of the barred windows as
they left, and that had made them shiver and grit their teeth,
would have to be expunged. The scream had made Esther won-
der if they had not really been wrong after all; the scream would
have to be kept locked in her heart as Deborah in That Place.

Doctor Fried got up from her chair and went to the window. It
faced away from the hospital buildings and over a small garden
beyond which lay the grounds where the patients walked. She
looked at the report in her hand. Against the weight of three
typewritten pages were balanced the lectures she would not be
able to give, the writing she would have to neglect, and the
counseling of doctors that she would have to refuse if she took
this case. She liked working with patients. Their very illness
made them examine sanity as few ”sane” people could. Kept
from loving, sharing, and simple communication, they often
hungered for it with a purity of passion that she saw as
beautiful.

19 65 '-Eh
Beyond All Reason, by Morag Coate

Beyond All Reason provides another example of the psychiatric auto-
biography used as documentation to support a particular theory of
madness. The introduction was written by R. D. Laing, who stresses
the need to understand the mad experience from the inside. He then
proceeds to give an ’’existential’’ interpretation of Coate’s madness.

Basically Laing rejects the notion that there is such a thing as ”men-
tal illness,” feeling that the concept of an ”illness” implies an alien
disease process which attacks the body or mind from without and
which must be treated by a counterattack with the techniques of
modern medical science. One may see the person's behavior as symp-
toms of a disease, but Laing would prefer to see it as ”expressive of
his existence.” 1 According to Laing, what we call ”normal” is simply
one form of alienation or estrangement from reality, and madness is
simply another form of alienation which happens to be ”out of step
with the prevailing state of alienation/'2

The particular form of alienation called ”schizophrenia” begins in
certain family situations where there is an unconscious conspiracy to
deny autonomy, individual identity, and sense of self to the growing
child. The child fights to develop a separate identity and eventually
begins a severe split between his or her outer self—a mask of con-
formity and acquiescence to the family—and his or her inner self.
When the chfld’s need for identity falls victim to the family's needs
for their idealized image of the child, the split in the child's personal-
ity between an inner and outer self comes to a crisis—the child at last
reaches a state of behavior and experience defined as ”schizo-
phrenic.” Laing believes that schizophrenia is nothing but the force-
ful takeover of the outer self by the inner self in a spontaneous and
naturally-occurring attempt of the human personality to heal itself.
Instead of trying to ”treat” this takeover of the inner self, cutting
short the natural process by shock or chemotherapy, the ”true physi-
cian-priest,” as Laing phrases it, should instead help the person go
through this natural healing experience—to take a journey into mad-
ness in order to confront and integrate the inner self.3

‘Laing, The Divided Self, p. 31.
2Laing, The Politics of Experience, p. 28.
3Ibid., p. 162.

296

Beyond All Reason 297

Laing feels that there may be certain biochemical abnormalities in
schizophrenia, but that they are probably the result of earlier psycho-
logical and interpersonal situations.‘ Actually Laing’s differences
with some biochemical theorists—Larry Stein, for instance—are
extreme. Where Laing believes that chemotherapy inhibits true
recovery because it blocks recognition and integration of the mad
experience and thus cuts short the natural healing process of schizo-
phrenia, Stein says that schizophrenia is caused by the presence of a
toxic substance in the brain and that this substance can best be
blocked by the ingestion of antipsychotic medications such as the
phenothiazines. Failure to block that toxin with medication, Stein
believes, will eventually lead to the irreversible damage of certain
neuron terminals in the brain, resulting in the syndrome of chronic
”burnt-out” schizophrenia.5

Laing maintained a therapeutic center at Kingsley Hall in a work-
ing-class neighborhood of London's East End, where people could
"go down and come out,” that is, experience their madness in a
supportive community without medication, restraint, or interruption.
Unfortunately, no conclusive results of this experiment have been
presented. In 1971 one Kingsley Hall patient wrote an autobiographi-
cal account of her madness, published along with her therapist’ s per-
spective of the experience, under the title Mary Barnes: Two Accounts of
a journey Through Madness. But the book does not give a very clear
description of her madness or the dynamics of her recovery.

Morag Coate’s account in Beyond All Reason, however, is clear and
interesting and does support the Laingian theory of schizophrenia.
As a child Coate shed religious orthodoxy. Late in adolescence she
devoted much energy to serious philosophical inquiry. Then she had
some kind of spiritual experience, what she called an ’’illumination,'’
and from that she concluded that it was possible to have a personal
relationship with a personal God. Her thought and behavior quickly
became irrational, however, more magical and atavistic, until she
finally was hospitalized. She experienced five different breaks over a
period of fourteen years, two of which were dramatically ended by
electroshock therapy. But she seemed finally to be cured by a rela-
tionship with an understanding psychiatrist who encouraged her to
accept and integrate the experience of her madness.

In his introduction Laing promises that Coate’s description will
raise questions beyond the reach of psychiatry and medicine, to a

‘Laing, Sanity, Madness and the Family, p. 18.
5Stein, ”Neurochemistry of Reward and Punishment,” pp. 354-56.

298 MORAG COATE

”domain of relevance that takes us to the very horizons of human
existence/'6 He suggests that priests, theologians, and philosophers
will find relevance in the account and that this psychiatric autobiogra-
phy might best be read as a spiritual autobiography.

Since natural science studies only the relation between things, we are
thus in a context of relevance that is outside the domain of natural
scientific investigation. We have to realize the phenomenal existence of
an ”inner” world, that goes beyond the realm of imagination, reveries,
dreams, and even of unconscious fantasy. I can think of no better word
for the experiential domain that lies ”beyond” the reach of perception,
thinking, imagination, dreams, fantasy, than the spiritual world—or
the domain of spirits, Powers, Thrones, Principalities, Seraphim,
Cherubim, The Light.7

The following excerpts were selected to illustrate the writer's
psychiatric and/or spiritual progress. She first describes the begin-
ning of her unusual mental experiences which she enters into with
tremendous intellectual curiosity. In the next entry her first acute
break and subsequent hospitalization are described. Writing retrospec-
tively, she portrays it as an experience of insanity, but it is clear that at
the time she felt she was going through powerful experiences of spir-
itual significance. Her experiences involve a few hallucinations, some
delusional interpretations, but mostly a state of awareness in which
she experiences herself and others as shorn of their contemporary
identities and participating in a more universal or archetypal identity. In
the third excerpt Coate describes her first contact with Dr. Upton, who
tells her—as Laing would recommend—that much of the content of
her religious experiences may be valid. In the last excerpt, Coate writes
of her resolution and cure through her therapeutic relationship with
Dr. Upton. She is able to achieve an emotional release through the
support of this relationship and to ’’resolve and integrate” her mad-
ness.

I GOT UP from where I had been sitting and moved into another
room. Suddenly my whole being was filled with light and loveli-

5Laing’s intro. to Coate, Beyond All Reason, p. viii.
7Ibid., p. ix.

Beyond All Reason 299

ness and with an upsurge of deeply moving feeling from within
myself to meet and reciprocate the influence that flowed into
me. I was in a state of the most vivid awareness and illumina-
tion. What can I say of it? A cloudless, Cerulean blue sky of the
mind, shot through with shafts of exquisite, warm, dazzling
sunlight. In its first and most intense stage it lasted perhaps half
an hour. It seemed that some force or impulse from without
were acting on me, looking into me; that I was in touch with a
reality beyond my own; that I had made direct contact with the
secret, ultimate source of life. What I had read of the accounts of
others acquired suddenly a new meaning. It flashed across my
mind, ”This is what the mystics mean by the direct experience
of God.”

It did not necessarily follow that God was a person as we
understand the term; my initial state of illumination was highly
abstract and gave no clue of that. It might be a life force, an
inorganic source of spiritual power transcending all our own
notions of individuality; but that it was the external, transcen-
dent source of life and beauty and of truth, I did not doubt. I
had never feared people, and it did not occur to me now to be
afraid of God; I was astonished and awed at the magnitude of
what had happened to me, but I responded simply, warmly and
intensely as my natural self. It was, from that first instant, a
direct, reciprocated love relationship. It remained to be seen
what was its cause and purpose and what I should make of it.

2- 3% 3(-

One Saturday, feeling that the crisis point was now at hand, I
decided that the only thing to do was to call God back to earth to
see and take charge of matters for himself. I finished my work in
an orderly fashion and stood up in my office at midday. I
clasped my hands tightly together and with my whole strength
called on God. There was a sudden feeling as of a strong current
running through me from above downwards. It lasted for about
six seconds. It left me feeling dehydrated, as though I had been
in some literal sense burnt out. I went across to the canteen to
have my lunch, and drank nearly a quart of water before I ate
my food. I was quite untroubled now. I had done all that was
needed, and my period of lone responsibility was over. From
now on I would be instructed what to do. I no longer held

300 MORAG COATE

tentative beliefs, or was puzzled at the idea of what seemed
strange or unlikely happenings. I took the situation perfectly for
granted. I knew.

In the short space between one half minute and the next I had
lost my reason and become insane. Not that this was apparent
yet to anyone, and least of all to me. Months earlier when I was
alarmed in case I might be losing my sanity, the fact that I could
feel- this fear showed that I was not more than partly submerged
in my own inner mind. I was like a swimmer who has gone out
of his depth and fears drowning; sometimes my head was above
water, sometimes under the surface, and the comparison and
contrast between the different views kept me clearly aware of
which was which. Since that time, although getting into deeper
and deeper water, I had so to speak kept my head above it, and I
remained clearly conscious of the normal aspect of the outside
world. Suddenly I had gone deep down under, as though it
were a kind of water of Lethe I had sunk into, I forgot im-
mediately and completely my normal, rational View of life.

I finished my lunch and walked out into the town, ready for
whatever adventure should befall. I was under direction. All I
needed to do was to go wherever the impulse took me, and
sometime during the day I would meet the special messenger
who was being sent.

If anyone suspected my state of mind and had tried to reason
with me, they could have had no influence. I was no longer the
same person who had gone to work in the morning. This new
me had direct and certain sources of knowledge, shared only by
those who, for some special purpose, might have been called to
play a part in the important event at hand. The messenger I was
waiting to meet would, no doubt, be one of them.

The sun shone brightly, reflecting off the chromium of parked
cars and refracting tiny fans of iridescent rainbow colouring. I
could have spent hours observing the subtle qualities of light,
but there was not time to linger on the way. I passed by my flat
and glanced in through the window. A man was kneeling be-
side the armchair on which I had laid my head while deep in
thought the previous night. I passed on quickly. If I had stopped
to look closely I would have seen no one there. I saw the man
only abstractly with my inner eye; I was aware of his attitude

Beyond All Reason 301

and general build, but we were apart in time and on different
planes of existence and we were not meant to meet that day.

The city was crowded. There was a big football match on, and
that was significant, for part of the plan for the future was that
aggressive and competitive impulses should be channelled into
sports and games as a substitute for war. I pressed on pur-
posefully towards the cathedral which was my immediate des-
tination, and I was soon joined by an unseen companion who
walked beside me on my right. Unlike the man in the flat who
was, as it were, the invisible shadow of the form of a man, this
person was totally unseen but vividly present in strong spirit,
and my right hand curled its fingers lightly against his. I was
glad to have him there, and I was surprised when he held back
fifty yards from the cathedral and would not come any nearer to
it. I went on alone, went in, genuflected towards the high altar,
and came straight out again. My unseen visitor had not waited
for me, he was gone; but within a few yards of where I had left
him a man of flesh and blood fell into step with me. We walked
in silence; I felt no need to talk; I knew I had at last met my
special messenger.

When we reached the quiet backwater where I lived he
started, still in complete silence, to make love to me. This aston-
ished me; it was the last thing I had expected in the circum-
stance. I thought quickly. N o doubt some special demonstration
and tuition had been called for. I planned my actions accord-
ingly, and I noted that the man's hands shook when I lit him a
cigarette. Eventually he spoke.

”Do you know who I am?”

”No.”

”I’m David.”

”David Stronsay?”

“Yes.”

This was the only conversation that we had. It was quite
sufficient for me; it identified him as my grandfather’ s great-
grandfather come back from the dead. A

My contact was in fact a real and ordinary man. So much the
worse for him, for he had been nervous from the start, and he
got a serious fright when I told him suddenly that he was up-
side down. He ran away from me, after a short struggle in

302 MORAG COATE

which I tried to stop him; and after that the solar system started
to fall apart. I had certain, but purely abstract, knowledge of the
danger that now threatened, and it was up to me to keep my
head. The running man, as he went out of sight, could be seen
now as four different men all present in one body at the same
time. There was the stranger of my own time and district; there
was the eighteenth-century ancestor; there was another contem-
porary man living at that time in a different place; and there was
a semi-divine personage as well. They had all simultaneously
panicked.

I retired to my flat, dismissed from mind the stranger and the
ancestor, who were no longer relevant, and concentrated my
attention on the other two. The superhuman personage was in
blind flight and racing round the planets widdershins. The
planets were arranged in a circular ring around the sun, all on
the same plane, and spaced evenly enough to provide a series of
stepping stones. I could not see this from my room, but I knew
it; and I knew also, as the racing figure did not, that at one point
one of them was missing and he would fall through and disrupt
the equilibrium of the others in his fall. I could not call him back,
and the only person who could help was the contemporary
whose identity I knew, who had now fled to his own part of the
country. He, if he could be induced to do it, could rise up like
Atlas and, by strengh of personal stature, support not only this
world but the whole disrupting system. I called out to him,
”Stand up. Be a man.” It was in vain. He could not be roused,
and I had not the strength. I was tempted to run away myself,
but checked the impulse and thought quickly what I could do.
The main risk was that the balance of the moving planets would
be lost. If I could provide some kind of counterpoise, all might
be well. I stood in a passage swinging my arms like pendulums
until the danger point had passed and all was well. I became
elated after that.

I was found soon afterwards, dancing naked in front of a
mirror. My eyes were very wide open so that the whites were
visible on both sides of the iris. From this I knew that I was now
a priestess of the Minoan snake goddess, or perhaps the god-
dess herself; it did not seem to matter which. I found it easy
enough to make the transition back to modern times when my

Beyond All Reason 303

visitor, whom I knew well, helped me into a dressing gown. To
keep me talking while expert help was being sought, he told me
about a recent journey he had made. I understood clearly what
he was saying, but I was puzzled by it. What was the special
significance of this journey, and why, at this precise moment,
did the knowledge of it have to be conveyed to me? To my mind
then there were no such things as ordinary, everyday events.
Everything was charged with an immense significance.

The visiting psychiatrist looked in and spoke to me briefly. I
made what must have seemed a highly delusional reference to
Eve. I had recently spent some time playing with a child who
had that name, and it seemed relevant and important to refer to
the fact.

After the ambulance took me away, I became so ill that there
are now some gaps in memory, but I found myself before long
lying on a mattress in a small and otherwise empty room. I was
inside out and upside down, and the visible sign of this was that
I was lying on the ceiling. How did I know it was the ceiling and
not the floor? In the first place there was the absence of a bed. In
hospital you are put to lie on a bed if you are nursed by ordinary
gravity. But if you had to lie on the ceiling, you would want to
be as close to it as possible; so that was why I only had a
mattress. These things are quite simply explained if you keep
calm, but at the same time it is as well to make sure. I got up and
looked out through the small peephole in the observation cu-
bicle. There were shelves alongside, and on them parcels tied
up in newspaper. I looked closely. The print was upside down.
That proved conclusively that in this place gravity had been
reversed.

I knew I was in hospital because I was attended there by girls
in nurses’ uniform. I knew also that I was in prison because I
was locked in. As I had done no wrong, I waited hourly for a
friend in whom I trusted to release me. I was disappointed
when he failed to come, but not deeply troubled. I had forgotten
about him by the time I was transferred elsewhere. I have no
memory of being moved.

On arrival at the distant hospital, my first memories are of
struggles and of forcible sedation. Soon afterwards I adapted
myself to my new environment and acquired a different person-

16 MARGERY KEMPE

end. Therefore, daughter, thou hast as great cause to be merry
as any lady in this world; and if thou knew, daughter, how
much thou pleasest Me when thou sufferest Me wilfully to

speak in thee, thou wouldst never do otherwise, for this is a

holy life, and the time is right well spent. For daughter, this life
pleaseth Me more than the wearing of the haburion or the hair-
cloth, or fasting on bread and water; for, if thou saidst every day
a thousand Pater Nosters, thou wouldst not please Me so well

as thou dost when thou art in silence and sufferest Me to speak

in thy soul.”
-3 -)3 -it

Thus, through hearing holy books and holy sermons, she
ever increased in contemplation and holy meditation. It is in a
manner impossible to write all the holy thoughts, holy speeches
and high revelations which Our Lord shewed unto her, both of
herself and other men and women, and also of many souls,
some to be saved and some to be damned, and it was to her a
great punishment and a sharp chastisement. To know of those
that should be saved, she was full glad and joyful, for she de-
sired, as much as she durst, all men to be saved, and when Our
Lord shewed to her any that should be damned, she had great
pain. She would not hear or believe that it was God who
shewed her such things, and put it out of her mind as much as
she might. Our Lord blamed her therefor, and bade her believe
that it was His high mercy and His goodness to shew her His
privy counsels, saying to her mind:—

”Daughter, thou must as well hear of the damned as of the
saved.” ‘

She would give no credence to the counsel of God, but rather
believed it was some evil spirit deceiving her.

Then for her frowardness and her unbelief, Our Lord with-
drew from her all good thoughts and all good remembrance of
holy speeches and dalliance, and the high contemplation which
she had been used to before, and suffered her to have as many
evil thoughts as she before had good ones.

And this vexation endured for twelve days; and just as, be-
fore, she had four hours of the forenoon in holy speeches and
dalliance with Our Lord, so now she had as many hours of foul

304 MORAG COATE

ality. My experiences were now filled with religious content,
but of a kind quite different from what had occupied my mind
over the previous half-year. I was submissive, pious, and at the
same time elated. I was not concerned with understanding any-
thing; I had been specially chosen to be a kind of star actress in a
celestial mystery play. I accepted this unquestioningly and with
delight, while at the same time never completely identifying
myself with the role I played. At one time I took the part of the
Virgin Mary, at another I was the boy David; sometimes I was
an anonymous figure representing a boy and a girl at the same
time. Always my point of reference and of distant veneration
was the black-robed, sandalled figure who sat motionless for
hours at a time at the end of the aisle of a cathedral. The bufld-
ing was long enough to fit in with this interpretation, and the
tall windows were suitable, and the flowers were appropriate.
The presence of beds there could be conveniently dismissed
from mind. The black-robed figure was a priest, the head of a
religious order, who represented and at times actually became
Christ. At meal times we filed into an adjacent, circular bufld-
ing, the chapter house, in which the ceremony of the Last Sup-
per was recurrently enacted. The priest-figure served out the
food which I helped, with due reverence, to carry round. Then,
after seating myself at one of the wooden trestle tables, my duty
was to see that the salt was passed up and down and especially
from one side to the other. This was vitally important, for the
two sides were not, as it seemed, a mere arm's length apart. The
opposing rows of people seated there were really in far different
places and in different centuries as well. Space and time con-
verged here to make a meeting point.

I awoke one day, as my nonnal self, to the consciousness that
I had recently been mad. I tried to hope that this was not true,
that I had dreamed it, and that nothing had really happened.
This hope quickly died. Further and seemingly insoluble prob-
lems now arose. I had certainly been mad, my recent actions
proved it; how could I be sure I was now sane? I believed I was
in hospital, but was I? This place bore no resemblance to the
traditional hospitals with which I was familiar. I looked out of
the windows at a mountain, but it was different in outline from
any that I knew. The faces that surrounded me were strange.

Beyond All Reason 305

The place and people might all be a hallucination of my own. If
one’s personal yardstick for reality has once proved faulty, it is
hard in strange surroundings to recover confidence in it. I was
allowed no visitors. The nursing and medical staff had no con-
versations with me. I had to work the problem out from first
principles as best I could. Two points of reference eventually
fixed my orientation. 1 received letters, undoubtedly authentic
because of their characteristic handwriting, from people that I
knew. I also eventually recognised by name and by appearance
one member of the staff whom I had happened to meet, else-
where and in a very different context, a year ago. I was after all
among real people and in a real place.

I sought out the doctor in charge of my section of the hospital
and asked what had happened to me. He said, ”You have had a
nervous breakdown, and you must now forget all about it.” I
found this singularly unhelpful at the time.

1- 36 3!-

I moved to a larger city not long afterwards. I had some con-
tacts there and I hoped to build up a fuller and more satisfying
social life. In that I was, for various reasons, less successful than
I had hoped. The general tone of my life was an even grey. My
youth was past, and I had nothing to look forward to in later
life.

I thought it might be wise to put myself under the supervision
of a psychiatrist. I was too depressed to expect much benefit
from this, but I found it unexpectedly most helpful. In the past I
had only had occasion to speak to doctors about my illnesses or
about my spiritual experiences at times when I was too ill to
think and express myself with ease. It was a relief to be able to
talk freely at last. Unlike the psychiatrists in the mental hospi-
tals, Dr. Upton was not a persistent questioner. Once the ice was
broken he just let me talk, and it was his quality as a listener that
led me on. He did directly influence me, but in a quiet and
non-dominating way. He suggested to me that I had cast out too
much when I rejected the whole content of my spiritual experi-
ences. There might still be much that was valid in them. I was
impressed by his comments, and by the way he listened, and by
his quickness to link up experiences of mine with those of other
people. I no longer felt inwardly alone, and hope began to stir

306 MORAG COATE

within me. My outside interests revived, I could listen to music
with enjoyment, the world became a brighter place.

All this was of immediate value to me, and it was also danger-
ous. Only I knew how I induced my experiences and what effect
they had and what they meant to me. I should have been wiser
not to reverse too quickly the verdict of renunciation which I
had earlier made. But I jumped eagerly at the excuse that I
might have been wrong; I felt that I was so to speak licensed to
go ahead, and that I now had a safe support behind me. I
decided to seek direct contact with God again.

I started one Saturday evening. The experience I had was
intense and emotionally demanding. I slept dead out afterwards
until half—way through the following morning, and found my-
self hard pressed to get through my commitments during the
rest of the day. That did for a moment give me pause to wonder
about the physiological effect of what I was doing. But I chose to
explain it differently; God had missed me and wanted more of
me because of my long absence. I soon adjusted to a comfort-
able balance between spiritual and other day-to-day activities. I
told Dr. Upton nothing about all this. When I saw him I was still
busy talking about events in the past, and I felt no need to
discuss present-day affairs that, from my point of view, pre-
sented no problem. I felt undisturbed and confident. From Dr.
Upton's point of view I seemed to be progressing well. He little
knew that inadvertently he had done the equivalent of sending
a refonned drug addict back to addiction.

Not that, on a long-terrn view, his judgement was at fault. I
needed to pick up where I had left off in order to resolve and
integrate my whole experience. But a more watchful check on
what was currently happening to me might have been advis-
able. Direct questioning has its values too.

Some months went by before anything unusual happened. In
the past I had tended to expect too much too soon. I felt less
impatient now because I was, correspondingly, more confident.
Outside events would undoubtedly confirm before long the in-
dications I received in private. It was just a matter of keeping in
readiness, and of dealing with such matters as came my way
meanwhile.

The first surprising thing that happened was that I met the

Beyond All Reason 307

devil in a restaurant. I had been to an official meeting and took
myself out to dinner afterwards. I had a leisurely meal and was
daydreaming about certain friends whom I wanted God to
meet. Suddenly something about the quality of my inner feeling
told me that another person had intruded into my private, per-
sonal relationship with God. The newcomer was unrestrained
and rather sentimental, and I knew that it was the devil, though
he was not a person I had thought about or believed in before.
But, if he existed, he was clearly a deprived person, so it was
perhaps not surprising that he should be sentimental in private
when his outer facade was not in evidence. I was angry at his
intrusion and lost my appetite; I quickly paid my bill and left.
The devil had made contact from within; I projected him now
outside me where I would have more control over him. I half
thought of sending him to heaven as a punishment, as I reck-
oned that he would be bored. But no, on second thoughts that
would be dangerous; among innocent and unsuspecting people
he could do too much harm. The only thing to do was to take
him home with me. That was an inconvenient plan, but not
specially dangerous. He could have no power over me unless I
feared him, which I did not. I was still cross, and mentally I
reduced him to the status of an animal, a kind of farmyard
version of a dinosaur that I negotiated through the traffic on a
lead. But to treat a potential human as an animal is meant and
felt as an insult, and it is particularly inappropriate to behave
towards a deprived person in that way. I therefore changed my
tactics and accorded him human status, and I began to tease
him a little, mainly to reassure myself because I was in fact
rather frightened of him after all. That clearly boosted his self-
importance too much. The best way was to accept him and take
him for granted in the simplest way possible. When we got
home, I offered him the run of the flat for as long as he wanted.
But one thing I made clear. He would have no opportunity of
intruding on my privacy with God. So long as he was around, I
would abstain from direct contact with God. I took no further
notice of him and was not sure when he actually went. At most,
he did not stay more than a few days.

I wondered about him afterwards. Was it the spirit of some
man who identified himself as the devil? Or was the devil really

308 MORAG COATE

a person, and if so what had happened to develop him into a
twisted, thwarted adversary of the good? There was clearly a
place for adversaries in any stable spiritual ecology; healthy re-
sistance and challenge keep up the vitality and quality of
goodness; unopposed, steam-roller benevolence is a spurious
substitute. But evil is a form of sickness . . .

I was thinking about this and switched on the wireless and a
traveller was speaking of a Persian sect who worship the lord of
darkness who fell to earth as a wounded peacock. The speaker
linked the story with his journey home and the English child in
the train listening to a fairy tale—could it have been Beauty and
the Beast? I have forgotten now.

A week or two later I attended church on Sunday as a kind of
thanksgiving, for I had a feeling that all was going well. The
quality of the service disappointed me; a good deal of rather
tatty ceremonial, but no sense of spiritual depth or inspiration. I
was glad to get out into the fresh air. It was a very lovely day. I
decided to visit a park on the outskirts of the city.

Time was becoming altered again, but I was not alarmed. It
had merely been lengthened to allow more to take place per
minute than would otherwise be possible. This meant that the
time I had to wait for a bus appeared much longer than in fact it
was. The bus itself was quite normal when it came.

I went in at the park gates and was overwhelmed by the glory
of the colour of the rhododendrons. I had forgotten that they
would be in full bloom. Crimson and pink and white they
blazed in the sunlight, and beyond them the yellow-gold and
orange of azaleas and the creamy tumbled remnants of over-
blown magnolias spread out under the light, spring-green trees.
I drank in the colour as if it had been wine, and I returned with
special delight to the rhododendrons because of their associa-
tion with a very special experience which happened in the early
days of my spiritual adventures.

I was enjoying these outward beauties so wholeheartedly that
it was not for some time that I sensed I was in danger. A slight
shift in the spectral quality of the colours warned me; they be-
came just a shade too crude and bright. A split between the
spiritual and physical components of reality was taking place, as
had happened some years earlier when I found myself in Vanity
Fair among fake people. A fake version of the flowers and the

Beyond All Reason 309

park and people in it would shortly be projected away from
earth, taking me too, unless I could arrest the process. Forces
from elsewhere had once again credited me with a power and
importance that was not mine, and were attempting to kidnap
me. I would be given greater status than I could hope for here,
but I would never see earth and my friends again. And I would,
in subtle, imperceptible ways, lose my own soul.

I lay face downwards on the grass. I had been through so
much in different ways over the years, I now felt spent. I looked
down as I lay and remembered lying in this position on my bed
twelve years ago. I used to look in imagination through the
earth and visualise the ocean where I would surface if I slipped
straight through. I looked further and, looking downwards,
knew I was looking up towards far distant stars. To look in that
way used to delight me; it increased my sense of danger now. I
closed my eyes and put my face close to the grass and whis-
pered into the earth and asked that a friend in whom I trusted
would call my spirit home. I had a sense of being shriven. I got
up quietly and returned.

1- 36 3!-

It was in the end an outside stimulus that triggered off a sud-
den, unforeseen emotional release. I went, a shade reluctantly,
to see David and Lisa, a film that tells the story of a mental-
ly sick boy and girl in a school for severely disturbed adoles-
cents. The opening shots reminded me of my own horror of the
mental hospitals I had been in, but I soon forgot that and be-
came absorbed completely by the personal human drama—
tense, beautifully acted, and at times deeply moving. The cen-
tral characters were presented with a reality that struck me as
perfectly authentic, and with a sympathy that implied absolute
acceptance. So, by involving myself in their experience as I did,
I was not only accepting my past sickness, but feeling it
accepted too. This was something which I had so needed, but
had lacked in hospital.

I had gone to the film by myself, and was glad afterwards to
come out alone. I walked slowly along the river bank, and let
the chattering groups pass me by. The black waters of a big river
at night are threatening when seen in the context of insanity; I
was not troubled by them now, but awed a little, certainly im-
pressed. And a planet shone out in the clear sky above, as

310 MORAG COATE

piercing in its light as a single sharp note of music, and the
lights on the far bank were gay with a warming brightness, and
I myself was feeling human and humane. I had quite lost my
dread of mental hospitals. On the contrary, I felt that was where
I would now like to be, that I had gifts which I could use and
that, instead of trying to forget and to deny my kinship with
people who were mentally ill, I wished to work directly with
them.

I climbed up some steps onto the bridge, and as I did so it
dawned on me what this new-found impulse meant. I had at
last forgiven my sick self. It did not in fact greatly matter
whether I could use my gift for making contact with deeply
disturbed people, but I felt sure this was something that I had,
and the important thing was that I should know and value it.

My involvement in the film brought home to me how sick I
had been in my past life at times when I had outwardly seemed
well. I saw with sudden insight the relevance of minor neurotic
symptoms, and I remembered the terrors of infancy which had
been revived for me in my last time in hospital. I began to reach
down towards the roots of a forgotten fear of absolute destruc-
tion and annihilation.

I explored further into this hidden region on the same eve-
ning after I got home. But this was something that I could not
have done alone. I was thinking of Dr. Upton at the time. At first
I had felt inclined to write to him, and then I knew there was no
immediate need to write and I would rather wait and talk to him
direct. Meanwhile, in spirit I took him by the hand with the
same confidence and comfort that a child holds someone’s hand
when retracing their steps to the place where they have had a
terrifying accident. I pressed down into the darkly bright in-
tensity of my hidden life and broke through to the perilous
secret that my adult defences had guarded me from coming
near. Damned up and firmly sealed off down inside myself my
primal, urgent need was still intact. And somewhere, in the
uncharted time of early infancy, I had given myself and taken in
return; I had needed and enjoyed and later felt that I had lost a
mother’ s love. The sudden, living sense of need and loss came
upon me so strongly that I wept. And then, refreshed as by a
sudden storm of rain, I fell asleep.

Beyond All Reason 311

During the next few days a tremendous emotional upheaval
took place. I was able to recover into consciousness and to
assimilate the terrifying feelings that stemmed from my first
relationship in infancy. The barrier against them had been so
strong that, except during periods of acute psychosis, it had
never lifted until now. And it could not have lifted without
disaster or destruction if there had not been a new relationship
to take its place. It did not matter feeling I was an infant in dire
need—I could need Dr. Upton now. And need him I did, quite
unrestrainedly. I just didn't mind. I didn't feel embarrassed or
that my inner stature had lessened, rather the reverse. For there
was something about this primal urge, stemming from the very
source of life, that was bigger, brighter, deeper and stronger
than any of the feelings of my remembered childhood. It was
also something that could have been overwhehning if I had
been alone with it. Dr. Upton was my safe anchorage. I could let
my feelings free.

This direct, completely uninhibited relationship gave a pro-
found new sense of freedom to the rest of my emotional life. My
sense of urgent, overwhelrnjng need for the doctor whom I
freely loved and trusted subsided gradually as I worked through
and left behind my childhood terrors. The curious experiences
which I went through at that stage would take too long to re-
count in detail here. Once that phase was over I could return to
the interests and joys of normal adult life. But the personal
relationship remained, giving a deep, warm sense of security
that enriched all aspects of my life. Mind, body and spirit were
now at peace with one another. I had been made whole.

So, despite all that has happened, I can feel that nothing has
been wasted, and my worst experiences have had constructive
value for me in the end. I have lost some transitional beliefs that
I based on experiences which bewildered and sometimes gravely
misled me at the time. But I have regained and strengthened
my faith that life has a purpose and a meaning. I can honestly
say I now have every reason to believe that living is worthwhile.

Is that an irrational belief? Of course it is. Reason is a tool; a
valued tool which it is our pride and privilege to use as best we
may. But life and love and loveliness, whose existence reason
confirms and must accept, are in themselves beyond all reason.

19 75 “Eh
The Eden Express, by Mark Vonnegut

Mark Vonnegut is the son of the novelist Kurt Vonnegut. Mark gradu-
ated from college just when his father was becoming famous as an
author who was especially popular with the counterculture of the late
sixties and early seventies. The son embraced the styles and values
of the counterculture wholeheartedly: he renounced the barber, ex-
perimented with psychedelic drugs, was once arrested for possession
of marijuana, and went to British Columbia to found a self-sufficient
farm commune.

The counterculture emerged as a reaction to the Vietnam war, to A

apparent secrecy and distance in government, and to what it per-
ceived as the aggressive and destructive tendencies of American
mainstream culture. Although there was a radical leftwing element
that was perhaps as coercive and institutionally oriented as its right-
wing counterpart, the important core of counterculture values was a
kind of benevolent anarchism—with a distrust of institutions, of coer-
cion, of authority, a belief in the importance of the individual and the
power of goodness, and a fascination with the organic and the
spiritual.

The theories of R. D. Laing happened to mesh quite well with the
attitudes and values of the counterculture folk. His rebellion suited
theirs. His distrust of psychiatric institutions matched their distrust of
institutions. His distrust’ of traditional psychiatry paralleled their dis-
trust of traditional authority. His insistence on the spiritual validity of
schizophrenic experience reflected their own fascination and trust in
spiritual systems of understanding. His theory that schizophrenia is a
natural, organic attempt at the self-healing of the psyche was akin to
their own fascination with the natural and the organic. His therapy of
kindness, empathy, guidance, and care embodied their own trust in
the value of benevolence.

Mark Vonnegut worked in a mental hospital for several months
and at the time firmly believed in Laing’s ideas: he described himself
as a ”Laing-Szasz fan” who "didn't believe there was really any such
thing as schizophrenia. I thought it was just a convenient label for
patients whom doctors were confused about.” He believed that if the
patients were acting a little strangely, it was nothing but ”a reason-
able reaction to an unreasonable society.” After living in British
Columbia, however, Vonnegut had a severe experience of madness,

312

The Eden Express 313

later labeled ”schizophrenia," which had apparently been triggered by
a weekend mescaline trip. His friends took care of him as well as they
could, and eventually his best friend took him into Vancouver to a
commune which tried to treat him in what was essentially a Laingian
therapeutic milieu. The results were disastrous. He was finally taken
to a psychiatric institution called Hollywood Hospital where, after a
short period of Thorazine treatment, he recovered. After his dis-
charge he stopped taking Thorazine and soon again became dis-
oriented and began hallucinating. Eventually he was readmitted and
again, after Thorazine treatment, his madness receded. After his dis-
charge this time Vonnegut continued to use Thorazine and also began
taking megavitamins. His interest in Laing ended and his interest in
biochemistry began. He went east, wrote The Eden Express, and en-
tered medical school.

A review in Newsweek magazine downgrades the importance of the
book, describing Vonnegut as ”an immensely 1il<able young man with
no distinct capacity to write." 1 The reviewer appears to have reacted
not so much to Vonnegut’ s ability to write, however, as to his use of
what the reviewer calls the ”hippie cant.” But it seems to me that
Mark chose deliberately, with skill, humor, and intelligence, to write
in a particular voice—that of counterculture slang—fully appropriate
for the subject. For not only is Eden Express a fascinating account of
madness, it is also one of the clearest published accounts of the Amer-
ican youth culture of the late sixties and early seventies.

In the following excerpts, the author describes the Vancouver com-
mune, where, roughly and with little preparation, a therapeutic en-
vironment is prepared to help him go through his ”journey” a la
Laing. In medieval times, and to a large degree until the great age of
asylum construction in the nineteenth century, most mad people
were treated at home, probably much in the improvised way that the
writer was cared for. The reader will have to judge for himself or
herself the efficacy of that approach as compared to the Thorazine
treatment at Hollywood Hospital; I have included Vonnegut’s opin-
ion on that subject as the last excerpt.

:_H;:

What Was Really Going On. All I was catching was itty-bitty
snatches. A word here, a sentence there. A funny smell, a

‘Taylor, ”Bad Trip,” pp. 85A, 86.

The Book of Margery_Kempe 17

thoughts and foul memories of lechery and all uncleanness, as
though she had been common to all manner of people.

And so the devil deluded her, dallying unto her with cursed
thoughts, as Our Lord dallied to her before with holy thoughts.

And, as she before had many glorious visions and high con-
templation in the Manhood of Our Lord, in Our Lady and in
many other holy saints, even right so had she now horrible
sights and abominable, for aught she could do, of beholding
men's members, and such other abominations.

She saw, as she thought verily, divers men of religion, priests
and many others, both heathen and Christian, coming before
her sight, so that she might not eschew them or put them out of
her sight, shewing their bare members unto her.

And therewith the devil bade her, in her mind, choose whom
she would have first of them all, and she must be common to
them all.

And he said she liked better some one of them than all the
others.

She thought that he said truth; she could not say nay; and she
must needs do his bidding, and yet she would not have done it
for all this world.

Yet she thought it should be done, and she thought these
horrible sights and cursed memories were delectable to her,
against her will.

Wherever she went, or whatever she did, these cursed
memories remained with her. When she should see the Sacra-
ment, make her prayers, or do any other good deed, ever such
cursedness was put into her mind.

She was shriven, and did all that she might, but she found no
release, until she was near at despair. It cannot be written what
pain she felt, and what sorrow she was in.

Then she said:—”Alas! Lord, Thou hast said before that Thou
shouldst never forsake me. Where now is the truth of Thy
word?”

And anon, came her good angel unto her, saying:—

”Daughter, God hath not forsaken thee, and never shall for-
sake thee, as He hath promised thee; but, because thou be-
lievest not that it is the spirit of God that speaketh in thy soul,

314 MARK VONNEGUT

funny face. Now and then a whole vignette. Putting it together
was like trying to make a movie from a bunch of slides that had
nothing to do with each other.

Why is Simon turning green? Why is Sy beating me up?
What's that awful smell? Why is André winking at me? Why
won't they let me go outside? What the fuck is going on?

What was going on was several people dealing as best they
could with a very difficult, unfamiliar situation: a friend gone
psychotic.

Apparently suffering a great deal. Incoherent most of the
time. Incapable of understanding anything said to him. Moan-
ing, screaming, smashing things. Completely unpredictable.
And the cherry on the whole show—he doesn't sleep. Some
six-day house guest.

What was really going on was Simon's job. I had other things
to do. But when I did manage to check in, that I was very
different from other people and being treated very strangely,
and in a great deal of physical pain and not hearing, see-
ing, smelling, tasting, walking, or talking right, was hardly
delusional.

What could they do? Putting someone in a nut house isn't a
nice thing to do to someone. There are lots of pressures in the
hip community that make that sort of decision even harder to
come to than normally. Doctors don't know anything, mental
hospitals are repressive, fascist, etc. Hippies are supposed to be
able to take care of their own. ”Schizophrenia is a sane response
to an insane society.” ”Mental illness is a myth.” The Sanskrit
word for crazy means touched by the gods.

I vaguely remember Sy’s threatening me. ”If you don't shut
up we'll have to put you in a nut house. You've been yelling all
night.” I laughed. ”Fine hippie, fine revolutionary, fine peace-
love brother you turned out to be.”

It was a cosmic barroom brawl. Like most it had something to
do with religion. My team was fighting for minority plank No.
234: Everyone gets saved. Fighting against notions of chosen
people. Trying to convince everyone that no one really knew
much. For sure no one had come even close to putting it all
together. So the best we could do was present a united front of
ignorance rather than our pathetic fragmented pretensions.

I was the clock. As long as I could keep breathing, there was

The Eden Express 315

still time. We were badly behind and needed all the time we
could get. One of our key strategies was to find out what every-
one knew or thought they knew and then publish-broadcast-
ESP it to everyone. And all the time thinking that what I was
thinking was absurd and very unlikely but a bet that had to be
covered.

Suddenly Sy was shaking me by the shoulders, looking very
unfriendly. He must have been frustrated to the point of tears.

Fuck shit if my crazy hunch didn't turn out to be right. Here's
a Jew who wants to stop the clock. Well, if it comes down to one
on one, me vs. Sy, no sweat. I'm not in the greatest shape but he
couldn't do much damage. Besides, wasn't he into pacifism,
peace-love, etc.?

Boomzapplewomp! Wow! Where the hell did he learn how to
throw a punch? I never saw it coming, which didn't mean that
much. There was lots of stuff I wasn't seeing. He was slugging
my chest. It was hard to tell the heartbeats from the punches. It
all just rolled together. I was having a heart attack. Sy hit me a
few more times. I went down hard.

Sy was making me get up. Someone had slashed my temples
with razors. There was blood. Something had something to do
with Maharishi, with my old girl friend, Betsy, in Houston with
Harry Reasoner and mission control and gay bars, and watching
on tv something called Operation Jack-in-the-Box battling
against some acid-freak mutant from the year two thousand,
into time travel, trying to have things his way. I wasn't sure
which side he was on, but he had a thing about black people
and electroshock and Thomas Edison and heroin and being
wired to the fact that my father, besides being wanted by Israeli
zealots, wasn't able to give up smoking. And someone making
me hold on to the refrigerator door handle and not being able to
move a muscle. And André, where the hell were those French
when you needed them, came in saying something about Paris
burning and telling Sy to let up on me and that he'd be in pretty
rough shape too if he'd had my dose of bad news. And I cried
and cried and cried, begging Sy to just give me a little time.
Maybe if I had paid more attention to Bucky Fuller. ”I’ll adjust
better. Please, another chance. I'll pay better attention. Please,
another chance.”

After a while a reasonable routine for dealing with me was

316 MARK VONNEGUT

worked out. A twenty-four-hour watch was set, sharp and
dangerous objects were put away, and things calmed down a
little. There was some talk about hospitals but Simon held fast to
his promise to me. There was a lot of telephoning. The Bam-
stable house, which was the only number I could remember, still
never answered. Simon somehow managed to get my sister
Edie in N .Y.C. on the line.

”Mark?”

”Don’t worry, Edie, I won't tell them a thing,” and I slammed
the receiver down.

Many hours were taken up trying to decode my ravings, in
hopes that if they knew more about what was going on in my
mind they could snap me out of it. Most of the time I was
honestly trying to be as informative and straightforward as
possible, but there was so much? to tell and things kept getting
more and more confusing and it was so hard to understand
what they were saying or make my own voice and words act
right. But things seemed to be working out all right.

Hello. I am here. I am Mark Vonnegut and all that that entails.
That's Simon there and Sy there and Andre there and Sankara
there. We all went to Swarthmore. We are in Vancouver, British
Columbia, Canada. I can remember lots of things. I can think
about‘ things. I can understand what people are saying and they
can understand what I am saying.

It never lasts very long. It's lasting less and less. I keep going
away. It keepsgetting harder and harder to come back. I stop
being Mark Vonnegut. Simon stops being Simon and so on. I
stop being able to remember things, think about things, or
understand what people say. It stops being Vancouver, British
Columbia, Canada. I get swept away. I keep making it back, but
it’ s getting tougher and tougher.

In a funny way it's almost fun, having everything he so
fucked up and managing to adjust. I guess you might say I'm
proud. Proud of me, proud of my friends for managing to deal
with this thing so well. For most people this would be the end of
the world. They’ d panic, their friends would panic. Things
would get trampled in the stampede. But we've kept our heads,
made the necessary allowances, and can just ride this thing out.

I'm pretty much just putting in time waiting for this cloud to

The Eden Express 317

blow over. Waiting for something to come along to make some
sense out of all this. Killing time, waiting for some sort of cav-
alry to come over the hill. There's really not an awful lot I can do
but wait. As long as there's no panic, we can hold out darrm
near forever.

And Then Along Came Warren. Actually we went to see him.
Warren was a holy man of sorts who was supposed to drive the
evil demons out of me or maybe just talk me down or at least
come up with some explanation for what was wrong with me.
The Stevens Street folk and Simon were getting desperate.

We first heard about Warren from Luke. Luke was wandering
around the Kootenays feeling very untogether. One day he
came across this old man who, as Luke put it, was living the
most together organic, spiritual life he had ever seen. It was
Warren. Vibes happened and something like a guru-disciple
relationship went on for a few weeks. Luke credited Warren
with having helped him a great deal. All this had taken place a
year or so ago.

Then we heard from Sankara, Andre, and Sy that they had
run into a really far-out man, long white hair, flowing white
beard. He did Ching reading, numerology, and other things and
had spiritual powers of some sort. They were getting more and
more into 

Sure enough, it was Warren. I had had lots of opportunities to
go see Warren but always managed to pass them up. Maybe if I
had met him earlier it would have helped lessen the shock of
our first encounter.

Now there was lots of talk about Warren and all his spiritual
gifts, wisdom, and powers, and that he probably knew all about
whatever had gone wrong with me. I dreaded going to see him
or having him come to see me. I'd never gotten on very well
with guru types and was perfectly happy with the adjustments
that had been made for my disabilities. Killing time till the cloud
blew over. But maybe the cloud wasn't going to blow over until I
faced Warren. Maybe Warren was in charge of the cloud.

I don't know how many of us went. I don't remember how
we got there. I don't even remember whether I knew we were
going to see Warren.

The door was opened by this white-haired, white-bearded

318 MARK VONNEGUT

man, skinny as a rail, with sunken raving eyes and a huge hook
nose, in a white-robe, holy-man outfit.

”We1come to my temple.”

Lots of white, incense, burning candles, little altars here and
there, a rnishmash of religious symbols and objects. We were
supposed to sit on cushions on the floor. He had a chair.

I can't believe that I and these other people here are really
sitting on cushions in front of this guy doing a white-robe bit in
such a rinkydink put-up job of a temple.

Gurus as a group are generally a kindly lot. But there was
nothing gentle or kindly about Warren in his appearance or
manner. His face and the face that had engulfed me some weeks
earlier had a lot in common.

I don't remember much of what was said. I blocked it out at
the time: Whatever else happens here, don't let the joker trick
you into saying the Lord's prayer backward. A limited objective,
you might say, but it seemed the most I could handle at the time
and when I left I wasn't even sure I had managed to achieve
that.

”Look, sweetheart, I don't give a shit what you say.”

”OK, pops, snap-fizzle-crack-pop. Sure, War.”

Nothing pissed Warren off more than my calling him War, but
I didn't dig his calling me sweetheart much so I figured we were
even, at least on that score.

Disbelief, naked terror, frustration, towering rage. This can't
be happening. I have to sit here and take this shit? I was furious
at Simon. I had put him in charge of reality and he had really
botched it. Judas? Was this what he had been up to all along? To
deliver me into the hands of War? All that feigned fuzziness,
leading me along? What was in it for him? Could I come up with
a counteroffer? He wouldn't look at me. He had the look of a
guilty chfld.

From not eating for quite a while I had developed a facial tic to
go along with the general shakiness of my whole body. I was
confused, upset, scared. Warren did everything he could to
amplify all this. He challenged me to try to stop the tic in my
face. He seemed to be trying to impress upon me the fact that he
and not I was in control of my body.

”You are dust dust dust. You will die and nothing will re-

The Eden Express 319

main.” True enough, but not really what I needed to hear at the
time.

Someone from the Stevens Street apartment had briefed him
about me. He used the information as if he had just divined it
clairvoyantly.

”You had a girl. She is not with you now.”

War was hooked on notions of spiritual power, satanic or
angelic didn't make much difference to him. If I had had an
inclination to believe that maybe he was somehow hypnotizing
me or in control of my heartbeat or an important part of some
cosmic plot——candy to a baby, dope to an addict. He did every-
thing to expand and amplify such notions.

He talked about earthquakes and other cataclysmic events.
”All this will pass away. There will be nothing left. Nothing.”

He kept changing subjects so often or jumbling them all
together that it was hard to keep anything straight.

”Do you see the way the light comes through the curtains?
Mountains will crumble into the sea. You had a girl but you
didn't love her, all you wanted to do was fuck her. I have the
mayor in my pocket. I know the Koran backwards and for-
wards. The forests are burning out of control. The Kennedys
will all be dust . . .”

There was a long, long recital of my sins and transgressions.
Lust was the biggie. Maybe he was going to straighten every-
thing out by slipping me a whomping dose of acid. There was a
direct link between my fuck-ups and mountains crumbling,
forests burning, and all of human suffering.

Everything was dying outside. The earth was passing away.
Like the tic in my face, it was something I could do nothing
about. The only safe place was in Warren's rinkydink temple. It
was like what happened when Atlantis sank, the end of the
land of Mu. I had a feeling Warren and I had both been there
and had more or less the same conversation. It would probably
happen again at the next apocalypse. What a bore.

I looked around the room. N 0 women and no blacks. A petty
point, I suppose.

Warren was real. I wasn't hallucinating him. The other people
were acknowledging him as real. If Warren was real, anything
was possible. His antics made my hallucinations pretty pale.

320 MARK VONNEGUT

The voices were the soul of rationality, salt-of-the-earth common
sense, next to what he was saying. My wildest thoughts sud-
denly seemed much too conservative to deal with what was
really happening.

If I had been difficult to deal with before Warren, it was
nothing compared to what I became afterward. A nuisance
turned menace. There was indeed something very heavy and of
vast proportions going on. All those thoughts, the voices and
the visions, weren't just ways to while away the time, things
that I might some day turn into short stories. There was, in fact,
a danger, and I was an important player in whatever was being
played out.

A clinical psychologist’s view of the situation might be that
before Warren got into the act I was not actively suicidal or
combative. Afterward I was. My paranoia, previously vague
and intermittent, almost playful, became full-time focused and
anything but playful.

Paranoia was the best way to deal with my situation, the most
hopeful way to make any sense of the things that were happen-
ing to me. If there was no sense to what was happening, no
intention, malignant or benign, then there was no hope. Would
you rather be chased by a pack of wild dogs that were hungry or
a pack of dogs that had a master who could, if he wanted to, call
them off?

Warren himself was hauled off to the nut house a few weeks
after I was. As I found out later, it wasn't his first such trip. An
interesting footnote to the whole thing is that he was picked up
by the cops from the lawn in front of the Stevens Street apart-
ment. The diagnosis: paranoid schizophrenic. A couple of
weeks after that, a freak wandered in off the street claiming that
God had led him there. He wrote poetry all over the wall and
claimed that there was someone after him. He was right. He
had busted out of a nut house somewhere in Ontario. I don't
know what it was about the Stevens Street apartment, but the
odds of such a chain of events says something.

Suicide. The twenty-four-hour watch system broke down from
time to time. I remember coming out of a long blank during

The Eden Express 321

which I had made love to every living thing, ingested gallons of
every poison known to man, and called the devil's bluff in a
game a lot like seven-card stud in an end-of-the-world baccha-
nal. I was still moving but Simon and everyone else were out
cold. I had relived the history of man and it was mostly ugly,
brutal, and macho. My dead grandfather was congratulating me
on winning. I was the toughest bastard who had ever lived and
my forefathers were very proud of me.

I got up and went into the bathroom. The mirror in ‘there was
the best way to broadcast back to planet earth.

”First I'd like to thank all the billions of people, animals, and
plants who made this possible.”

Looking in the mirror I could see that my body had become a
composite of all bodies. Half my face was Asian, an arm and a
leg were black. But it was more subtle than that. Everything that
had ever lived had contributed their best cell to make what I
now called me.

I tried to open the bathroom door but it wouldn't budge, and I
finally understood what I had to do. My life had been spiraling
toward this place and moment, pulled closer and closer to the
vortex, and now I was there. I cheerfully drew myself a nice hot
tub, found the razor blades they hadn't hidden very well and a
gallon jug of Clorox. I wasn't unhappy or bitter, I was humming
tunes from ”My Fair Lady.” I thought it would be lots of fun to
see if I really could kill myself, but Simon interrupted my little
party before I could decide whether it would be better to slash
my wrists and then drink the Clorox or vice versa.

At other times suicidal longings came from desperate un-
happiness, but everything was so confused I couldn't do a de-
cent job of it. I'd become convinced that something like sitting in
a certain chair, looking crosseyed at a psychedelic poster while
I chanted Om and clicked my heels together, would do the
trick. It became very hard for me to tell when I was committing
suicide and when I wasn't.

I had thought a fair amount about suicide before I went nuts.
It was often in connection with thinking about what sort of
positive move I could make toward solving the problems of the
world. The only way out of the mess the world was in that I
could see was to have fewer people. Maybe killing myself and
thereby making one less mouth to feed, one less body to clothe,

322 MARK VONNEGUT

one less excuse for the New York Times to kill trees, would do
more good than anything else.

I believe now that if I placed a twelve-gauge shotgun in my
mouth and pulled the trigger, I would cease to have conscious-
ness. I find it a comforting belief. Much of the terror of then was
that I had done that or the equivalent and it hadn't worked.

Before the crackup, suicidal impulses had been prodded by
my mortality: Since some day, why not now? But suicide now
sprang from desperate fear of immortality. I kept dying and
maintaining some form of consciousness.

Down from one fifty—five to about one twenty-five pounds,
deaf, dumb and blind, convulsing in my own puke, shit and
piss. If something wanted me to suffer, how much more could
they want? If there was a finite amount of suffering in the
world, I was sparing someone somewhere something, I was a
first-rate safety valve.

I don't pretend to know any more than anyone else about
what happens after death, but if there is such a thing as hell and
it's anything like some of the things I went through when I was
nuts, and you can avoid it by doing things as petty as not
coveting your neighbor's ass, by all means, DO NOT COVET
YOUR NEIGI-IBOR’S ASS.

At some point I gave up clothing. It was just too sticky and
confining, almost like drowning. N 0 Clothes would have maybe
been OK ifI hadn't taken it into my head to make a break for it.
Andre and Simon tackled me before I got very far, but a neigh-
bor saw me and told them that if he saw me anywhere near his
kids, he'd shoot me. Other neighbors were going to call the
cops about all the noise I was making, but the Sunshine Boys
always managed to calm them down. Somewhere in there I
threw a huge rock through the living—room picture window.

Gradually it became clear even to Simon that they might have
to put me in a hospital, if only to save their own sanity.

31- 36 3(-

1-"ebruary 14: Valentine's Day. Oh, God, it was awful. The end.
So fucking hopeless, so fucking lonely. And getting more and
more so and worse and worse. And harder and harder to hang
on. And oh, Mother, how did your poor son end up in such a

The Eden Express 323

depressing hopeless meaningless mess? And oh, Father, what’ s
gone so terribly wrong?

No more chances. No more people, trees, music, dogs. No
more anything.

But then suddenly I had allies. ”I thought you guys would
never get here.” Simon and my father, or damn convincing
hallucinations, were holding me up and talking about getting
me the hell out of that apartment. I hadn't been allowed outside
since my nude sprint around the block.

We were in a car going somewhere. The fuckers didn't have
me yet. My waiting game had paid off. I had allies.

I'd give almost anything for a tape of my ride to the hospital.
My father had a lot on his mind, but still, not to have brought
along a recorder verges on criminal neglect. My finest rave is
lost forever unless you believe in that big cassette in the sky.

I didn't think my rave was being lost at the time. I didn't
know it was just a normal day with a normal father and a nor-
mal friend of his son taking his son who had gone crazy to the
sort of place you normally take someone who's gone crazy.

It was bop talk. Like a '50s D]. I wasn't thinking, it was just all
there. Words a mile a minute. No second thoughts. No need or
time for them. Music.

Wazzzzzzzzzzzz Wassa what I thought my rave-a-rap a’
doin’. Passwords. Getting through to different teams and get-
ting them to climb aboard. Start a bandwagon. For what to start
a bandwagon? For to show those fuckers for to keep life going. I
had something that made H-bombs look like ladyfingers. I had
rhythm. And ain't no mother fucker nowhere nohow gonna
take it away.

”Hey Giuseppe, how good you think that joker swim with
some nice new cement booties?”

”Get the fuck out of the way. The team is coming together,
coming through. Anybody I ain't talkin’ to ain't gonna get
talked to by nobody. Climb aboard or get run the fuck over, Jack.
Get with it, Jack, or get off it.”

I had some modest goals. Like letting a few people know I
wasn't dead, that I was still in there somewhere. That I was
salvageable. I had some immodest goals, like saving the world.

One thing a tape of my ride to the hospital would show was

18 MARGERY KEMPE

and sheweth thee His privy counsels, of some that shall be
saved and some that shall be damned, therefore God chastiseth
thee in this wise and manner. And this chastising shall endure
twelve days, until thou wilt believe that it is God Who speaketh
to thee, and no devil.”

Then she said to her angel:—”Ah! I pray thee, pray for me to
My Lord Jesus Christ that He will vouchsafe to take from me
these cursed thoughts, and speak to me as He did before time,
and I shall make a promise to God that I shall believe it is God
Who hath spoken to me beforetime, for I may no longer endure
this great pain.”

Her angel said again to her:—

”Daughter, My Lord Jesus will not take it away from thee till
thou hast suffered it twelve days, for He will that thou know
thereby whether it is better that God speak to thee, or the devil.
And My Lord Jesus Christ is never the wrother with thee,
though He suffer thee to feel this pain.”

So she suffered that pain till twelve days were passed, and
then had she as holy thoughts, as holy memories and as holy
desires, as holy speeches and dalliance with Our Lord Jesus
Christ as ever she had before, Our Lord saying to her:—

”Daughter, believe now well that I am no devil.”

Then she was filled with joy, for she heard Our Lord speaking
to her as He was wont to do.

Therefore she said:—”I shall believe that every good thought
is the speech of God, blessed may Thou, Lord, be, that Thou
deign to comfort me again. I would not, Lord, for all this world,
suffer such another pain as I have suffered these twelve days,
for methought I was in Hell, blessed may Thou be that it is past.

”Therefore, Lord, now will I lie still and be obedient to Thy
will. I pray Thee, Lord, speak in me what is most pleasing to
Thee.”

324 MARK VONNEGUT

how I was responding to outside events. It was a dialogue. I'd
give some sort of a blues rap and then there’d be some horn or
something which was a ”yes" or "amen” from all blue freaks.
I'd do a Mafia thing and they'd answer, a woman's thing and
they'd say yes yes. A videotape would be even better. Flashing
neon signs and I had some very good raps. Jackhammers had
some very encouraging things to say. And big Diesel trucks and
fire sirens. Who would be dumb enough to try to mess with me
with Mack trucks, sirens, electricity, jackhammers, and traffic
lights all on my side?

Hospital. Back at the apartment Simon had asked me if I was
ready to go to the hospital. Sure I'm ready to go to the hospital.
I'll go anywhere. Father seems very worried, very nervous. I
guess there's no time to ask questions. Maybe everything will be
explained at the hospital.

Remember Lot’ s wife. Full speed ahead. This train is bound
for glory. Simon's driving beautifully, the car’ s running per-
fectly. Who's against us? How can we lose? We're on our way,
great God, we're on our way.

The shifting is music to my ears and the lights are all turning
green. Hold on tight, we're goin’ to make it. We're passing
everything on the road, and I hear myself rapping, cursing non-
stop, hitting every password just right.

And Simon gives a ”Wa hoo,” double-clutches down to third,
and passes another car. What a ride!

Why are they taking me to a hospital? Why is everything
whizzing by faster and faster? Why am I holding my breath?
Why do I feel so strange? Whatever is wrong is very strange.
This will doubtless be a very strange hospital.

When the car finally came to a stop, the place looked like the
Hyannisport Kennedy compound. I complimented Simon on
his driving. My father and Simon turned and looked at me
somberly.

When they left me, when three guys dressed in white started
walking me down that long hall, half holding me up, half hold-
ing me down, I understood. I had gone too far. I was putting too
much on the line. Simon and my father couldn't go the whole
way with me.

In a way, it was a relief not having any allies any more. Now if

The Eden Express 325

I fucked up, I fucked up on my own. I wouldn't drag a lot of
people through the shit with me. But maybe it was just a hold-
ing action. They were putting me in cold storage and going out
to get more allies.

Clunk, into that little room. Cuzzzunk, a huge mother bolt
ran the whole width of the door. A separation chamber? N 0 one
could breathe the sort of stuff I had to breathe to keep alive.

3? if 3(-

Biochemistry. At first my friends and I were doubtful that there
was any medical problem. It was all politics and philosophy.
The hospital bit was just grasping at straws when all else failed.

It took quite a bit to convince us that anything as pedestrian as
biochemistry was relevant to something as profound and poetic
as what I was going through. For me to admit the possibility
that I might not have gone nuts again had they given me pills
when I left was a tremendous concession.

It's such a poetic affliction from inside and out, it's not hard to
see how people have assumed that schizophrenia must have
poetic causes and that any therapy would have to be poetic as
well. A lot of my despair of ever getting well was based on the
improbability of finding a poet good enough to deal with all that
had happened to me. It's hard to say when I accepted the notion
that the problem was biochemical, it went so hard against every-
thing I had been taught about mental illness. At the farm we
were coming more and more to seeing physical illness as
psychological. A cold or slipping with a hammer and smashing
a finger was psychological. Schizophrenia was biochemical?

But the idea had a lot to recommend it. The hopelessness of
dealing with it on a poetic level was the start. The doctor who
had apparently been able to bring me out of it was working from
a biochemical model. According to most authorities who be-
lieved in this or that poetic theory, my case was hopeless. The
biochemists said otherwise. The poets in the business gave little
hope and huge bills. The chemists fixed me up with embar-
rassingly, inexpensive, simple nonprescription pills. Vitamins
mostly. The biochemists said no one was to blame. The poets all
had notions that required someone’s having made some
mistake.

The AMA had no particular affection for megavitamin ther-

326 MARK VONNEGUT

apy. That was something. Anything the AMA hated couldn't be
all bad.

The more research I studied, the more impressed I was. I
remain converted.

19 76%
Insanity Inside Out, by Kenneth Donaldson

A central issue in the psychiatry of our time is that of the civil rights of
patients. Kenneth Donaldson, carpenter, factory worker, law student
by correspondence, and for fifteen years, ”professional patient,” has
been intimately acquainted with this issue.

In 1943, at the age of thirty-four, Donaldson was working as a
milling machine operator for the General Electric Company in Syra-
cuse, New York. He began to feel that other workers in the plant were
against him, that people were watching him. He heard swearing be-
hind his back and threatening remarks that seemed to refer to him.
One day, on the way to the parking lot, he became confused. Hours
later he found himself wandering downtown. He was taken to Marcy
State Hospital near Utica and given electroshock therapy that seemed
to do little except disturb his concentration and memory. For thirteen
years Donaldson moved from job to job around the country. It
seemed that wherever he went, hard luck and persecution followed.
In Arizona he heard people speaking behind his back. Barbers were
calling him a sex deviant. Fellow workers played tricks on him. He
overheard some women planning to medicate his food in order to
control his sex life. In St. Louis strangers insulted him. When he went
to the toilet, noises were made to insult him. People still talked about
him. In Savannah, Georgia, the persecution continued so he went to
South Carolina, where the same kinds of events persisted. He re-
turned to Syracuse, but the people at work seemed to be ridiculing
him because he ”shunned sex.” Each time he used the toilet a horn
blew. In Los Angeles clerks in several stores and banks seemed to be
hazing him. Someone put medicine in his food. He eventually re-
turned to Florida to live with his parents in a trailer court.

In 1956 two police officers arrested him on the authority of his
father, who had initiated commitment proceedings. After several
days in jail and brief conversations with two physicians and a judge,
Donaldson was sent to the White Male Department of the sixty-eight-
hundred-bed Florida State Hospital at Chattahoochee, where he re-
mained for almost fifteen years. There he witnessed incredible
abuses—vicious beatings, teasing, and other manipulations by atten-
dants—and seldom saw a physician. Introducing himself as a Chris-
tian Scientist he was usually able to avoid the two kinds of treatment

327

328 KENNETH DONALDSON

Chattahoochee had to offer: pills and electroshock therapy. During
the entire fifteen years Donaldson insisted he was sane, although his
commitment papers described him as a ”schizophrenia paranoiac
who was seeing and hearing things and was possibly dangerous to
the people of the state.” He behaved reasonably, even though at
times his feelings of persecution recurred. A previous study of law by
correspondence came in handy; he was able to have a fellow patient
released by court order. Donaldson petitioned nineteen times to
various courts for his own release. The first eighteen were rejected.
Typically, the court asked for the opinions of Chattahoochee physi-
cians, but the physicians would simply repeat what was written on
the original admittance papers. Although they were not treating
Donaldson, they held him because he had been placed there by a
legal commitment. They continued to label him as a ”paranoid
schizophrenic” who was ”possibly dangerous.” For fifteen years the
man insisted on his insanity, writing letters asking for help and taking
notes for a book to expose the asylum system. Unfortunately, the
doctors saw these activities as firm evidence of his mental incompe-
tence. One physician described Donaldson this way: ”This is to cer-
tify that I have this date, again interviewed Kenneth Donaldson . . .
he does not realize he is mentally ill. . . . He states that if he is
released he will obtain a civilian job and publish a book of his hospi-
talization for the past 20 years which illustrates he has little insight of
his own condition.”

In 1971 Donaldson was able to get a court hearing of his case, asking
for his release and $100,000 in damages. While the case was in court,
physicians at Chattahoochee decided to release him but he continued
his suit. It was demonstrated in court that Donaldson had not resided
in Florida long enough for a legal commitment, had never threatened
anyone, had not been properly examined before commitment, had
received very little attention and no psychiatric treatment during his
fifteen years’ incarceration, and that to all appearances he was sane
and competent. As part of the evidence justifying his imprisonment,
Chattahoochee physicians testified that when Donaldson drew stick
figures on a psychological test he did not put pupils in their eyes. A
psychologist described that as one indication of paranoid schizophre-
nia. Under cross-exarnination, however, the psychologist admitted
that although Little Orphan Annie's creator never put in pupils either
he had somehow managed to survive outside an institution. The jury
concluded that two of Chattahoochee’s physicians had acted ”mali-
ciously or wantonly or oppressively” and awarded Donaldson

Insanity Inside Out 329

$38,500 damages. The two physicians went on to appeal the case, and
it was eventually brought before the bench of the United States Su-
preme Court. That court also ruled in Donaldson’s favor, stating that
his ”constitutional right to liberty had been violated.” The court re-
ferred the particular issue of monetary damages back to a Florida
district court.

Donaldson was the first American psychiatric patient ever to win
damages against his physicians, and he was the first ever to be heard
by the Supreme Court. It is important to understand, however, that
his is not really an isolated case. Examination of patients’ periodicals
such as Madness Network News (San Francisco, Glide Press) or Con-
structive Action (Syracuse, Shirley Burghard) reveals numerous similar
cases of questionable psychiatric practice. Donaldson made it to the
courts because he was tremendously persistent and because some
powerful lawyers and law organizations took an interest in his case.

Among other things his lawyers hoped that Donaldson’s case
would establish a ”Right to Treatment” precedent in the courts—that
people confined in a psychiatric institution have a right to either
adequate psychiatric treatment or release. Since Donaldson had re-
ceived virtually no treatment for fifteen years, his seemed a good test
case. Unfortunately the right to treatment issue is a red herring. It
was created with the hope of releasing large numbers of untreated
patients from confinement. However, as long as physicians define
what they are doing as ”treatment” they can justify their use of
confinement.‘

Donaldson’s case was so clear-cut that the Supreme Court was able
to consider it by sidestepping the broader, much more important
issue of the constitutionality of commitment. In many states, simply
on the word of one or two experts, people alleged to be ”a danger to
themselves, or to others, or severely disabled” can be deprived of
many of the civil rights ordinarily guaranteed by the constitution.
They can be imprisoned without having committed a crime and var-
ious treatments can be administered without their consent. If the case
somehow goes to court, judges will traditionally defer to the opinions
of the knowledgeable psychiatric professional.

Thomas Szasz compares the contemporary issue of commitment to
the issue of slavery as it was seen in the early nineteenth century.
Because slavery already existed in many parts of America, it was

‘See Szasz, Psychiatric Slavery.

330 KENNETH DONALDSON »

assumed to be acceptable, a necessary evil. People didn't ask how to
do away with slavery but how to improve plantations. The real issue,
however, was not whether slaves were happy, or whether slavery was
good for them, but rather, was slavery morally right? Donaldson was
held as a ”possible danger,” yet who has the moral right to determine
what is ”possibly" going to happen? Do we hold people for ”possible
thievery” or ”possible murder”?

Donaldson has achieved some prominence since his trial. Insanity
Inside Out, the autobiographical account of his life as a patient,
appeared in 1976, supplementing his career on the lecture circuit. The
book is a hodgepodge of descriptions of ward life, sketches of in-
teresting patients, verbatim accounts of conversations with his
physicians, legal documents, and notes on his case from the
Chattahoochee files, all placed in a vaguely chronological sequence.

Donaldson presents a very fair, balanced self-portrait. From what
he openly tells us, he did indeed hear things, imagine peculiar tastes
in his food, imagine a conspiracy. Beyond these elements of suspi-
ciousness and exaggerated self-reference, however, the man displays
an impressive intelligence and rationality.

Some of the sketches of fellow patients and ward life are
tremendously precise and well-observed; but most interesting are the
accounts of his encounters with Chattahoochee physicians—giving a
most frightening vision of authority as seen from underneath, from
”inside out.” Having the law and the prestige of their positions to
back them up, these psychiatrists hardly strain in justifying their
treatment of Donaldson. The resulting conversations seem to be right
out of Catch—Z2, and the overall narrative is reminiscent of Kafka’s The
Trial. A number of doctor-patient conversations are excerpted here.

MY MAIN INTERRUPTION in a plodding summer was a call by
Gumanis. ”What ward are you on . . . ?” he asked.

Then I interrupted, ”How is my transfer coming to New
Jersey? I wrote you about it nine months ago?”

”Doctor Rogers wrote them that you were a resident of
Florida.”

”But that’ s not so.”

”Your commitment papers-—and I read them myse1f—say

Insanity Inside Out 331

you lived in Florida for four years. Rogers says there is nothing
he can do and New Jersey has dropped the matter.”

”But—”

31- 1- 3(-

”Doctor O'Connor,” Davis began, ”asked me to have a chat
with you.”

”Before we start anything," I said, ”I would like to get one
thing straight. It was nine months after I saw you, that I saw
Gumanis again, and when I asked how I did on the tests he said
you said I had hallucinations. Just what hallucinations did I
have?”

”I don't remember. Let me go check.” He left me alone for
five minutes, then reported, ”There is nothing in your record
about hallucinations.”

Here was proof Gumanis had lied, so I thought.

”Shall we proceed to take some tests, Mr. Donaldson?”

”I’d rather not. I don't need any tests. There was nothing
wrong with me when I came to Florida and there is nothing
wrong with me today. You can't tell anyone that I'm out of my
head—you just said there were no hallucinations. Then why are
you holding me? Why didn't Chattahoochee let my home state
of New Jersey take me?”

”I’m sure no one in Chattahoochee would want to keep you if
you were eligible for transfer."

”But that's just what they are doing.”

"I know better because that was my first job and if you are
entitled to one you'll get it.”

”But somebody lied and—”

”Nobody at Chattahoochee lied about you—least of all a
doctor!”

3? 3? 3(-

”You have been ‘seek’ all your life," were Char’s first words to
me. ”You have spent half your life in state hospitals.”

I let that pass, figuring the reasonableness of my story would
discount whatever Gumanis had told him. I took some notes
from my shirt pocket, which I had jotted down during a restless
night. I brought up the first point: "Why should Florida hold me
when my home state offered to take me back?”

”What have you got there?” Char asked excitedly, grabbing

332 KENNETH DONALDSON

the small piece of paper. ”I can read. I can read. You think you
have to read them to me?” His bushy black brows pushed over
the top of his glasses.

”No, no. They are only notes so I wouldn't forget some-
thing.”

Char read aloud: ”last letter, 1957" and ”have place to go.”
His face was triumphant. He gloated, ”See, you don't make
sense. You can't even write a complete sentence.”

I gave up. Another morning wasted. But Char was too excited
to restrain himself. Opening my chart to my letter, he said,
”See—-here—you say you saw me seventeen times. You're seek
when you say something like that.”

”I have a copy of the letter. Show me where I said that.”
Pointing it out, he read aloud: ’“. . . when you saw me on
seventeenth instant.’ That means you thought you saw me
seventeen times. So you see for yourself.”

”Oh, my God!” I thought. ”What have I drawn this hand?”
But I kept from laughing, feeling that such a jerk I should be
able to find some way to lead.

”In English,” I said politely, ”that means the current month.
That meant the seventeenth of February, the month I wrote it.”

"I know what it means,” he snapped. ”You don't have to tell
me. You are seek. Besides, why do you save your letters? What
good are they to you?”

Still hoping to salvage something, I said, ”Tell me one way in
which I am mentally ill.”

”I cannot do that. It would take too long. I have tried to
explain it to some of the others. I have spent hours—it is a
waste of time.”

But there was kindness in his voice too. I felt it worth another
try: ”Look at it this way then. I sleep and eat regularly. I have no
crazy ideas. I don't bother people. I'm not nervous. Name just
one way in which I am sick.”

”I can't.”

”]ust one way.”

”You are seek.”

1- 31- 3(-

Rich said, ”You’re schizophrenic. I'll tell you what,

Donaldson. I promise to let you go one year from now if you'll

take a course of medication for six months.”

Insanity Inside Out 333

”No,” I said. That would give them the proof they needed
and leave me no recourse. ”I don't need any medication.”

”What do you say, Gumanis?”

”I agree with you, Doctor Rich. Why don't you try it, Kenny?
You've tried everything else.”

”But I don't need any pills.”

”Then you'll stay here forever!” Rich said. ”Either you take
pills for six months or I'll never let you go.”

"That’s coercion,” I said.

”We could give you the needle. That would be coercion,
wouldn't it?”

Any further remarks by me, I feared, would only cause him to
double whatever the pill man was bound to have for me at
supper.

”Don’t you know we have the right to treat you when they
send you here?”

I answered with a craven “Yes.”

36 39 3!-

The day of staff, March 21, Hanenson called me to say: ”You
must not show any hostility. Hostility is the one thing that
bothers Rich. Don't argue. If some doctor says something you
don't like, don't answer. Do I make myself clear? You don't
belong in here, I've got the votes to get you out. Don't argue
with the doctors.”

I was the first one called. O'Connor was not present. My
chart, top one of five, lay open in front of Rich, who leafed a few
pages. The two letters from John Lemboke were on the very
top.

Rich: ”The next time you come to staff, I hope you have a plan
to present.”

Me: ”There—”

Rich: ”The only reason the hospital has not released Mr.
Donaldson to his friend in New York is because his friend has
not shown interest enough to so much as notify the hospital he
is willing to take him out.”

Hanenson (with his hand on my arm): ”I will work something
out for Kennet .”

(There were a number of questions by younger doctors on the
details of the case.)

Dunin (sitting at far end of table this time, which was half

1677, 16 78%
The Diary of Christoph Haizmann

The marks of true demonic possession were clear in the minds of
medieval authorities. Possessed persons could not pray, take the
Eucharist, or look upon the image of Christ without fear. They were
prone to bodily convulsions, uncontrollable grimacing and contortion
of the face, rolling of the eyes, and uncontrollable rages of cursing
and blasphemy in a voice not their own.1

The treatment for possession was the ritual of exorcism performed
by a priest. By the seventeenth century, the Church had established a
standard formula for exorcism, written into the Rituale Romcmum. First
the priest prays to himself, to gather his own strength and confi-
dence. Then he commands, ”in the name of him who rules the seas
and the winds, the heavens and earth, in the name of him who was
crucified by men,” that the Devil, ”the adversary of all,” leave the
body of the possessed and return to ”the regions from whence he
came.” Having spoken that command, the priest places his crucifix
upon the forehead of the possessed, then upon the heart, and again
upon the forehead, stating that the power to heal the possessed
comes not from any earthly source, but from God above.2

Christoph Haizmann was a painter, a native of Bavaria, staying for
a time in the Seignory of Pottenbrunn, near Vienna. On August 29,
1677, while attending church, Haizmann was seized by what a clerical
witness described as ”certain unnatural convulsions."3 The seizures
continued through that day and into the next until at last Haizmann
was taken to the prefect of Pottenbrunn. The prefect asked him

‘Neaman, Suggestion of the Devil, p. 32. In the late nineteenth century, Charcot and
others began to examine medieval accounts and concluded that the possessed were
really suffering from what was soon to be called ”schizophrenia.” The simple equation of
possession and schizophrenia, however, is inappropriate. One suspects that medieval
possessions arose from a number of sources, including a recently identified disease
known as Tourette’s Syndrome, a poorly understood loss of normal inhibitory processes
leading to violent tics and loud outbursts including coprolalia (involuntary utterances of
obscenities).

2Ibid., p. 33.

3Haizmann’s narrative of demonic possession is the sole account we shall consider in
which the central figure was not thought to be mad at, or soon after, the time of the
experience. Though Kempe had visions of devils and for a time thought she was

19

334 KENNETH DONALDSON

filled, about fifteen present): ”You remember me. . . . You say
your parents put you in here. Didn't they?”

Me: ”They requested I be examined.”

Dunin: ”That’s the same thing.”

Me: ”But they're not doctors.”

Dunin: ”But members of families know best. The only thing
wrong with you is that you don't know you're sick. Look at
me—I have diabetes. So I take medicine for it. You have mental
illness and don't know it. You can't see it—that’s why you are
mentally ill. But instead of being sensible like me and taking
some medication for it—no, you'd rather stay here the rest of
your life. That's your illness, Donaldson—you are so sick you
won't admit it.”

An unidentified doctor: ’’Florida law says you must be ex-
amined by two doctors before commitment.”

Me: ”I know that. That's why I object. It's fraud—abso1ute
fraud in my case.”

Doctor: ”If the law says you must be examined by two doc-
tors, then you were examined by two doctors.”

31- 3(- 3(-

R: ”I’d like to put you to staff. But I couldn't get you a com-
petency discharge. You are schizophrenic. You've been schizo-
phrenic all your life. But you're not dangerous. There are lots of
schizophrenic people outside—they don't hurt anyone. But
you'd have to have somebody be responsible for you.”

Me: ”I had someone.”

R: ”No you didn't. Nobody wants you. Your family doesn't
want you. Why is your family against you?”

Me: ”That’s not so.”

R: ”But your mother won't take you out. Why not?”

Me: ”She’s dead. And my father died last year.”

R: ”It says in here your children don't want you.”

Me: ”My children tried to get me out.”

R: ”All these doctors here have said the same thing. Why do
you think everybody is against you?”

Me: "I never said that. The whole case consists of presump-
tions and assumptions. And lies.”

R: ”And how about all your psychological tests here? Did you
know that you didn't pass them?”

Insanity Inside Out 335

Me: ”Doctor Chacon told me that I had passed the last four
times.”

R: ”I’1l let you go out of state whenever you can get anyone
responsible to take you.” [Then, after reading in my chart.]
”Here—Doctor Hanenson wrote your friend Mr. Lemboke not
to ever write you again or ever to take you out, because you
would never be well.”

Me: ”That explains that.”

36 3% 3(-

W: ”What I would like to know is why the staff did not pass
you two years ago.”

Me: ”They did.”

D: ”That’s right, he did pass.”

W: ”Why are they holding you then?”

Me: ”That’s the question I'd like to have an answer to.”

W: ”There’s something wrong here."

D: ”There is.”

Epilogue

THE INTRODUCTION of effective antipsychotic medications in the
1950s, combined with a massive federal program in the follow-
ing decade and the overdue liberalization of many state commit-
ment laws, produced a complete reversal of the century-long
trend toward centralized institutional care in America. Between
1955 and 1975 the number of patients in state psychiatric institu-
tions decreased by two-thirds, from 559,000 to 193,000. That
new policy of what was called ”deinstitutionalization” has, to a
large degree, eliminated many of the visible vices of the institu-
tion-cities of mid-century: overcrowding, shortages, and under-
staffing. But we still must ask whether it has actually improved
the lives of mad people in America, or whether it is simply a
retrogression toward the earlier fragmented and irresponsible
systems of local care.‘

The seeds for this profound shift in American institutional
patterns were sown in 1955 when Congress established the Joint
Commission on Mental Illness and Health to survey psychiatric
care in America and to suggest a comprehensive national policy.
In 1960 the commission recommended to Congress the estab-
lishment of a community-based care system which would
emphasize outpatient care and coordinate a massive transfer of
patients from the old state and federal asylums into smaller,
more personal psychiatric care units, such as halfway houses,
foster care homes, therapeutic boarding houses, and private
residences. In 1963 Congress began to implement the commis-

‘Information in this section is taken from Bassuk and Gerson, ”Deinstitutionalization
and Mental Health Services,” pp. 46-53. I J’ -

336  A 5

Epilogue 337

sion’s recommendations by providing federal funds to build
community psychiatric: centers. These new centers would be
run by the communities they served and would eventually be-
come self-supporting. By 1975 over five hundred centers were
built, with ninety-six more ready for construction.

The goal of ”deinstitutionalization” was eventually achieved
—state institutions have reduced their populations by 65
percent. The benefits of that reduction, however, are open to
question. Just as nineteenth-century reformers hoped that the
very institutional edifices themselves held curative power, so
the reformers of the 1950s and 1960s assumed that these institu-
tions were, in themselves, anti-curative. They may have been
right. But have they provided adequate alternatives?

The hope was that these masses of deinstitutionalized pa-
tients would continue to receive psychiatric treatment within, or
coordinated by, the community centers. The fact is that less than
half the necessary centers have been built or even planned, and
the ones that do exist are chronically short of money and staff.
The hope was that those who did receive genuine treatment
would improve. The fact is that we hardly know where to begin,
in treating most psychiatric problems; the new antipsychotic
medications have enabled some patients to control their most
severe experiences, but these medications have hardly pro-
duced mass cures. The hope was that the many patients
released from the large institutions would eventually be reinte-
grated into their communities, but the fact is that although some
ex-patients have adjusted on the outside, and others are living
well within smaller psychiatric care units, still others are left to
bleak lives in residential hotels and substandard inner-city
rooms and apartments. Sometimes marked as peculiar in be-
havior and appearance, isolated, often without occupation or
interest, these wandering ”mad people” of today may be no
better off than they would have been two and three decades ago.

California commitment laws were vastly liberalized in 1969
with the passage of the Landis Petris Short Act, which provided
a number of strict safeguards for people taken in as mental
patients. Among the safeguards are the requirements for very
short ”holds,” along with a number of rights for legal review.
One result is that it is much more difficult to deprive a person of

338 Epilogue

his or her civil rights through psychiatric measures in my state.
Another result is that some people wander the streets and sleep
in the alleys.

There is, in the town where I live and work, a woman who
wanders about talking to herself. At the time of this writing she
appears to be in the final stages of pregnancy, and I am told she
sometimes sleeps in a creek bed. When I saw her a month ago,
running down the middle of a busy street, shouting at herself,
striking herself, I called the police. I asked them what could be
done, and whether there was any way to help this young
woman, or at least see to it that her pregnancy was somehow
cared for. The police told me that they knew her well, she was a
local transient, and that they used to pick her up in the past and
take her to a hospital, but they had given up. They told me she
preferred to be out on the streets, and no physician was willing
to attempt to hold her—after all, she wasn't a danger to herself
or others. ”What about her unborn child?” I asked the police.
”Isn’t she a danger to it? ” They refused to admit that possibility.

I think it is of immense importance that all adults are assumed
to possess certain basic civil rights and that communities toler-
ate some measure of deviance. The postwar American vision of
itself as a clean society composed of clean individuals all con-
nected to separate nuclear families, all living in separate houses,
allowed little room for deviance. Misfits were better unseen in
institutions than seen on the streets. Fortunately, we have
grown beyond that narrow ideal. We are more tolerant. But are
we more caring? The danger is that the emptying of the old
large institutions may lead not to some improved system of care
for the helpless but to the old eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century habits of abandonment.

Appendices
Bibliography


Appendix I

Ancient and Medieval
Visions of Madness

@While the word was in the king’ s mouth, there fell a voice
from heaven, saying, 0 king Nebuchadnezzar, to thee it is
spoken; The kingdom is departed from thee. And they shall
drive thee from men, and thy dwelling shall be with the beasts
of the field; they shall make thee to eat grass as oxen, and seven
times shall pass over thee, until thou know that the most High
ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever he
will. The same hour was the thing fulfilled upon N ebuchadnez-
zar: and he was driven from men, and did eat grass as oxen, and
his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were
grown like eagles’ feathers, and his nails like birds’ claws.
[Daniel 4:31-33]

9': Men ought to know that from the brain, and from the brain
only, arise our pleasures, joys, laughter and jests, as well as our
sorrows, pains, griefs and tears. Through it, in particular, we
think, see, hear, and distinguish the ugly from the beautiful, the
bad from the good, the pleasant from the unpleasant. . . . It is
the same thing which makes us mad or delirious, inspires us
with dread and fear, whether by night or by day, brings sleep-
lessness, inopportune mistakes, aimless anxieties, absent-
mindedness, and acts that are contrary to habit. These things
that we suffer all come from the brain, when it is not healthy,
but becomes abnormally hot, cold, moist, or dry, or suffers any
other natural affection to which it was not accustomed. Mad-
ness comes from its moistness. [Hippocrates (c. 460-377 B.C.):
The Sacred Disease]

341

342 Appendix I

gfilf a man is mad he shall not be at large in the city, but his
family shall keep him at home in any way which they can; or if
not, let them pay a penalty. . . . Now there are many sorts of
madness, some arising out of disease, which we have already
mentioned; and there are other kinds, which originate in an evil
and passionate temperament, and are increased by bad educa-
tion; out of a slight quarrel this class of madmen will often raise
a storm of abuse against one another, and nothing of that sort
ought to be allowed to occur in a well-ordered state. [Plato
(c. 428-348 B.C.): Laws]

I5: But in dealing with the spirits of all patients suffering from
insanity, it is necessary to proceed according to the nature of
each case. Some need to have empty fears relieved, as was done
for a wealthy man in dread of starvation, to whom pretended
legacies were from time to time announced. Others need to
have their violence restrained as is done in the case of those who
are controlled even by flogging. In some also untimely laughter
has to be put a stop to by reproof and threats; in others, melan-
choly thoughts are to be dissipated, for which purpose music,
cymbals, and noises are of use. More often, however, the pa-
tient is to be agreed with rather than opposed, and his mind
slowly and imperceptibly is to be turned from the irrational talk
to something better. At times also his interest should be
awakened; as may be done in the case of men who are fond of
literature, to whom a book may be read, correctly when they are
pleased by it, or incorrectly if that very thing annoys them; for
by making corrections they begin to divert their mind. . . . If,
however it is the mind that deceives the madman, he is best
treated by certain tortures. When he says or does anything
wrong, he is to be coerced by starvation, fetters and flogging.
He is to be forced both to fix his attention and to learn some-
thing and to memorize it; for thus it will be brought about that
little by little he will be forced by fear to consider what he is
doing. To be terrified suddenly and to be thoroughly frightened
is beneficial in this illness and so, in general, is anything which
strongly agitates the spirit. [Celsus (First century A.D.): De re
medica]

Ancient and Medieval Visions of Madness 343

5fiAnd when he was come out of the ship, immediately there
met him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit, Who
had his dwelling among the tombs; and no man could bind him,
no, not with chains: Because that he had been often bound with
fetters and chains, and the chains had been plucked asunder by
him, and the fetters broken in pieces; neither could any man
tame him. And always, night and day, he was in the mountains,
and in the tombs, crying, and cutting himself with stones. But
when he saw Jesus afar off, he ran and worshipped him. And
cried with a loud voice, and said, What have I to do with thee,
Jesus, thou Son of the most high God. I adjure thee by God, that
thou torment me not. For he said unto him, Come out of the
man, thou unclean spirit. And he asked him, What is thy name?
And he answered, saying, My name is Legion: for we are many.
And he besought him much that he would not send them away
out of the country. Now there was there nigh unto the moun-
tains a great herd of swine feeding. And all the devils besought
him, saying, Send us into the swine, that we may enter into
them. And forthwith Jesus gave them leave. And the unclean
spirits went out, and entered into the swine: and the herd ran
violently down a steep place into the sea, (they were about two
thousand;) and were choked in the sea. And they that fed the
swine fled, and told it in the city, and in the country. And they
went out to see what it was that was done. And they came to
Jesus, and see him that was possessed with the devil, and had
the legion, sitting, and clothed, and in his right mind: and they
were afraid. [Mark 522-15]

4'1 How wretchedly do false appearances distract men in certain
diseases! With what astonishing variety of appearances are even
healthy men sometimes deceived by evil spirits, who produce
these delusions for the sake of perplexing the senses of their
victims, if they cannot succeed in seducing them to their side!
[St. Augustine (354—43O A.D.): The City of God]

$3 Expulsion of a Demon by Saint Martin

The Saint, it chanced, had stopped before a house;
he went to enter, at the threshold paused,

20 CHRISTOPH HAIZMANN

”whether perhaps he practised the forbidden arts or was tangled in a
pact with the Devil.” Haizmann made the following confession.

Almost nine years earlier, while despondent over the death of his
father, and troubled about his career as an artist, Haizmann met the
Devil in a forest, disguised as a respectable old man. The Devil
offered to help him in his life, provided that he would give the Devil
power over his soul after nine years. Haizmann refused nine times
but at last was persuaded to sign a pact, first in ink, later in blood.
With great remorse and fear, Haizmann explained to the prefect that
the pact was to fall due within a month, on September 24, 1677. He
begged to be sent to the Shrine of the Most Blessed Virgin at Zell—
otherwise known as Mariazell——to be exorcised.

The prefect sent him to Mariazell, where for three days and nights
the exorcist, Father Sebastian Meitinger, ordered the Devil to appear
at the Altar of the Virgin to return the written pact and restore
Haizmann. At midnight of the third day, the day of the Feast of the
Nativity, Haizmann saw the Devil at the altar, holding the piece of
paper on which the first pact was written. Haizmann broke loose from
the grasp of the priests around him and tore the scrap of paper out of
the Devil's hands.

Immediately after that dramatic midnight event, Haizmann’s sei-
zures stopped. In gratitude, he stayed at Mariazell long enough to
paint the story of his several encounters with the Devil and his
seemingly successful exorcism. At last, sure of his recovery, he left
Mariazell and went to Vienna, to live with his sister and her husband.

However, the convulsions and possession returned. Haizmann had
several frightening visions of the Devil in Vienna, which he recorded
in a diary, and at last, in early May 1678, he returned to Mariazell,
asking once again for the rite of exorcism. On May 9, after much
priestly invocation, the Devil gave up the second pact, the one writ-
ten in blood. Thereafter, according to clerical accounts, Haizmann
was fully free from demonic bondage. For the rest of his life he was
tempted by the Devil to sign another pact, but he never again yielded.
In 1700 Haizmann died peacefully.

The account we have comes relatively directly from original
sources—Haizmann’s diary, his paintings, eyewitness accounts-

possessed, simultaneously she was treated for madness. Haizmann, on the other
hand, was treated solely for possession—nothing more. However, I think that
Haizmann’s experience was an experience of what we would call madness, simply seen
from a different world-view. Other twentieth century commentators hold the same
opinion. Therefore, I include it in this ”history of madness.”

344 Appendix I

scenting a dreadful demon’s shadow there.

A cook, possessed, had grown a ravening beast,
biting his comrades and himself for food.

The others ran and feared to cross his path,
scarcely escaping safe for all their speed

and pleased enough to win unbitten out.

Our iron-heart, God's soldier, Martin, stood

and would not budge nor let the maniac pass.

He bade the Thing of gnashing plague to halt,
thrusting his holy fingers in its mouth.

”Here, wolf of evil, here is offered food.
Elsewhere you hunt, here's meat between your teeth.”
The jaws of fury slowly opened out, a
they dared not bite. Gaping, the beast was held
and feared the touch of flesh it longed to tear.

The cornered spirit was convulsed with pain

yet might not pass the mouth those fingers closed.
Then, leaving trails of foulness on the air,

the filthy presence backed through filth away,
blasting an outlet fit for driven fiends.

[St. Columban (sixth century, A.D.)]

4': Of Madnes-—And the Causes and Signes Therof. Amentia and
maddness is all one, as Plato sayeth. . . . And as the causes be
divers, the tokens 8: signes ben diverse. For some cryen, 8: lepe,
& hurt & wounde them selfe & other men, & derken & hide them
self in privy & secret places: of whose disposicion & difference it
is reherced tofore in the fifthe boke, where it is treated of the
passion of the brayne. The medicines of them is, that they be
bounde—that they hurt not them selfe & other men. And namely
suche shall be refreshed & comfortid—& withdrawen from cause
and mater of drede and besy thoughtes. And they muste be
gladded with instrumentes of Musike-—and some deale be occu-
pied. And at the laste if purgations and electuaries suffisen
not—they shall be holpe with crafte of Surgery. [Bartholomaeus
Anglicus (thirteenth century): De proprietatibus renum]

:33 That demons harass men according to certain phases of the
moon happens in two ways. . . . it is manifest that ”the brain is

Ancient and Medieval Visions of Madness 345

the most moist of all the parts of the body,” as Aristotle says.
Therefore it is the most subject to the action of the moon, the
property of which is to move what is moist. And it is precisely in
the brain that animal forces culminate. Therefore the demons,
according to certain phases of the moon, disturb man's
imagination, when they observe that the brain is so disposed.
[St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-1274 A.D.): Summa theologica]

é There are four kinds of insane people: Lunatici, Insani, Vesani
and Melancholici. Lunatici are those who get the disease from
the moon and react according to it. Insani are those who have
been suffering from it since birth and have brought it from the
womb as a family heritage. Vesani are those who have been
poisoned and contaminated by food and drink, from which they
lose reason and sense. Melancholici are those who by their na-
ture lose their reason and turn insane. We must, however, note
that apart from these four kinds there is another kind: these are
the Obsessi who are obsessed by the devil; the various ways in
which this happens are treated by us in De spiritibus. But here
we deal with those who are insane by nature, and sufferers of
these four kinds cannot become obsessed by the devil and his
company, as many people say. [Paracelsus (1493-1541): On the
Origin of Truly Insane People]

gfiAnother was one, whyche after that he had fallen in to ye
frantike heresyes, fell soone after in to playne open fransye
bysyde. And all be it that he had therfore ben put uppe in
bedelem, and afterwarde by betynge and correccyon gathered
hys remembraunce to hym, and beganne to come agayne to
hym selfe beynge theruppon set at lyberty and walkynge about
abrode, hys olde fansyes begarme to fall agayne in his hed. And
I was fro dyvers good holy places advertised, that he used in his
wanderynge aboute, to come into the chyrche, & there make
many madde toyes & tryfles, to the trouble of good people in
the dyvyne servyce and specially wold he be most besy in the
tyme of most sylence, whyle the preste was at the secretes of the
masse aboute ye levacyon. And yf he spyed any woman knel-
ynge at a fonne yf her hed hynge any thynge low in her medyta-
cyons, than wolde he stele behynde her, & yf he were not letted

346 Appendix I

wolde laboure to lyfte up all her clothes & caste them quyte over
her hed, wheruppon I beyng advertysed of these pageauntes,
and beynge sent unto and requyred by very devout relygyouse
folke, to take some other order wyth hym caused him as he
came wanderyng by my dore, to be taken by the constables and
bounden to a tre in the strete byfore the whole towne, and there
they stryped hym with roddys therfore tyl he waxed wery and
somwhat lenger. And it appered well that hys remembraunce
was good inough, save yt it wente about in grasynge tyll it was
beten home. For he could than very well reherse hys fawtes
hym selfe, and speke and trete very well, and promyse to do
afterwarde as well. [More, The Apologye of Syr T. More, Knyght
(1533)]

gt? Poor Tom, that eats the swimming frog, the toad, the tadpole,
the wal-newt and the water; that in the fury of his heart, when
the old foul fiend rages, eats cow-dung for sallets, swallows the
old rat and the ditch-dog, drinks the green mantle of the stand-
ing pool; who is whipped from tithing to tithing, and stocked,
punished, and imprisoned; who hath had three suits to his
back, six shirts to his body,

Horse to ride, and weapon to wear,

But mice and rats, and such small deer,

Have been Tom's food for seven long year.
[Shakespeare, King Lear (1605)]

4'1 Arculanus will have these symptoms to be infinite, as indeed
they are, varying according to the parties, for scarce is there one
of a thousand that dotes alike. . . . Fear and Sorrow are no
common symptoms to all melancholy; upon more serious con-
sideration, I find some that are not so at all. Some indeed are
sad, and not fearful; some fearful, and not sad; some neither
fearful nor sad; some both. . . . Many fear death, and yet, in a
contrary humour, make away themselves. Some are afraid that
heaven will fall on their heads; some afraid they are damned, or
shall be. . . . Fear of Devils, death, that shall be sick of some
such or such disease, ready to tremble at every object, they shall
die themselves forthwith, or that some of their dear friends or

Ancient and Medieval Visions of Madness 347

near allies are certainly dead; imminent danger, loss, disgrace,
still tonnent others, &c. that they are all glass, and therefore
they will suffer no man to come near them; that they are all
cork, as light as feathers; others as heavy as lead; some are
afraid their heads will fall off their shoulders, that they have
frogs in their bellies, &c. [Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melan-
choly (1621)]

53 Casting out Devils is meer Juggling, they never cast out any
but what they first cast in. They do it where for Reverence no
Man shall dare to Examine it, they do it in a Corner, in a Mortice-
hole, not in the Market-place. They do nothing but what may be
done by Art, they make the Devil fly out of the Window in the
likeness of a Bat, or a Rat, why do they not hold him? Why, in
the likeness of a Bat, or a Rat, or some Creature? That is why not
in some shape we Paint him in, with Claws and Horns? By this
trick they gain much, gain upon Mens fancies, and so are rever-
enced and certainly if the Priest deliver me from him, that is
most deadly Enemy, I have all the Reason in the World to Rever-
ence him. [John Selden, Table-Talk (1689)]

Appendix II
Contemporary Models of Madness

Psychiatric terms such as ”psychosis” and ”neurosis” are used loosely,
and it is not easy to establish perfect definitions. In general one can
make a distinction between neurosis and psychosis on the basis of
severity. A psychosis is a very severe experience likely to be so debilitat-
ing as to require intensive care and hospitalization, while a neurosis is
not. In this history I intend ”madness” to be equivalent to ”psychosis.”

According to one authority, a psychosis is an illness, or an experi-
ence, marked by the persistent misevaluation of perception, which is
not produced by sensory defect} The color-blind person, for exam-
ple, is not ”psychotic” by this definition, but the person who hallu-
cinates is. Similarly, the person who expresses sadness at the death of
a loved one is not ”psychotic,” but the person who expresses a deep,
long-lasting despair because he or she believes his or her sins caused
World War II is.

Psychoses are of two basic types: the organic and the functional.
Organic psychoses have a known organic or physiological origin,
such as a brain tumor. Functional psychoses have no known organic
origin—and many physicians assume the origin to be psychological.
Definitions are in flux, but generally we may speak of three types of
functional psychoses: (1) the affective psychoses (related to extremi-
ties of emotion, such as manic-depressive psychosis and involutional
melancholia), (2) paranoid psychoses, and (3) schizophrenia?

Since much of my discussion of writings by mad people has to do
with schizophrenia and its theories, I believe it appropriate to give
here a short description of the contemporary model of this particular
type of psychosis. The theory of what is today called schizophrenia

‘Klein, Diagnosis and Drug Treatment of Psychiatric Disorders, p. 33.
‘Coleman, Abnormal Psychology and Modern Life, p. 267.

348

Contemporary Models of Madness 349

was developed around the turn of the century by two psychiatrists,
Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926) and Eugen Bleuler (1857-1930).

Kraepelin began by observing a great many mental patients. He
attributed some of their symptoms to models of madness that were
already established, such as ”melancho1ia," and ”epileptic insanity.”
He ascribed others to a new model. The symptoms included in this
new model were very diverse, and Kraepelin accounted for that di-
versity by postulating some sub-types of the model, such as hebephre-
nia, catatonia, and paranoia.3 One overriding symptom as described in
the model was called ”dementia,” a kind of emotional stupor. In the
following passage, taken from one of his letters at the University of
Munich, Kraepelin describes a patient who appears to exhibit that

symptom:

GEN'TLEMEN,—You have before you to-day a strongly-built and well-
nourished man, aged twenty-one, who entered the hospital a few
weeks ago. He sits quietly looking in front of him, and does not raise
his eyes when he is spoken to, but evidently understands all our ques-
tions very well, for he answers quite relevantly, though slowly and
often only after repeated questioning. From his brief remarks, made in
a low tone, we gather that he thinks he is ill, without getting any more
precise information about the nature of the illness and its symptoms.
The patient attributes his malady to the onanism he has practised since
he was ten years old. He thinks that he has thus incurred the guilt of a
sin against the sixth commandment, has very much reduced his power
of working, has made himself feel languid and miserable, and has
become a hypochondriac. Thus, as a result of reading certain books, he
imagined that he had a rupture and suffered from wasting of the spinal
cord, neither of which was the case. He would not associate with his
comrades any longer, because he thought they saw the results of his
vice and made fun of him. The patient makes all these statements in an
indifferent tone, without looking up or troubling about his surround-
ings. His expression betrays no emotion; he only laughs for a moment
now and then. There is occasional wrinkling of the forehead or facial
spasm. Round the mouth and nose a fine, changing twitching is con-
stantly observed.

The patient gives us a correct account of his past experiences. . . . In
answer to our questions, he declares that he is ready to remain in the
hospital for the present. He would certainly prefer it if he could enter a
profession, but he cannot say what he would like to take up. No physi-

3Arieti, Interpretation of Schizophrenia, p. 11.

350 Appendix II

cal disturbances can be definitely made out, except exaggerated knee-
jerks.

At first sight, perhaps, the patient reminds you of the states of de-
pression which we have learned to recognize in former lectures. But on
closer examination you will easily understand that, in spite of certain
isolated points of resemblance, we have to deal here with a disease
having features of quite another kind. The patient makes his statements
slowly and in monosyllables, not because his wish to answer meets
with overpowering hindrances, but because he feels no desire to speak
at all. He pays no heed, and answers whatever occurs to him without
thinking. No visible effort of the will is to be noticed. All his move-
ments are languid and expressionless, but are made without hindrance
or trouble. There is no sign of emotional dejection, such as one would
expect from the nature of his talk, and the patient remains quite dull
throughout, experiencing neither fear nor hope nor desires. He is not at
all deeply affected by what goes on before him, although he under-
stands it without actual difficulty. It is all the same to him who appears
or disappears where he is, or who talks to him and takes care of him,
and he does not even once ask their names.

This peculiar and fundamental want of any strong feeling of the impress-
ions of life, with unimpaired ability to understand and to remember, is
really the diagnostic symptom of the disease we have before us. It
becomes still plainer if we observe the patient for a time, and see that,
in spite of his good education, he lies in bed for weeks and months, or
sits about without feeling the slightest need of occupation. He broods,
staring in front of him with expressionless features, over which a
vacant smile occasionally plays, or at the best turns over the leaves of a
book for a moment, apparently speechless, and not troubling about
anything.4 ‘

Kraepelin was most impressed by the rapid progression of the pa-
tient’s illness toward a final state of dementia, and labeled his
hypothetical disease model ”dementia praecox.” ”Dementia” stood
for the core symptom and the prognosis, while ”praecox” described
both the usual time of onset (early adulthood or late adolescence) and
the speed of the progression toward dementia.5

Kraepelin’s model was altered by the work of Eugen Bleuler, who
published a monograph in 1911 entitled Dementia Praecox, or The Group
of Schizophrenias. Bleuler proposed that the characteristic process of
the new model was not a movement toward dementia, but rather a
loss of psychological organization and a splitting up of the various

4Kraepe1in, Lectures on Clinical Psychology, pp. 21, 22.
5Arieti, Interpretation of Schizophrenia, p. 10.

Contemporary Models of Madness 351

functions of the mind. Bleuler wanted to discard the term ”dementia
praecox” and proposed instead "schizophrenia” (meaning ”split
mind”), which he felt would be more descriptive. He thought ”de-
mentia” was misleading because it implied that an irreversible loss of
intellectual ability took place, while he felt that a loss of emotionality
was the real symptom.‘ He considered this ”disturbance in affectivity"
to be one of the four central symptoms of ”schizophrenia.” Interes-
tingly enough, however, it clearly resembles Kraepelin’s descriptions
of dementia:

Many schizophrenics in the later stages cease to show any affect for
years and even decades at a time. They sit about the institutions to
which they are confined with expressionless faces, hunched-up, the
image of indifference. They permit themselves to be dressed and un-
dressed like automatons, to be led from their customary place of in-
activity to the messhall, and back again without expressing any sign of
satisfaction or dissatisfaction.7

Bleuler also paid considerable attention to an intellectual process
which his predecessor noted only in passing.8 Bleuler called it a ”dis-
turbance of association.”

In this malady the associations lose their continuity. Of the thousands
of associative threads which guide our thinking, this disease seems to
interrupt, quite haphazardly, sometimes such single threads, some-
times a whole group, and sometimes even large segments of them. In
this way, thinking becomes illogical and often bizarre.9

A type of thought and inner experience that tends to be unusually
divorced from reality, which he called ”autism," became the third
symptom. The fourth was a tendency ”to endow the most diverse
psychisms with both a positive and negative indicator at one and the
same time,” or ”ambivalence.” 1°

Autism, ambivalence, and disturbances in affectivity and associa-
tion were the four symptoms that Bleuler suggested would be present
in all cases of schizophrenia and which could therefore be considered

‘Bleuler, Dementia Praecox, p. 71.

7Ibid., p. 40.

3Kraepelin, Lectures on Clinical Psychology, p. 23.

9Bleuler, Dementia Praecox, p. 14.

‘°Ibid. The place of ”ambivalence” in Bleuler’ s system is not absolutely clear. At first

Bleuler does not mention it as a fundamental symptom (p. 14), but later he does (p. 53).

352 Appendix II

the distinguishing symptoms. Bleuler considered some of the more
dramatic symptoms of schizophrenia to be ”accessory” because he
felt they were not necessarily present and could not therefore be con-
sidered the distinguishing symptoms. These include: hallucinations,
delusions, some disturbance of memory, various changes in person-
ality, and changes in speech, writing, and physical functions.“

Illbidq P. 950

Bibliography

In this bibliography, I have tried to include only works which possess
all the following six criteria. They are (1) separately published, (2)
nonfiction, (3) prose works, (4) written in, or translated into, English,
(5) about the experience of being mad or being a mental patient, and
(6) written by a mad person or a mental patient.

I have not included unpublished accounts or accounts published in
journals or anthologies but never separately published. Works by
mad people or mental patients written about their experiences in well
or non-patient roles have been excluded; thus, the Marquis de Sade,
though a patient, cannot be found here. I have tried not to include
works of which the author was merely neurotic, or deviant, or alco-
holic, or undergoing psychoanalysis—unless that person was a patient
in a psychiatric institution. Thus, books such as the well-known
account of a ”multiple personality neurosis” treated in a psychiatrist’ s
office, Sybil, have not been included. But autobiographical accounts
of asylum life by supposed or apparent sane persons who were men-
tal patients have been included. ”Fictionalized” accounts based upon
autobiographical material are present. A few autobiographical
accounts of alcoholics who seem to have gone through mad experi-
ences have also been included.

I have tried to examine the book behind each reference to be certain
it belongs in this bibliography. There are some I have not been able to
examine; in those instances, I have relied on secondary material, such
as index notes and other works by the same author, to make my
judgment. In general I have been eager to make my mistakes on the
side of inclusion, rather than exclusion.

I began my bibliographical work by examining the two important
earlier bibliographies on the subject in Walter Alvarez’s Minds That
Came Back (1961) and Carney Landis’s Varieties of Psychopathological
Experience (1964). Alvarez’s bibliography is annotated and Landis’s
bibliography has a diagnostic index: therefore, if my reference is also

353

The Diary of Christoph Haizmann 21

that were preserved by the religious order guarding the shrine at
Mariazell as evidences of a miracle. That material was put together
fourteen years after Haizmann’s death, transcribed (the paintings
copied), and eventually preserved in the Austrian National Library in
Vienna. The manuscript then emerged in the early 1920s when the
director of the Vienna library discovered it and sent it to Sigmund
Freud, thinking the case might have some medical or psychiatric in-
terest. Freud published an analysis in 1923, ”A Neurosis of Demoni-
acal Possession in the Seventeenth Century,” in which he argued that
Haizmann’s possession was in reality a psychiatric problem arising
from certain repressed homosexual fantasies.4 But Freud merely
summarized the original material, seeming to favor those portions
which supported his theory, while he neglected to reproduce any of
the paintings. In 1956, however, Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter,
partly in an attempt to repudiate Freud's analysis, published the en-
tire manuscript in English translation, including plates of all nine of
Haizmann’s paintings, along with their critique of Freud and their
own analysis of the possession, in Schizophrenia 1677: A Psychiatric
Study of an Illustrated Autobiographical Record of Demoniacal Possession.5

Most fascinating are Haizmann’s nine paintings of the Devil as he
appeared to him at various times. The first painting shows the Devil
to be a well-dressed, respectable old man with a black dog; in the
second he has become a creature of reddish hue with a bearded man's
face, horns, a serpent’s tongue, eagle's talons in place of hands and
feet, and four pendulous female breasts. In successive paintings, the
Devil continues to have female breasts, sometimes two, sometimes
four. In the third painting, he is shown also to have a long, snake-like
tail and bat-like wings. He becomes more grotesque, sometimes more
absurd, progressively more reptilian until, in the eighth and ninth
paintings, he is shown to be a scaly dragonlike creature, bathed in
fire, with a long serpentine tail and torso. Interestingly enough, the
paintings may not be atypical of medieval representations of the
Devil. Albrecht Diire1’s Descent into Hell, for instance, shows a devil with
large female breasts, bat wings, and a scaly reptilian torso and tail.
Perhaps we ought to be reminded how much perception and fantasy
can be influenced by context or environment.

The following excerpts are taken from Haizmann’s diary, written in
Vienna after his first exorcism. Haizmann first describes a series of
visions or hallucinations of several diabolic personages disguised as

‘Freud's analysis here is very similar to his analysis of Schreber’ s madness (1903).
5This work is the source of all my background information on Haizmann.

354 Bibliography

to be found in Alvarez or Landis, I have marked it with an ”A” or ”L”
for the reader who wants comment or diagnosis. Alvarez’s opinions
on diagnosis have not always been reliable; thus I have felt compelled
to drop certain of his entries—books by Albert Abrams, for example,
whom Alvarez considers to be a manic-depressive. Both the Alvarez
and Landis bibliographies list autobiographies of neurotics, deviants,
drug addicts, and so forth, which I have not included; and Landis’s
bibliography includes references to several accounts not noted here
because they were published in medical or psychiatric journals.

I have also gone through indexes in the British Library, the Library
of Congress, the New York Public Library, the libraries of the Well-
come Institute in London, the Royal College of Physicians in London,
the Institute of Psychiatry in London, the Cornell Medical School in
New York, the New York State Psychiatric Institute in New York, and
Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley.
Further bibliographical discoveries have come from Louis Kaplan’s A
Bibliography of American Autobiographies (1961) and William Matthews’s
An Annotated Bibliography of British Autobiographies Published or Written
before 1951 (1955). In rare instances, browsing in used book stores and
talking with friends and acquaintances, have brought to light relevant
works not found in any of the above sources. For a long time I
thought I was the only person working on such a bibliography, and
then I met Charles Steir, compiler of the anthology, Blue Iolts. Inde-
pendently, Mr. Steir developed his own extensive bibliography on the
same subject, and he has very generously allowed me to make use of
it here. We both hope the resulting combined list—with fully half
again as many entries as my original list—will prove to be a unique
resource for scholars: the only comprehensive bibliography in this
area. Thank you, Mr. Steir.

I have tried to use the most sensible and readable form for my
entries. In cases where it is known that the book was published under
a pseudonym, the book is listed under the pseudonym, followed by
the annotation ”[pseud.]”; if the real name of the author is known it is
listed, with the pseudonym following in brackets. Use of capitaliza-
tion and punctuation in titles is arbitrarily standardized. In cases of
multiple publication, dates included are the last and first dates of
publication, but the most recent publisher is mentioned. For transla-
tions, the date of the original foreign edition is mentioned along with
the date and publisher of the last English edition. Where the author’ s
name is not known, the reference is listed under the name of an
editor or commentator, or it is cited under ”anonymous.” If an editor
or commentator has significantly revised an author's original material

Bibliography 355

in some subsequent edition, both versions are listed. Otherwise, edi-
tors or commentators are not mentioned.

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Agnew, Anna. From Under the Cloud; or, Personal Reminiscences of Insanity. Cincinnati:
Robert Clarke, 1886. A.

Aldrin, Edwin E. ”Buzz,” Jr., with Wayne Warga. Back to Earth. New York: Random
House, 1973.

Alexson, Jacob. The Triumph of Personal Thought and How I Became a Mason. Washington:
Ransdell, 1941.

Anderson, Dwight, with Page Cooper. The Other Side of the Bottle. New York: A. A.
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Anonymous. Autobiography of a Schizophrenic. Bristol: J. Baker & Son, 1951.

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. Crook Frightfulness-—By a Victim. London: Moody Bros. Ltd., 1935.

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Exchange, 1901.

. Five Months in the New-York State Lunatic Asylum by an Inmate. Buffalo: L. Dan-
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———. I Lost My Memory—The Case as the Patient Saw It. London: Faber, 1932.

———. I Question. Nashville, Tenn.: 1945. A.

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Wright, 1867.

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:—. A Palace-Prison; or, The Past and the Present. New York: Fords, Howard & Hulbert,
1884.

. The Petition of the Poor Distracted People in the House of Bedlam. London: 1620. No

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Heard in his Defense, Nay Even without Being Accused, and at Last Denied an Appeal to a
Jury. Humbly Offered to the Perusal and Consideration of the Public. London: The Author,
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———. One More Proof of the Iniquitous Abuse of ‘Private Madhouses. London: The Author,
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. Who's Looney Now? Roanoke Rapids, N .C.: Palmetto, 1914.

Chamberlain, Judi. On Our Own. New York: Hawthorne Books, 1978.

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Letters: Published in the Hope of Rousing a Humane Nation to the Consideration of the
Miseries Arising from Private Madhouses: with a Preliminary Address to Lord Erskine.
London: The Author, 1811.

Cruden, Alexander. The Adventures of Alexander the Corrector, Wherein Is Given an Account
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Doe, Jane. [pseud.]. Crazy. New York: Hawthorne, 1966.

Donaldson, Kenneth. Insanity Inside Out. New York: Crown, 1976.

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Feugilly, Mary Heustis. Diary Written in the Provincial Lunatic Asylum. The Author, 1885.

Pink, Harold Kenneth. Long Journey; a Verbatim Report of a Case of Severe Psychosexual
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Graves, Alonzo. The Eclipse of a Mind. New York: Medical Journal, 1942. A, L.

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Greally, Hanna. Bird's Nest Soup. Dublin: 1971.

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(2) Gagging in Madhouses as Practised by Government Servants, in a Letter to the
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22 CHRISTOPH HAIZMANN

handsome cavaliers and beautiful women. The general coherence and
reasonableness of the experience, compared to most hallucinatory
experiences considered in this volume, is striking. The account most
resembles Joanna Greenberg’s description of her visions in I Never
Promised You a Rose Garden (1964). Haizmann’s second excerpt de-
scribes experiences and events which are less coherent and reason-
able. He comes to himself, feeling in the midst of flames and
”stench.” He rolls on the floor until blood pours from his mouth and
nose. Later he experiences some unusual tactile hallucinations—the
sensations of being tortured by ropes, being pulled apart by devils,
having a devil sit on his tongue. Such experiences are similar to
Schreber’ s 1903 account of his own terrifying bodily ”miracles.”

We may prefer to call Haizmann’s experiences ”hallucinations,”
but it is important to remember that his perception of them was quite
different. For him, they not only seemed real at the time they oc-
curred, as dreams may seem real, but they also seemed real afterward.
They remained for him very real, very disturbing encounters with the
personal, intelligent force behind all earthly evil.

AFTER I HAD ARRIVED IN VIENNA and had myself received into
the Holy Rosicrucian Brotherhood, I lived in peace until 11th
October between 11 and 12 at night, when a well-dressed cava-
lier appeared who spoke to me and asked why I was so simple-
minded as to allow myself to be enrolled into the Brotherhood.
Of what help would it be to me? I should throw away the scraps
of paper as they were useless and nothing but sheer tomfoolery.
He added besides: as I was deserted by everybody, what would
I do now? But as I did not listen to him, he receded from me and
vanished.

On the 12th between 2 and 3 at night, I imagined I was in a
beautiful hall which was delightfully furnished, full of silver
chandeliers in which candles were burning; the most mag-
nificently dressed Cavaliers were dancing round and round me
with the most beautiful women. Then one of them said to me,
had he only stayed with us he could enjoy these pleasures too; it
is all his own fault. The cavalier said I should tear up the draw-
ings of the apparition which I had sketched, and not paint the
High Altar, he would then give me a goodly sum of money. But I

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Joan K. McMichael

Health Care in the European Community
Alan Maynard

A Mad People's History of Madness
Dale Peterson, Editor

A Mind That Found Itself
Clifford W. Beers

The Psychiatric Halfway House: A Handbook of Theory and Practice
Richard D. Budson

Racism and Mental Health: Essays
Charles V. Willie, Bernard M. Kramer, and Bertram S. Brown, Editors

Social Skills and Mental Health
Peter Trower, Bridget Bryant, and Michael Argyle

The Sociology of Physical Disability and Rehabilitation
Gary L. Albrecht, Editor

The Style and Management of a Pediatric Practice
Lee W. Bass and Jerome H. Wolfson
In cooperation with the Institute on Human Values in Medicine:

Medicine and Religion: Strategies of Care
Donald W. Shriver, Editor

Nourishing the Humanistic in Medicine: Interactions with the Social Sciences
William R. Rogers and David Barnard, Editors



HlST/ PSY

A Mad People’s History of Madness
DALE PETERSON, Editor

Contemporary Community Health Series

A man desperately tries to keep his pact with the Devil, a woman is
imprisoned in an insane asylum by her husband because of religious
differences, and, on the testimony of a mere stranger, “a London citizen” is
sentenced to a private madhouse. This anthology of writings by mad and
allegedly mad people is a comprehensive overview of the history of mental
illness for the past five hundred years—from the viewpoint of the patients
themselves. '

Dale Peterson has compiled twenty—seven selections from published
works in English (including translations) from 1436 to 1976. Included are
accounts of possession by the Devil and “cure” by exorcism, poet William
Cowper's memoir on his psychotic depression, and samples of protest
writing such as Urbane Metcalf’s account of confinement in Bedlam-
London’s infamous public asylum. Some other selections are by the found-
er of the mental hygiene movement, Clifford Beers, and current portrayals of
schizophrenia from the recent novels of Joanne Greenberg (/ Never Prom-
ised You a Rose Garden) and Mark Vonnegut (Eden Express).

Dr. Peterson prefaces each excerpt with biographical information about
the writer. A running commentary explains the national differences in mental
health care and the historical changes that have taken place in symptoms
and treatment. He also traces the development of the private madhouse
system in England (which was comprised of family-run homes or
businesses) and the state-run asylum system in the United States.

A Mad People ’s History of Madness also contains the first comprehensive
bibliography of writings by the mentally ill.

Dale Peterson, who holds a doctorate in literature, became interested in
the writings of the mentally ill when he worked as a nursing assistant in a
large psychiatric hospital. He has taught writing at Stanford University and
has published several books about computers.

University of Pittsburgh Press

Pittsburgh, Pa. 15260

Pitt Paperback——175

COVER DESIGN BY GARY GORE

ISBN 0-8229-5331-5

The Diary of Christoph Haizmann 23

would not listen to him and knelt down and prayed a rosary.
Thereupon I lay down on the floor and prayed five Paternos-
ters, five Ave Marias, and one Credo, and then everything
vanished.

On 14th October between 3 and 4 in the morning, I again saw
this stately hall and in it a long table covered with the most
select delicacies, and adorned with the most beautiful goblets of
gold and silver, with gorgeously decked out cavaliers who were
eating and drinking well together. Also amongst them sat the
cavalier who had originally appeared to me, he called me to
him, I was to sit between him and the lady who had the seat
next to him; but as I could not get myself to do this he told the
lady to get up and try and bring me to them. She got up and
came to me. But as often as I screamed: Jesus, Mary and Joseph!
she receded. This shouting was heard by my brother-in-law,
and it made him together with my sister and other people rush
into my room, with a light and a font from which they sprinkled
holy-water round the room, until at last they came up against
these hellish monsters in disguise who receded step by step,
until finally they were driven close to the wall, whence they
disappeared.

On 16th October there appeared to me again a still more
beautiful hall adorned with precious pieces of silver and deco-
rated with fine golden candlesticks, and in them white candles
were burning. In the centre stood a throne made up of pieces of
gold and on each side of it stood a guilded lion rampant; each
held in the right paw a kingly crown and in the left a sceptre.
Various cavaliers stood around them in great numbers who
were arguing among themselves and apparently eagerly await-
ing the arrival of their king; but as they could not wait for him
any longer, the previously mentioned cavalier came up to me
saying, that I should be seated on the throne, they would take
me for their king and thus honour me to all eternity. Whereupon
I screamed Jesus, Mary!—came to my senses again and saw
nothing more.

On 20th October in the evening between 6 and 7 o'clock, a  

radiant light appeared to me: I immediately shouted: Jesus,
Mary, Joseph. Then I heard a voice out of the light which said: I
am sent by them. It said also I should not be afraid: Arise, o


24 CHRISTOPH HAIZMANN

sinner, it said, and love Me Jesus. I saw what great bliss and
indescribable pain there was in eternity, and with that I fell into
a trance lasting two and a half hours. In it he showed me eternal
bliss and eternal pain, neither of which I can put into words, nor
describe. After this vision he said to me, that I should go into
the wilderness for six years and therein serve God; after that I
could go Wherever I wanted. With that I awoke again so to
speak, and came to myself.
If 8- 3!-

On 26th December I went in the afternoon to Stephen's
Cathedral to worship. While I worshipped to the best of my
ability there came a strapping maid and a well done up man,
and I thought to myself I wish I were he and as well done up as
he; after that I went home. In the evening I went to my bedroom
to say my prayers there and after I had said them there was a
clap of thunder and a bright flame came down on me so that I
again feH into a swoon.

Thereupon my sister came and with her a gentleman who
called me by my name, and with that I came to myself. Then it
seemed to me as if I were lying in nothing but fire and stench,
and could not stand on my feet. I rolled out of my chamber into
the room, and rolled around the room until the blood gushed
out of my mouth and nose. Then my sister did not know what
to do with me; so she sent for the priests. After they had come
the stench and heat disappeared. As I could not yet stand on my
feet I was lifted on to a chair. A quarter of an hour after the
priests had left me again, something came to my side and spoke
to me: this suffering is given to you because you have such
worthless and idle thoughts. I was to comply in the matter and
become a hermit, as had been ordained by God. Then I got up
from the chair and it was as if nothing had happened.

On the 26th day of December and on 30th December, two evil
spirits tortured me with ropes, which I felt on my limbs for two
days afterwards. They said the torture would be repeated every
day until Ijoined the hermit Order.

1- 31- 3(-

On the 2nd day of January, I returned home towards evening.
I paced up and down in the room when a feverish shivering
came over me. My sister said to me, I was to sit by the fire and

The Diary of Christoph Haizmann 25

then I would feel better. I had hardly sat down when six evil
spirits came and wanted to charge at me and pull me to pieces. I
shouted out Jesus, Mary and Joseph! stand by me; so they drew
back, but soon moved forward again. The struggle between us
lasted for one whole hour. Then the priests came, and as soon as
they had come, so they vanished one after the other. Afterwards
I got up from the floor.

On 7th January I had my lesson in the Jesus, Mary and Joseph
Brotherhood. On the same day I went to the Franciscan Fathers
and wanted to confess there and take Communion. When I
wanted to confess the priest ordered me to say the confession-
prayer. But I could not pray it although I started four times, yet I
failed every time until the priest recited it before me; then I
could say it and complete the prayer. While I was confessing the
Foul Fiend came for me twice and plagued me during confes-
sion. After I had confessed I went into the Church and received
the High Sacrament from the Altar. Then the priest ordered me
to take my lesson in the afternoon, and I went home. After I had
eaten the rnid-day meal, four evil spirits came and started to
torture me terribly. Throughout the whole afternoon and the
whole night until the next morning they went for me; one of
them sat on my tongue, so I took my hand and tore out the evil
spirit.

During this time several people watched over me, who were
also so horror-stricken that they became seriously ill and saw
visions.

On 13th January whfle sitting and actually painting my pic-
ture, the Foul Fiend came and sat on the table next to me; so I
shouted to my sister that the Evil One was present. Then my
sister came with holy-water and sprinkled it around the room,
at which everything vanished from the table.

1714'-E»

The Life of the Reverend Mr. George Trosse:
Written by Himself, and Published Posthumously
According to His Order in 1714

George Trosse was a Presbyterian minister in Exeter during England's
century of religious strife. Having refused to take an oath of conformi-
ty to certain Anglican practices, Trosse was for a time liable to pros-
ecution. In 1685 he was indeed arrested for participating in an illegal
religious gathering and placed in jail for six months, along with four
other Nonconformist ministers. But by the time he wrote his Life, in
the first decade of the eighteenth century, Trosse was a highly
esteemed member of the Exeter community, no longer an object of
persecution.

In his Life, Trosse tells very little about his long, successful career as
a minister, instead choosing to focus on events of his rebellious
youth, the first twenty-five or twenty-six years of his life in which he
remained ”in a State of Nature, in a Course of Sin and Folly; and
experienc’d it to be brutish, unreasonable, ruinous and destructive to
Health, Estate and Name, to Rest and Reason, as well as tending to
Horrour, Despair, Rage and Hell.”

The mature, reformed Trosse, in telling this story of youthful folly,
and madness, serves not only as a kind of moral censor———showing us
past events through the screen of his mature judgment—but also as
an intellectual or rational censor, always careful to distinguish be-
tween appearance and reality. Particularly during descriptions of his
experience of madness, he uses such qualifiers as ”I fancy’d,” or
”seemingly.” Nonetheless, Trosse the narrator believes that his mad-
ness was both a possession and a natural illness, brought about by
sinful living and, as he puts it, by having ”tempted the very Temptor.”
He tells us at one point that the visions and voices of his madness
were (like those distracting visions and voices seen and heard by the
Papists, leading them to believe in purgatory) brought about by a
”disturb’d Brain,” which was in turn ”influenc’d by a deceitful and
lying Devil.” But at other points in his description, the Devil seems
actually to be present, rather than simply an influence behind the
scenes.

26

The Life of the Reverend Mr. George Trosse 27

At length, standing up before the Window, I either heard a Voice, which
bid me, or had a strong Impulse, which excited me, to cut off my Hair; to
which I reply’ d, I have no Scissars. It was then hinted, that a Knife would
do it; but I answer’d I have none. Had I had one, I verily believe, this
Voice would have gone from my Hair to my Throat, and have com-
manded me to cut it: For I have all Reason to conclude, that the Voice
was the Voice of Satan, and that his Design was, to humble me as low as
Hell: But the Absence of a proper Instrument prevented it.

Trosse’s characterization of his young self as having ”tempted the
very Temptor” is a particularly interesting expression because it gives
us an idea of how complex the issue of responsibility is here. The
Devil tempts him, but he is responsible for having made himself
vulnerable to the temptation of the Devil. As if to complicate this even
further, in at least two places Trosse assures us that God limited the
seriousness of his sins as an act of mercy. The unresolved issue of
individual responsibility and spiritual manipulation goes much
deeper than it did in Margery Kempe’s Book. Kempe did not consider
herself very responsible; from her point of view, most of her thoughts
and actions were brought about as a direct result of spiritual in-
fluence. But with Trosse, the connection between self and thought,
between self and action, is much stronger. Trosse clearly sees his self
as capable of acting with free will. And if Trosse is capable of acting
with free will (with the Devil waiting at a small distance) then he is
indeed capable of sin and depravity. In sum, Trosse’s greater freedom
leads to greater responsibility, which in turn leads to greater potential
for sin and greater potential for guilt (self-censure). It should not be
surprising, then, that Trosse’s madness seems to be a manifestation of
self-hatred and that much of the emotional tone of this Life is a tone of
self-censure, as the elder Trosse condemns so severely the actions
of the younger.

In the following excerpt from the Life, Trosse describes his first of
three attacks of madness, in which he believes, in part, that the Devil
has possessed him. The reader may want to compare this highly
dramatic description of madness and possession with John Cus-
tance’s description of his depressive madness in Wisdom, Madness, and
Polly (1952).

I REMEMBER, I went into the Country (about Twelve Miles from
Exon) with my Mother; I left her there, and one Day return’d to

28 GEORGE TROSSE

the City, to be a Surety for one who had been a Major in the
King's Army, but was at that Time very poor, and liv’ d obscurely.
He was thought to be a dangerous Person by such as then were in
Authority: Insomuch that an Order coming from the Protector;
To secure all suspected Persons, the Sheriff of the County, suppos-
ing him to be such a Person, requir’ d him to give Security in a
Bond, of some Hundreds of Pounds, not to leave the City, or
else to yield himself into their Hands at all Demands. I believe,
the Sheriff thought none would have stood bound for him, since
he was a single Person, one who had nothing to engage him to
make his Stay in Exon, no Interest to induce him to keep his
Promise, and, if he had thought it for his Advantage, he, no
Doubt, would have broken it. Without Question, no Prudent
Man, in such Circumstances, would have been Surety for him.
But I was a vain rash Young—l-"ellow, throughly devoted to the
Interest of the Cavaliers, and extreamly fond of that Party.
Hereupon, I would be a Surety for him, to keep him from Con-
finement, tho’ the Sheriff disswaded me, telling me it might
prove of Ill Consequence to me: But I slighted his Caution and
Advice, and so was actually bound for this Fellow, that he might
have his Liberty.

Hereupon, I went up and down from Place to Place in the
City, prating and drinking, ’tiH at length I was excessively drunk;
but yet would ride back again to my Mother in the Evening,
according to my Promise. In my Return back I fell from my
Horse; but how I got on Horseback again I know not. I have
sometimes been apt to believe, but am not positive, that God,
who amidst all my Wickedness had such Thoughts of Mercy to-
wards me, as since has so evidently appear’ d, might irnploy his
Angels for my Preservation. Well! when I was brought safe home,
I was fit for nothing but the Bed. Just as I was going, I ask’d my
Mother's Blessing, and fell upon my Face, not being able to stand;
and thus leaving my Mother sad and griev’d, I was carried to my
Bed, more like an Hog than a Man. I slept ’till the Morning, a
Serving-man lying with me; who rising about Five of the Clock
left me well in Body and compos’d in Mind, and I talk’d with
him as I had been wont to do: But I was not willing to rise so
early, therefore lay still, and slept an Hour or two more. I then
waking, and being alone in the Chamber, fancy’d I heard some

The Life of the Reverend Mr. George Trosse 29

rushing kind of Noise, and discem’d something at the Bed’s-Foot
like a Shadow; which I apprehended to have been a Spirit.
Hereupon, I was seiz’d with great Pear and Trembling, rose in
Haste, went forth into the Outer-Chamber in great Consternation,
and walk’d up and down in it as one amaz’d. As I was thus
walking, with dismal Apprehensions, my being bound for the Major
came into my Mind, with great Aggravations of the Polly and
Danger of it: fearing that the Major either was gone, or would get
away; and then, I concluded, I should be undone. This greatly
perplex’d my Spirit. The Devil, who in our Blindness and Pre-
sumption hurries us upon rash and foolish Actions, knows how in
a Time of Trouble to set them home, with such Aggravations, as
utterly to sink & distract us.

While I was thus walking up and down, hurried with these
worldly disquieting Thoughts, I perceiv’ d a Voice, ( I heard it
plainly) saying unto me, Who art thou? Which, knowing it could
be the Voice of no Mortal, I concluded was the Voice of God, and
with Tears, as I remember, reply’ d, I am a very great Sinner, Lord!
Hereupon, I withdrew again into the Inner-Room, securing and
barring the Door upon me, 8: betook my self to a very proper and
seasonable Duty, namely, Secret Prayer; performing it with some
kind of Conscience towards God, and with Hopes to receive some
Good at his Hands, (which I never did all my Life-time before). But
it was an impudent and proud Prayer: For I pray’d in my own
Strength, as tho’ I was good enough to have Communion with an
Holy God, and worthy enough to have Access to Him, and Suc-
cess with him, as to all I pray’ d for. I 1ook'd not to the Spirit to
help me in Prayer, nor to the Lord Iesus to render it acceptable. So
that altho’ I had liV’d a Sinner and a Publican all my Days, yet
now I pray’d like a Pharisee, with a carnal Confidence, which was
an infinite Dishonour to God, and could not but be a great Prov-
ocation, as the Event prov’d.

For while I was praying upon my Knees, I heard a Voice, as I
fancy’ d, as it were just behind me, saying, Yet more humble; Yet
more humble; with some Continuance. And not knowing the
Meaning of the Voice, but undoubtedly concluding it came from
God, I endeavour’d to comply with it. Considering that I
kneel’d upon something, I remov’d it; and then I had some kind
of Intimation given me, that that was what was requir’ cl. Thus I

30 GEORGE TROSSE

kneel’d upon the Ground: But the Voice still continu’d, Yet more
humble; Yet more humble. In Compliance with it I proceeded to
pluck down my Stockings, and to kneel upon my bare Knees: But
the same awful Voice still sounding in mine Ears, I proceeded to
pull off my Stockings, and then my Hose, and my Doublet; and as
I was thus uncloathing my self, I had a strong internal Impres-
sion, that all was well done, and a full Compliance with the
Design of the Voice. In Answer likewise to this Call, I would bow
my Body as low as possibly I could, with a great deal of Pain, 8: this
I often repeated: But all I could, do was not low enough, nor
humble enough. At last, observing that there was an Hole in the
Planking of the Room, I lay my self down flat upon the Ground,
and thrust in my Head there as far as I could; but because I
could not fully do it, I put my Hand into the Hole, and took out
Earth and Dust, and sprinkled it on my Head; some Scripture
Expressions at that Time offering themselves to my Mind, I
thought this was the Lying down in Dust and Ashes thereby pre-
scrib’d.

At length, standing up before the Window, I either heard a
Voice, which bid me, or had a strong Impulse, which excited me, to
cut off my Hair; to which I reply’ d, I have no Scissars. It was then
hinted, that a Knife would do it; but I answer’ d, I have none. Had I
had one, I verily believe, this Voice would have gone from my
Hair to my Throat, and have commanded me to cut it: For I have
all Reason to conclude, that the Voice was the Voice of Satan, and
that his Design was, to humble me as low as Hell: But the Absence
of a proper Instrument prevented it.

Thus, pretending the Worship of God, I fell, in effect, to the
Worshipping of the Devil; and my Falling on my Knees before God
issu’d in a Prostration at the proud l1surper’s Feet. I am per-
swaded, that many of the Quakers fonnerly were deluded by such
Voices and Impulses from the Impure Spirit, which they mistook
for the Holy Spirit of God; many of them having been grosly
ignorant, and so fitted to entertain such Delusions of the Devil,
as I then was. [And I verily believe, that those many Visions and
Voices among the Papists, which gave the Occasion, and are the
Establishment of their Purgatory, came from the same Author, or
Cause, viz. A crack’d Brain, irnpos’d upon by a deceitful and
lying Devil.]

The Life of the Reverend Mr. George Trosse 31

After a while, I began to incline to put on my Cloaths again;
and sitting down in order thereto, I was directed by strange
Kinds of Impulses what Garment first to put on, and so in Order;
and then with what Leisure, and with what Awe and Reverence
all was to be done. Thus I comply’d with these Impulses in put-
ting on several of them, ’till I came to the Putting on One of my
Stockings; for then, having pu11’d it up Half-way, with all Dread
and Caution, I apprehended I was not allow’d to draw it higher:
But without any Impression, or against it, I pluck’d up my Stock-
ing about my Leg; whereupon I thought I had greatly offended.
And immediately, in a Corner of the Room, towards which my
Eyes were directed, I saw, as it were, a Breath coming down
from the Roof, about the Bigness of a Man's Thigh, and to look
to was somewhat like the Beams of the Sun shining into a Win-
dow; and by and by, from that Breath, I (seemingly) heard a Voice,
saying with great Anger, Thou Wretch! Thou hast committed the Sin
against the Holy-Ghost. This Breath I then believ’d to have been
the Holy-Ghost; because I had read, that Christ breathed upon the
Disciples, when He gave them the Holy-Ghost. And believing that
I had been inspir’ d and taught by Him in all these ridiculous Acts
of Humiliation, (I am sure they were so as done by me.) I present-
ly concluded, that I really had been guilty of the Sin against the
Holy-Ghost, and so could not possibly be pardon’d. Thus by my
careless and prophane Reading and Hearing the Word of God,
and not endeavouring to understand the Meaning of it, I gave the
great Deceiver an Advantage to make me believe, that the Word
perverted and understood in a wrong Sence was the Word of
God: For, not Receiving the Truth in the Notion, much less in the
Love of it, I was dispos’d to believe every 1-"alshood that the Father
of Lies might impose upon me. But I bless God I am well assur’d
that this was not the Sin against the Holy-Ghost; no, nor all the
other more horrid and aggravated Sins which I afterwards commit-
ted: For I am perswaded, that God hath given me Repentance as
to all my Sins, and a sincere Faith in Christ, and so a full Remission.

From this Perswasion, that I had been guilty of the Sin against
the Holy-Ghost, I was fi1l’d with grievous Horrour and Anguish,
with great Anxiety and sinking Despair; and then went forth in
the Outward Room with my Cloaths hanging about me, and some
of them off. As I was going out, I met an Antient Servant-Maid;

32 GEORGE TROSSE

(A Sight doubtless frightful to Her.) and in a distracted manner
cry’d out, I have committed the Sin against the Holy-Ghost, and I
must necessarily be Damn’d. I begg’d she would lend me a Pair of
Scissars to cut off my Hair; but she fearing a worse Use (as I
suppose) would be made of them than I pretended, refus’d my
Request.

Walking up and down in the Room, in a miserable distracted,
despairing Condition, I had a Suggestion and Temptation to
curse God and die. Whatever was the Meaning of those Words in
the Mouth of ]ob’s Wife, I am sure, I then apprehended them to
be Literally meant. This was a Suggestion so black and horrid, as
could be suppos’d to have been from none but the Dark Prince,
that great Enemy and Blasphemer of God. Whereupon,
methought, all was fil1’d with Horrour and Confusion about
me. And the whole Creation might justly have been muster’d up,
with all it's Rage and Fury, to revenge such an infinite Indignity
offer’ d to it's Creator. It was matter of Wonder that the Fire did
not burn me, or the Earth did not swallow me up, or Angels did
not fall upon me with all Severity, or that God did not Damn me.

A Brother-in-Law of mine, standing by, demanded of me
whether I would be rul’d and follow Advice; assuring me, that,
in case I would, all might be well again. To whom I instantly
reply’ d I would do so. But, after this, I was full of all manner of
Blasphemies and wicked Passions, and was haunted with horrible
distracting Temptations to Self-Murther, 8: with a great many
terrifying and disquieting Visions and Voices; which tho’ (I be-
lieve) they had no Reality in themselves, yet they seem’d to be
such to me, and had the same Effect upon me, as if they had been
really what they appear’d to be. Thus was I disturb’d with silly
ridiculous Fancies, and Thousands of unreasonable and non-
sensical Delusions. I shall only mention a few of them.

Wherever I turn’d mine Eye, for some Time, I fancy’d I saw
my Companion in Wantonness using some indecent Gestures, as
heretofore; and this was to my Shame, the Horrour of my Soul,
and the Torment of my Conscience. It seem’d to me that I heard
her Voice, calling to me with Earnestness and Importunity,
which was worse to me than Thunder-Claps. So that my impure
Paradice was turn’d into a dreadful Hell. I fancy’d that the Devil

The Life of the Reverend Mr. George Trosse 33

was about to take her, and carry her away, to make her his Prey;
but she cry’d to me, and ask’d me whether I would suffer it.

I also wickedly fancy’ d, that I was able, by my bare willing it,
to make God miserable; yea, that I could torment Him in devouring
Flames: And as it was in my blasphemous Mind to fancy it, so it was
in my malicious Will to resolve it; and this I took delight in. Thus
having liv’d without any due and serious Apprehensions of
God, and his Divine Perfections, in my Sinful State, I was dis-
pos’d to entertain any the most unreasonable and most dishonour-
able Conceptions of Him; and so degraded Him beneath every other
Being, accounting Him weaker than the weakest of Creatures: For
tho’ by bare Willing I could not hurt a Gnat or a Plea, yet was I
fully perswaded that by this Way I could extrearnly torment the
Almighty and Llnchangable God. Thus by exerting Enmity against
the Image, the Ways, the Graces and Holy Spirit of God, in my
secure and unwaken'd Condition I was now dispos’d to dis-
cover Rage and Cruelty against God himself. But notwithstanding
all this Blasphemy and desperate Enmity against God, He did not
suffer Infernal Flames to kindle upon me.

I strongly fancy’ d that God watch’d Opportunities to destroy
me; but I also presum’d that God must get in by the Door, or he
would not be able to come at me; and I foolishly conceited, that
if I did but tie the Door with a particular sort of a Knot, He
would be effectually shut out; which I attempted to do, that I
might be secur’ d from his Wrath. Many and constant, for some
Time, were my Temptations to destroy my self. Sometimes I was
sollicited to dash my Head against the Edge of the Board near
which I sate; at other times, I was tempted to dash out my
Brains against the Walls, as I walk’d. So that between a Desire to
do this, and a natural Unwillingness to offer such Violence to
my self, I was miserably distracted.

Thus with a Multitude of blasphemous horrid Thoughts was I
fill’d as I walk’d up and down. But when I was lay’d upon my
Bed, where I continu’d for some Time, I was, from the Devil's
Influence, induc’d not to look or speak: So that for several Days, in
a Compliance with this Temptation, I would neither open my Eyes
nor my Lips: And those Words of Scripture came into my Mind,
and were strongly irnpress’d upon me, ( viz. ) Touch not; Taste not;

A Mad People's History of Madness

34 GEORGE TROSSE

Handle not; which, quite different from the Meaning of the Holy-
Ghost, were urg’d upon me, to perswade me not to make use of
any Meat. Hereupon I would neither touch it, nor taste it, nor
smell to it: For that was also suggested to me, Smell not. So that I
refus’d all Food whatever which might be offer’d me. I would
not endure the Smell of it. If it was brought nigh me, I would
turn aside with the greatest Indignation and Aversion, as if it
had been some abominable Thing. And I make no Doubt but it
was the Design of the Devil by that Temptation, to seek to starve
me. Thus I continu’d several Days under the Influence of this
Delusion, as tho’ the Starving of my Body was the Way to save my
Soul.

While I thus lay upon my Bed, with such a wild and troubl’d
Fancy, Night and Day, I seemingly heard many Voices and Dis-
courses; which I attributed to Fairies, who, I thought, were in
the Wall, and there convers’d and were merry together. And I
fancy’d I saw upon the Wall a great Claw, for a long while
together; but what the Meaning of that was I could not tell.
Thus was I continually haunted with Multitudes of such Whim-
S1€S.

Being in this miserable distracted Condition, and refusing to
make use of any suitable and proper Means, in order to my
Recovery, my Friends had Intelligence of a Person dwelling in
Glastonbury, who was esteem’d very skilful and successful in
such Cases. They sent for him. He came; and engag’d to under-
take the Cure, upon Condition that they would safely convey
me to his House, where I might always be under his View and
Inspection, and duely follow his Prescriptions. Hereupon, my
Friends deterrnin’d to remove me to his House; but I was re-
solv’d not to move out of my Bed; for I was perswaded that if I
removed out of it, I should fall into Hell, and be plung’d into the
Depth of Misery. I likewise apprehended those about me, who
would have pluck’d me out of my Bed, to have been so many
Devils, who would have dis1odg’d me: Therefore I stoutly resisted
them, with all my Might and utmost Efiorts, and struggled with all
Violence, that they might not pluck me out of my Bed and
cloath me. When one of the Persons about me came behind me
to hold me up in my Bed, I was under terrible Apprehensions it
was the Devil that seiz’d me. And the same Thought I had of all

The Life of the Reverend Mr. George Trosse 35

about me, that they were murtherous Devils; and that they exerted
all their Power to carry me away into a Place of Torment. By their
concurrent Strength they at length prevail’d against me, took
me out of my Bed, cloath’d me, bore me out between them.
They procur’ d a very stout strong Man to ride before me; and
when he was on Horseback, they by Force put me up behind
him, bound me by a strong Linnen-Cloth to him; and, because I
struggled, and did all I could to throw my self off the Horse,
they tied my Legs under the Belly of it. All this while I was full
of Horrours and of Hell within: I neither open’d mine Eyes nor
my Mouth, either to see what was done about me or to make
any Lamentations: for still I look’d upon this as my necessary
Duty.

Thus, like a miserable, wretched, and Condemn’d Malefactor,
was I carry’ d out of that Place and Country where I had commit-
ted so many great Sins against my God. As I rode along, I fancy’ d
many Devils flying in the Air just over me, and by my Side as so
many Fiery 1-“lying-Dragons, expressing their Rage against me.

Upon the Way, the Men stay’d a little to refresh themselves,
(for I was very troublesome to them by my continual Struggling)
and they offer’ d me some Meat; and altho’ I had not eaten nor
drunk for a long time, yet then I was perswaded to it. And when
they put a Glass into my Hand to drink of it, methought I saw in
the Glass a Black Thing, about the Bigness of a great black Ply, or
Beetle; and this I suppos’d to have been the Devil; but yet would
drink it; and, methought, the Devil went down my Throat with
the Liquour, and so took possession of me. At which desperate Mad-
ness of mine, it seem’d to me that all were astonish’d; and I
fancy’d, that every Step I stepp’d afterwards, I was making a
Progress into the Depths of Hell. When I heard the Bell ring, I
thought it to have been my Doom out of Heaven; and the Sound
of every Double Stroke seem’d to me to be, Lower down; lower
down; lower down; ( viz. ) into the Bottomless Pit. This to me then
was a dismal dejecting Sound. Whatever Noises I heard as I past
by, my Fancy gave them Hellish Interpretations: For I was now
perswaded that I was no longer upon Earth, but in the Regions of
Hell . When we came to the Town, I thought I was in the midst of
Hell: Every House that we pass’d by was as it were a Mansion in
Hell; and it seem’d to me that all of them had their several

36 GEORGE TROSSE

Degrees of Torment; & as we went forward, methought, their
Torments encreas’d; and I fancy’ cl I heard some say, as they stood
at their Doors with great Wonder, and somewhat of Pity, What,
must he go yet farther into Hell? 0 fearful! O dreadful! and the like.

At last, by God's good Providence, we were brought safely to
the Physician's House. Methought all about me were Devils, and
he was Beelzebub. I was taken off my Horse, and expected im-
mediately to be cast into intolerable Flames and Bumings, which
seem’d to be before mine Eyes. The Carrying me into the
House, and into an Inner and an Under Room appointed for my
Lodgings, I thought to be a Casting me into Utter Darkness.

Here I was committed to a Person who came to be my Guard-
ian, to watch me, that I might not destroy my self. And in this
Room and House I continu’d several Weeks, nay, as I take it,
Months. All the while I was full of Horrour, Delusions, Blasphemy,
8* c. and all attended with great Temptations to undo my self.
Sometimes I continu’d in the Bed all the Day: Sometimes they
put Bolts upon my Hands and Fetters on my Feet, when I
prov’ d violent and unruly (which I often did); for I would often
strive and fight, contending with my utmost Strength, to get away
from them, and so to free my self from that Place, which I
thought to have been Hell, and from those Persons whom I
thought to have been Tormentors.

When I was thus outragious at any Time, then would they
throw me upon the Bed, and thus put Bolts upon me; and there
should I lie in great Pain and Weariness ’tiH I could well endure
it no longer; then should I desire to be releas’d and promise to
be quiet.

Once, when I was thus manacled and fetter’ d, the Mortifying
of the Flesh, as commanded in Scripture, was brought to my
Mind; and I was perswaded, that the Grating of my Flesh from
my Bones, or the Putting of my Flesh to great Pains, F was the
Mortification requir’ d. Therefore I twisted and wrested my Legs
in my Fetters with all the Strength I had, enduring great and
grievous Pains, and grating away some of the Flesh of my Legs
thereby. I can shew, to this very Day, some of the Marks of that
Cruelty I us’d towards my self. Thus I, who would not mortify
the inordinate Lusts thereof, according to God's Command in
Scripture, was induc’d to mortify the Flesh of my Body as to the

The Life of the Reverend Mr. George Trosse 37

very Substance of it, in a Compliance with the Suggestions of the
Devil.

One Person in the House I fancy’ d to be Iesus Christ: and
every Thing almost that I spoke or did, I thought to have been a
Grief to him, and a Crucifixion of Him afresh; I apprehended him
pain’d under it, and complaining to God, and calling for
Vengeance to seize and crush me. Sometimes I would go to him,
(if not fall down before him) and beg him to be my Friend, and to
keep off Wrath from me. But, methought, he gave me a Repulse,
and with some kind of Adjuration, or Oath, ratify’ d his Rejec-
tion of me. I lay upon my Bed, every Instant expecting to be
rack’d or cut in Pieces, and to have all Manner of Cruelties to be
us’d towards my Body. Every Person I saw seem’d to me to be an
Executioner; and I thought every Thing either an Instrument of, or
a Preparation for, my Misery and Torture. I apprehended Self-
Murther to be the only wise and charitable Act that I could do for
my self, as the only Prevention of all expected and dreaded
Torment. In Expectation of a necessary and inevitable Injection into
the Lake of Fire and Brimstone, I presum’d that the longer I was out
of it, the deeper I should at last sink into it, and the more intolerable
would be my Torment there; because, I did nothing but Sin con-
tinually, and so every Minute of mine Abode on Earth, would be
a great Increase of the Intenseness of my Misery in Hell.
Hereupon, I was also fully convinc’d, that there was nothing so
good and beneficial to me as immediately to cast my self into the
Burning Lake, since there was an utter Impossibility of escaping
it; and I conceiv’d, that the sooner I was in it, the easier I should
be, and so prevent greater Degrees of my everlasting Burnings
there. Thus the Murderer had got the Assent of Carnal Self, the
grand Ruling Principle which had influenc’d me all my Days,
and was the Chief Cause of all my Wickedness and Rebellion
against God, prompting me to Self-Destruction, and Self-
Damnation: But my God and Saviour would not permit it to have
such a fatal Influence upon me.

When I expected every Moment to be cut off, and cast into
Hell, and could not but own it would be just, I would not so
much as bow a Knee, or open my Lips, either for the deferring or
the diminishing of my Torments there, much less for their perfect
Prevention. I did not shed a Tear, nor bewail my self; but, like a

38 GEORGE TROSSE

harden’d Sat and stupid Wretch, expected an Excision, and a being
thrown into Hell, without the least Endeavour to escape it.

If I did put on my Cloths, and ty’d them about me, then I
thought I bound my self to the Devil: If I unloos’d, and put them ofi‘,
then I fancy’ d I unloos’d my self from God.

[My awaken’d Conscience muster’d up my secret Sins in
order before me. The Terrors of the Lord surrounded me. My
darling Sin became my perplexing Misery, and my impure Para-
dise was turn’d into a confounding Hell. My Buttons, Gold,
Silver and the Silk upon my Sleeves lay very heavy on my
Conscience, as an intolerable Burthen, as weighty as a World.]
For I had been a foolish Gallant, and that too against the Will of
my Parent.

1739"E’~

The London-Citizen Exeeedingly Injured; Or, A
British Inquisition Display’d, in an Account of the
LInparallel’d Case of a Citizen of London, Bookseller
to the Late Queen, Who Was in a Most Unjust and
Arbitrary Manner Sent on the 23rd of March Last,
1738, by One Robert Wightman, a Mere Stranger,
to a Private Madhouse, by Alexander Cruden

In general, mad people in medieval Europe were taken care of pri-
vately, within the family. The few who had no family ties might be
social outcasts, expelled from cities, at times whipped or beaten. Sir
Thomas More, in his Apologye of 1533, tells of a madman who had
been in Bedlam and who would at times wander into church services
and ”make many madde toyes 8: tryfles” during quiet periods of
worship. More had the man bound to a tree and whipped before the
whole town, and afterward noted that ”it appered well that hys re-
membraunce was good inoug ” when ”it was beten home.” 1 At this
time, Catholic monasteries and priories occasionally took in the sick
and the poor, and provided what little institutional care there was for
mad people.

By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, large-scale institu-
tional confinement had begun. Beggars of all sorts, including the
mad, were put into the hopitaux généreaux of France, the Zuchthiiuser
of the German-speaking countries, and the houses of correction and
workhouses of England. All these early institutions housed together
quite indiscriminately the unemployed, the homeless, the criminal,
and the indigent mad. In the Hopital General of Paris, only about
one-tenth of the inmates were registered as ”insane” or ”demented”
or of ”wandering mind” or ”persons who have become completely
mad/'2 In the workhouses of England, the same was generally true.

Eventually, these catch-all institutions developed separate quarters
for their mad inmates, but whatever treatment they received was, at

‘More, The Apologye of Syr Thomas More, Knyght, pp. 132, 133.
2 Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 65.

39

40 ALEXANDER CRUDEN

the very best, haphazard. In 1811 the English reformer William Tuke
recorded in a diary his observations of the facilities for madwomen in
one particular workhouse. He saw several women locked in small
wooden cells, with no heat, the ventilation and light provided only by
an open iron grate in the door. Their beds were merely wooden plat-
forms. Although the weather was very cold-the temperature had
dropped to sixteen degrees below freezing the night before—the
women were naked. ”One of these forlorn objects,” wrote Tuke, ”lay
buried under a miserable cover of straw, without a blanket or even a
horse-cloth to defend her from the cold." 3

Gradually, institutions solely for the purpose of detaining and treat-
ing mad people developed. In the eighteenth century a small number
of charitable asylums, supported by public subscription, opened-
the earliest, in 1713. Sometime early in the seventeenth century,
another sort of institution exclusively for mad people had started: the
private madhousef‘

The private madhouse was a privately-owned, profit-making estab-
lishment for the care of mad people. Possibly the first form of state aid
to mad people took the form of a few informal private contracts by
local governments to physicians and others to care for some of the
indigent mad. Of course, mad people from families of means might
also be cared for by people who were paid for their services. And
eventually some people began specializing in the care of the mad.
They brought them into their own homes, and in some cases ex-
panded or redesigned their homes to prepare for the care of several
patients at once.

The conversion of private homes into private madhouses was sim-
ple enough. Obviously there were kitchen and sleeping facilities for
the patients. There were also probably added means of mechanical
restraint—chains, leg locks, and wrist locks—in case of violent or
potentially violent patients. Smaller rooms, sometimes outhouses
and stables, might have been converted into locked cells for patients
who needed to be alone or who wanted to leave.

There was money in madness, and the managers of these institu-
tions presented themselves and their houses with no little

flamboyance. James Newton converted an old London manor house 4

into a madhouse and in an advertisement printed in the late seven-
teenth century made the following claims: 1

3 Tuke, Chapters in the History of the Insane, pp. 126, 127.

‘A private madhouse may have existed in Wiltshire in 1615, perhaps earlier. The

Reverend George Trosse was kept in a private madhouse in 1656.

The London-Citizen Exceedingly Injured 41

In Clerkenwell Close . . . liveth one who by the blessing of God cures
all Lunatick, distracted, or mad people; he seldom exceeds three
months in the cure of the Maddest person that comes in his house;
several have been cured in a fortnight and some in less time; he has
cured several from Bedlam, and other mad-houses in and about the
city, and has conveniency for people of what quality soever. No cure-
no money.5

For a long time, the status and power of madhouse keepers re-
mained pretty much undefined in the law. A law passed early in the
eighteenth century said that two or more justices of the peace could
authorize the arrest by local authorities of any person deemed
”furious1y mad, and dangerous,” and could order his or her incar-
ceration, ”safely locked up,” where chains could be used for restraint
if necessary.6 Whipping was specifically forbidden, but there was no
provision for licensing, or inspection, and therefore virtually no con-
trol whatsoever over the happenings inside private madhouses dur-
ing the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century. And as a
profit-making institution, rather than a charitable or public-supported
institution, the private madhouse was particularly open to charges of
abuse and malpractice.7

At first the main public fear about private madhouses was not that
mad people might be poorly or cruelly treated, but rather that sane
people might be wrongfully imprisoned. Apparently in response to
public concern, Parliament, in 1763, formed a select committee to
investigate this possibility. The committee particularly investigated
two London madhouses, in Chelsea and Hoxton, where they found
evidence that sane people had indeed been locked up as if they were
mad, simply on the authority of friends and relatives. Sane people
had been confined for drunkenness or violent tempers, a wife had
been imprisoned by her husband because she had been extravagant
and indifferent toward him, and two young girls had been locked up
by their parents to break off love affairs.

Eleven years later, in 1774, Parliament passed the first significant
English legislation concerning the rights of persons accused of mad-
ness. The act required that a medical certificate be filled out by a
physician, surgeon, or apothecary, before non-pauper patients were

5Tuke, Chapters in the History of the Insane, pp. 92, 93.
°Parry-Jones, The Trade in Lunacy, p. 7. Most of my information on private madhouses
comes from this book.
7Ibid., p. 221.

42 ALEXANDER CRUDEN

confined. Of course, this had no effect on pauper patients. As for the
non-pauper patients, it probably had little real effect on them, since
medical certificates were easy to come by and often enough were
sloppy, makeshift productions. For example, consider this medical
certificate, made out by an apothecary in 1809:

Hey Broadway A Potcarey of Gillingham Certefy that Mr. James Burt
Misfortin hapened by a Plow in the Hed which is the Ocaision of his
Ellness and By the Rising and Falling of the Blood And I think a Blister
and Bleeding and Meddesen Will be A Very Great thing But Mr James
Burt would not A Gree to be don at Home. March 21, 1809. Hay
Broadway.8

The act also established the licensing and regular inspection of all
private madhouses in England and Wales. There were no require-
ments for licenses, though; licenses were to be given ”to all persons
who shall desire the same/'9 And there was no provision for the
revocation of licenses or for any other expression of opinion by the
madhouse inspectors. The inspection system was patently useless,
and so inspection quietly continued for a few years and then faded
away.

Toward the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the
nineteenth, England as well as much of Europe was experiencing
sudden and extreme changes in the quality of life. To begin with, this
was a time when radical ideas were made manifest in political sys-
tems by violent action: the American Revolution of 1775, the French
Revolution of 1789. Furthermore, beginning just before the American
Revolution and lasting for some sixty years, England was undergoing
radical changes of its own, a time that was retrospectively called the
Industrial Revolution. Advances in technology and industrial orga-
nization brought about a mass influx of people from the countryside
to the cities, a half century of great poverty and misery for the Work-
ing class, and frightening increases in population. During the reign of
George III (1760-1820) the population of England increased from
seven to twelve million. With that drastic increase in overall popula-
tion came an even greater increase in the apparent numbers of mad
people. An 1807 census recorded 2,248 ”lunatics and idiots” in En-

8Tul<e, Chapters in the History of the Insane, p. 163.
9Ibid., p. 102.

The London-Citizen Exceedingly Injured 43

gland and Wales, while a census taken only two decades later, in 1828,
recorded 12,547.10 ”Madness, strides like a Colossus in the country,”
wrote a London physician, John Reid, in 1808.“ For whatever reason,
there was a very real increase in the numbers of people considered to
be mad. This was a great economic boom for the private madhouses.
At the beginning of the century there were some twenty private mad-
houses in all of England and Wales. By the middle of the century
there were about one hundred.”

At the same time, there seems to have been some kind of remark-
able change in the attitudes of European society in general toward the
mad. In 1789 a Parisian mob stormed the Bastille, for the sake of
liberté, egalité, and fraternité. Three years later Dr. Philippe Pinel was
appointed director of the Bicétre, one of the units of the old Hopital
Général, which was by then used exclusively to house madmen. One
of Pinel’s first acts was to restore liberté, egalité, and fraternité to the
inmates of the Bicétre by striking off their chains and breaking open
their cages.

There is no question that mental patients before this time were
severely abused as a matter of course. However, life in general before
the nineteenth century was often severe. Even in the first quarter of
the nineteenth century, theft, forgery, shoplifting, sheep-stealing,
and similar crimes could lead to the gallows in England.” In the late
eighteenth century, an Englishman named John Howard toured in-
stitutions of all sorts throughout Europe, and found brutal, crowded,
infested, unsanitary conditions to be standard.” Beyond the fact of

hard conditions in general, however, was a vaguely formulated, cen- 1

turies-old philosophy that mad people, because of their lack of ob-
vious rationality, were much like beasts and should be treated like
beasts. It seemed to some that the mad were oblivious to extremes of
heat and cold, in the way that animals might be. It also seemed that
the best way to treat, perhaps cure, madness was by using the same
coercive methods used to train wild animals. A Frenchman described
the Salpétriere, the unit of the Parisian Hopital Général for mad
women: ”Madwomen seized with fits of violence are chained like
dogs at their cell doors, and separated from keepers and visitors alike

“Parry-Jones, The Trade in Lunacy, p. 12.
“Ibid., p. 11.

‘3Ibid.,' p. 289.
14 Howard, The State of The Prisons.


44 ALEXANDER CRUDEN

by a long corridor protected by an iron grille; through this grille is
passed their food and the straw on which they sleep; by means of
rakes, part of the filth that surrounds them is cleaned out.” 15

By striking off the chains of the patients at the Bicétre (and later, the
chains of the female patients at the Salpétriere) Pinel declared that
henceforth they were to be treated as human beings rather than
peculiar beasts.

Similar remarkable changes were taking place, so it seemed,
throughout Europe. In England, for instance, a group of Quakers
under the leadership of William Tuke founded a Retreat for mental
patients at York in 1796, after a fellow Quaker died under suspicious
conditions in the public asylum of York. At this Retreat workers were
forbidden to use chains, harsh treatment, most medicines, and blood-
letting; instead they were supposed to use kindness and reason.

During the first two decades of the nineteenth century, asylum and
madhouse reform became an important issue in England, given
added impetus by the much-publicized madness of George III, as well
as the assassination in Parliament of Prime Minister Spencer Perceval
by a madman in 1812. For the first time, Parliament and the public
became seriously interested not only in the potential for wrongful
imprisonment of sane persons, but also in the possibility of the abuse
of the mad. Parliament appointed several investigating committees to
consider alleged abuses of patients in various public and private in-
stitutions throughout England.

In 1815, for instance, a Parliamentary committee investigated re-
ports of bad conditions in several private madhouses around London.
In a Bethnal Green madhouse sometimes known as Dr. Warburton’s
White House, the committee described seeing several pauper men
and women patients chained to their beds, naked, and covered only
with rugs of hemp during the cold of January. A former housekeeper
testified before Parliament that she had seen an attendant kicking and
beating patients; she described a woman patient who was sometimes
confined, with chains and manacles, in what had originally been a
pig-sty. Other times, this patient had been hobbled with an iron bar
between her legs, confined to each ankle, with a chain attaching the
iron bar to her handcuffs.“ The committee concluded that new laws
were needed to control such abuses, and in 1816, 1817, and 1818, three
bills were passed through the House of Commons, but were then
rejected by the House of Lords.

“Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 72.
“Tuke, Chapters in the History of the Insane, pp. 155, 156.

The London-Citizen Exceedingly Injured 45

A few years later, in 1827, another Parliamentary committee carried
out investigations and reported to Parliament about, among other
things, continuing scandalous conditions in Dr. Warburton’s mad-
house. Partly in response to those reports, the House of Commons
passed another reform bill in 1828 which at last was carried through
the House of Lords, becoming the first significant reform since 1774.
The 1828 act, known as the Madhouse Act, in essence repeated the
principles of the 1774 act but with distinctly increased strength.

Then in 1829 a patient in the Lincoln Asylum died because he had
been strapped to his bed in a straitjacket all night. The death caused
enough of a scandal that the asylum issued a new policy: an attendant
would have to stay with any patient on whom mechanical restraints
were used at night. Before the patients had been locked up at night
and left with only minimal attendance. Under the new rule, the doc-
tors soon discovered that in fact not many mechanical restraints were
needed. Most of the patients just went to sleep. And not long after,
they found that mechanical restraints could generally be eliminated
during the day, too. In 1837, under the direction of Dr. Robert
Gardiner Hill, Lincoln Asylum did away with mechanical restraints
altogether. This meant more staff, more training, and the occasional
physical holding of violent patients were necessary, but the use of
mechanical restraints in non-emergency situations had been elimi-
nated.

Dr. John Conolly, director of Middlesex Asylum, studied the new
system at the Lincoln Asylum and in 1839 put it to practical use in his
institution with impressive results. Upon first assuming direction of
Middlesex, Conolly made the following inventory: ”Instruments of
restraint, of one kind or another, were so abundant in the wards as to
amount, when collected together, to about six hundred—half of these
being leg-locks or handcuffs.” But by 1840 Conolly could observe: ”no
form of strait-waistcoat, no hand-straps, no leg-locks, nor any contriv-
ance confining the trunk or limbs, or any of the muscles, is now in
use. The coercion chairs, about forty in number, have been altogether
removed from the wards.” 17 Conolly went on to develop a compre-
hensive system of management based upon the elimination of mechan-
ical restraints and the creation of alternatives, publicizing the system
widely with his book, The Treatment of the Insane Without Mechanical
Restraints (1856).

Although Conolly’s system aroused much resistance on the Conti-

17Conolly, The Treatment of the Insane Without Mechanical Restraints, pp. 189, 190, 194.

46 ALEXANDER CRUDEN

nent and lasting antagonism in America, in England it profoundly
affected the course of asylum management. Where it was employed
judiciously it seemed to work. A numerical count of restraints became
one of the ways in which the English were to measure the advance-
ment of reform.

The reform movement in England peaked in the 1840s. In 1842
government inspectors went through all private madhouses and pub-
lic asylums in England and Wales and published a comprehensive
report on what they saw. They made recommendations that Parlia-
ment put into law through two important acts in 1845. Described by
Daniel Hack Tul<e as ”the Magna Charta of the liberties of the in-
sane,” the legislation, among other things, established a permanent
inspection committee and gave authority for more frequent and de-
tailed inspections. 18

Possibly the most important part of the 1845 legislation, however,
was that which specifically required counties and important boroughs
in England and Wales to build public asylums to take in their indigent
mad. Through the first half of the century, those who wanted to
reform private madhouses saw at least a partial answer in the con-
struction of new, public institutions: the county asylums. The theory
was that county asylums would be easier to observe, supervise, and
regulate—since they were owned by the state—and that wrongful
imprisonment for mercenary reasons would be impossible.

When legislation was passed dictating that county asylums be
built, profound changes were set into motion. An important source of
income for private madhouses was diverted into these new public
institutions. Private madhouses after 1845 came more and more to
serve only the wealthier classes. As legislative control increased and
as the nonrestraint philosophy spread, the blatant and severe abuses
taking place behind closed doors of private madhouses in the first few
decades of the century, became less common.

Although the creation of a massive nationwide public asylum sys-
tem probably diminished the chances of wrongful imprisonment, as
well as covert patient abuse, it may have unwittingly limited the
chances of genuine treatment and individual care. The county asy-
lums were larger and more impersonal. As they filled to capacity and
beyond, in the 1860s and 1870s, possibilities of treatment were forgot-
ten by new, custodial regimes. Great care had been taken to make

‘8Tul<e, Chapters in the History of the Insane, p. 188.

The London-Citizen Exceedingly Injured 47

these county asylums externally attractive, appealing to the Victorian
eye. But by 1880 at least one observer remarked on the contrast be-
tween the care given the buildings and the care given the patients: ”It
was simply a larger prison and the inmates sitting listlessly and de-
pressed in the lengthened corridors served only to be mocked by the
polished floor and costly furniture to which they had been unaccus-
tomed and of which they took no heed.” 19 Nonetheless, the basic
direction of reform established in the first half of the century con-
tinued unchanged.

Institutions for the mad were built and gradually reformed. At the
same time, not surprisingly, the inmates of these institutions began
writing about their experiences—at first in small pamphlets, later in
books. By the nineteenth century, the most common type of autobio-
graphical writing by mad and allegedly mad people was the protest.

I know of only one piece of protest writing from the seventeenth
century, a pamphlet entitled The Petition of the Poor Distracted People in
the House of Bedlam, which was registered in 1620 but then lost. For all
practical purposes, protest writing by English mental patients begins
in the eighteenth century, with Alexander Cruden’s dramatic call for
justice, The London-Citizen Exceedingly Injured.

Alexander Cruden (1701-1770) was a London publisher, proofreader,
author, and eccentric, probably best remembered as the author of A
Complete Concordance to the Holy Scriptures, an index so thorough and
accurate that it remains to this day an authoritative source. Three times
in his life Alexander Cruden was locked up in madhouses. The last two
times he published angry, detailed accounts of his experiences as part of
his drive for vindication, an attempt to prove and carry charges of false
imprisonment through court. The pamphlet considered here is his first,
an account of his incarceration in 1738.

He had recently finished the Concordance after tremendous and te-
dious labor. He did the work and publication at his own expense, and
he hoped for some recompense from the crown. He presented the
completed work to Queen Anne, who smiled and murmured her
gratitude but died sixteen days later, before her gratitude could be
transformed into cash. Perhaps it was his great disappointment at
that failure, combined with a rejected marriage proposal, that precipi-
tated the events leading to his imprisonment in a private madhouse
in Bethnal Green.

19 Parry-Jones, The Trade in Lunacy, p. 259.

48 ALEXANDER CRUDEN

There he was held prisoner for nearly ten weeks at the direction of
a certain Robert Whiteman, a merchant, who for unclear reasons
chose to involve himself in the case. At times, Cruden was kept in
handcuffs, held in a straitjacket and chained to his bed. According to
his account, his pockets were rifled, private papers were seized, his
mail was intercepted and opened, he was denied visitors, he was
beaten by an attendant, he was denied writing materials, his ”phy—
si ” was prescribed for him by a private physician, Dr. James Monro,
six days before Dr. Monro ever saw him, and for the last five weeks he
was chained to a bed without any release whatsoever, not even to
change his clothes.

Finally, Cruden managed to escape—but his conflict with Wight-
man and Dr. Monro continued. Cruden believed that Wightman, in
concert with Dr. Monro and others, plotted to have him sent to the
infamous Bethlehem Hospital. Cruden wrote several angry letters to
Wightman and prepared to take Wightman and Dr. Monro to court,
asking damages of ten thousand pounds for false imprisonment. Be-
fore the case was heard, he wrote and published The London-Citizen
Exceedingly Injured, probably expecting that the written statement
would help his legal position. He hoped for ”the recovering” of his
own character, that Wightman and Dr. Monro might be made ”Exam-
ples to deter others from the like crimes,” and that ”the LEGISLA-
TURE will see the necessity of bringing in a bill to regulate Private
Madhouses.” Unforttmately, he lost the case.

Even if we were not informed in the pamphlet that Cruden in-
tended to take his adversaries, Wightman, Monro, and others, to
court, the style of the pamphlet ought to alert us to that fact. Nearly all
persons mentioned in the narration are treated as potential witnesses.
Either Cruden recounts their expressed opinions on the issue of his
sanity or he carefully describes how very sensibly and rationally he
behaved in their presences. As if to assist a courtroom presentation,
names of persons are usually followed by occupations and often by
places of residence. Minor events that may have some bearing are
described in methodical detail (for instance, when his pulse is taken, he
notes who took the pulse, what was said about the pulse, and what
possible interpretation could be made about what was said).

A closer examination reveals, however, that the pamphlet is not as
objective as it pretends to be: the facts are interspersed with a good
deal of strong opinion. Cruden is unable, or unwilling, to conceal his
rage. Most of his references to Wightman and Dr. Monro are overtly
biased: not fact but opinion, and extreme opinion at that. We cannot
know how far to trust it. Perhaps the least trustworthy part of the

The London-Citizen Exceedingly Injured 49

narration is Cruden’s account of his original trouble with his neigh-
bors. If we are to follow his version, the only version we have, indeed
the whole neighborhood is acting madly, and we are left feeling that
information has been withheld.

Nonetheless, the pamphlet remains a moving account of real abuse
of a man accused of madness. We cannot know how ”sane” Cruden
was, we cannot know how deliberately malicious and ”barbarous”
Wightrnan and Dr. Monro and the others really were, but we must at
last conclude that Cruden was treated arbitrarily, unfairly, and cruelly.

I have selected the following two excerpts for their intrinsic in-
terest. First Cruden describes his seizure as a madman. Then he re-
counts his remarkable escape.

A SHORT NARRATIVE is here given of the horrid sufferings of a
London-Citizen in Wright's private Madhouse at Bethnal-Green,
during nine weeks and six days, (till he made his wonderful
Escape) by the Combination of Robert Wightman Merchant at
Edinburgh, a stranger in London, and others, who had no right,
warrant or authority in Law, Equity or Consanguinity, or any
other manner whatsoever, to concern themselves with him or
his affairs; and yet most unjustly imprisoned him in that dismal
place. How unjustly and unaccountably they acted in first
sending Mr. C. to Bethnal-Green, and how cruel and barbarous
they were in their bold and desperate Design to fix him in
Bethlehem, (after Mr. C. refused to sign their Pardon) that they
might screen themselves from punishment, by covering one
heinous crime with another more heinous, will appear by the
following Journal of Mr. C.’s Sufferings.
3(- 3(- 3(-

Monday, March 20. This morning Wightman, without being de-
sired or expected, came to Mr. C.’s room, and advised him not
to go to the Printing Office that day, but to be let blood, and stay
at home, which Mr. C. at last complied with, tho’ with great
reluctance. Mr. C. wrote a letter to Mr. Ragg the Surgeon, who
came and let him blood: He was at home all that day in a quiet
and cahn manner.

Tuesday, March 21. He called in the morning on his Landlady

50 ALEXANDER CRUDEN

Grant's Wife for some of his Papers committed to her care, but
she for a great while made no Answer, ’till at last she said they
might be about his bed: But while Mr. C. was making diligent
search for them, Iohn Huet a Blacksmith in the neighbourhood
came up with a stick in his hand, in order to seize him as a
Madman; which Mr. C. looked upon as the highest Affront and
greatest Provocation. Mr. C. took the stick from him, and forced
him down stairs: but in a few minutes Grant and his Wife
alarmed the neighbourhood as if he was a Madman, and so
about a dozen of them came in, whom he obliged to go out, and
then shut the doors. They rallied by the cellarwindow, particu-
larly a bloody Butcher came from below, who disfigured Mr.
C.’s face with several blows: And while he was grappling with
this diabolical Butcher, john Duck a Blackmore and john Anderson
a Coachman came up, rescued Mr. C. from the Butcher and
seized him. This cruel Butcher soon after gave him a severe
blow, to the great effusion of his blood, with a stick on the head,
without the least provocation, and then quickly disappeared,
and no body can give any account of him. Mr. C. was amaz’d at
this uncommon Treatment and asked whether they were all
become Madmen?

Duck and Anderson went up stairs with Mr. C. where he lay
down on a bed, and Mr. Ragg the Surgeon came to dress his
Wound. He examined if it had fractured the Skull, but happily it
had not; for had it been a little deeper, it had been mortal. A Tool
of Wightman’s formerly an Apprentice to a Taylor, but lately a
Coffin-breaker and Grave-digger in St. Andrew's Burying-
ground, and a few months before a pretended Physician of no
figure, came in, who with great impudence insulted over Mr. C.
but he greatly despised this silly man, and calmly and com-
posedly desired Iohn Duncan then in the room, to go to the
learned and eminent Physician Dr. Hulse, to come and see him;
but tho’ Duncan promised to go, he never went. Mr. C. often
called for a Constable, but tho’ there was one at hand, he would
not come, he not approving of their conduct. This was about
twelve o'clock. He saw himself obliged to submit peaceably and
patiently to their orders all that day.

Wednesday, March 22. Mr. C. stayed at home all day, cool and
sedate, employing his time in reading: But the foolish people

The London-Citizen Exceedingly Injured 51

would allow none of his Friends to visit him, tho’ some particu-
lar Friends called both yesterday and to day, and earnestly de-
sired to go up to see him; yet Wightman hindered Mr. Kelsey Bull
and Mr. Frederick Bull, two of Mr. C.’s particular Friends, from
coming up to see him; and Grant and his Wife who stood at the
door, were so impudent as to refuse Entrance to Mr. Iohn Cargil
another particular Friend, and made Mr. C. their Prisoner.

Thursday, March 23. Mr. C. sorting his Papers this morning in
his room on the table where a candle stood, the foolish people
made a great breach in the door, and knocked at it with such
Fury, that they made the snuff of the candle to fall upon three
loose sheets of paper on the table, and set fire to them; which
Mr. C. to prevent any bad consequence, wrapt up together, and
put them out at the breach of the door. This is all the ground that
the malicious people had to say that Mr. C. designed to set the
house on fire; which is abominably false.

This day Oliver Roberts a Chairman came, as he said, from one
Robert Wightman in Spring-Gardens, and told Mr. C. that the said
Wightman wanted to speak with him at his lodgings in Spring-
Gardens; and Roberts taking with him Anderson the Coachman,
decoy’d Mr. C. into a Hackneycoach; and till the Coach came to
Ludgate-hill Mr. C. did not fully discover their wicked Design, for
the Coachwindows were drawn up: Mr. C. had asked Roberts in
Chancery-Lane which way the Coach was to go to Spring-
Gardens? Roberts answered Up the Strand. And when Mr. C. saw
himself thus imposed upon, he expostulated with them in the
following manner: ”Oh! what are you going to do with me? I
bless God, I am not mad. Are you going to carry me to Beth-
lehem? How great is this Affliction! This is the way to put an end
to all my Usefulness in the World, and to expose me to the
highest Degree! Oh! what shall I do? God help me! I desire to
submit to the Will of God." Roberts then positively told him that
he had Orders from the said Wightman to carry him to Country-
Lodgings near Bow, which proved to be Wright's private Mad-
house on Bethnal-Green, where he delivered him to Iohn Davis
the Under-Keeper of the said Madhouse, when Mr. C. re-
quested Roberts and Anderson not to expose him by telling any
body of his being brought to so dismal a Place: And Roberts
particularly remembers that Mr. C. said, he hoped that God

52 ALEXANDER CRUDEN

would make this great Affliction turn to his Good. Roberts also
declares that Mr. C. always spoke sensibly, and behaved well,
and much like a Gentleman.

The said Davis locked Mr. C. up in a room in the Madhouse,
who was at first much dejected, but after going to Prayer was
greatly comforted; and soon after Davis, Samuel Wall the Barber,
and Dorothy Mayleigh Housemaid came, and spoke very civilly to
the Prisoner, who this afternoon asked Wall if he saw any sign of
Disorder about him? To which Wall replied, None at all as yet,
but that he did not know how soon as alteration might come,
which proved only a groundless suspicion.

That very afternoon the Prisoner desired Pen, Ink, and Paper,
but Davis refused it to one in his Circumstances; yet the Prisoner
acquainting Davis with the occasion, relating to his Shop under
the Royal-Exchange, and promising to shew the Letter to Davis,
the Housemaid brought him some Paper. This Letter was
directed to john Scot, who had the care of the Prisoner’ s Shop,
and was acknowledged by Scot and others to be a very sensible
Letter, and much to the purpose.

Soon after in the evening the said Scot with Mr. Robert Mac-
pherson and Mr. Iohn Duncan, came to visit the Prisoner, who
spoke to them very sensibly, and shewed no signs of Madness
in his Conversation with them, as had been attested under the
hands of the said Macpherson and Duncan.

After they were gone, Wightman and Duncan came to the Pris-
oner, who with very great temper seriously expostulated with
Wightman about his presuming to send him to a Madhouse, that
had no Power over him in Law, Equity or Consanguinity, but
was his very slender acquaintance, and a stranger to all his
affairs; and asked by what authority he had been so bold as to
do so?

Wightrnan was confounded, and blamed Grant and his Wife,
who, he said, were very weak silly persons: Oswald, like a self-
condemned Person, was very silent, especially upon hearing
that his Wife had been convicted of a gross Lye she had uttered
to Wright's Wife in the morning, when she took the room for the
Prisoner; and so Wightman and Oswald went away abruptly and
without ceremony, instead of begging Pardon and releasing the
Prisoner. Davis was present at this Conversation, and told

The London-Citizen Exceedingly Injured 53

Wightman, after he went out of the room, that he had not
observed any signs of Madness about his Prisoner; but Wight-
man, who pretends to know that a person is made from the Tone
of his Voice, replied, that the Prisoner would be ill about three
o'clock in the morning, but he proved a false Prophet. When the
Prisoner went to bed about eight o'clock, Davis came and told
him, that seeing he was in a Madhouse, he must allow himself
to be used as a Madman, and submit to have the Chain on the
bedstead 1ock’d upon his Leg, which the Prisoner patiently sub-
mitted to.
36 1- 3(-

Saturday, May 27. The Prisoner being still chained night and
day to his bedstead in this hot season, and being alarmed with
being sent to Bethlehem, happily projected to cut the bedstead
thro’ with a knife with which he eat his victuals. He made some
progress in it this day. In the afternoon Mr. Willock the Booksel-
ler came in Wz'ghtman’s name, desiring to know the state of Mr.
Conon’s account with the Prisoner, for Wightman was ready to
settle it with him. The Prisoner answered that he had nothing to
do with Wightman, and would settle no accounts in concert with
him, who had no power to meddle in his Affairs, and that
therefore he hoped that Mr. Conon would wait a little longer.

The Lord's Day, May 28. The Prisoner being still chained night
and day, made his own bed himself very early to conceal his
design, but used not his knife this day upon the bedstead.
Thomas Lindon Apothecary, with a Friend, came to see him, who
declared that he found him in the full exercise of his reason and
judgment.

Monday, May 29. The Prisoner being still chained night and
day, took Physick by Monro’s order in the morning; and in the
afternoon he again used his knife upon the bedstead.

Tuesday, May 30. The Prisoner being still chained wrote a Let-
ter to Serjeant Cruden to send him a hand-saw, doubting of the
strength of the Knife, but providentially did not deliver this
Letter to his woman-keeper; for if he had, it had certainly fallen
into Wright's Wife's hands, and been sent to Wightman, as other
Letters were by that unfaithful woman's means, and so his
Escape had been prevented, and he had been most severely
used. Therefore he went to work again, prayed hard and

A Mad People '5
History of Madness

Dale Peterson, Editor

UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS

54 ALEXANDER CRUDEN

wrought hard, till his Shirt was almost as wet as if dipt in water;
and as if he had received more than common Vigour and
Strength, he finished the great Operation about four o'clock in
the afternoon: Upon which he kneeled down and returned God
thanks. Then he sent for Hollowel to shave him, and began to
prepare for his Escape. He prayed at night that he might awake
seasonably for his Escape, and he slept some hours that night as
sound as ever he did in his life, chearfully and believingly com-
mitting this affair to God who had never left him nor forsaken him.

Wednesday, May 31. The Prisoner's birth-day, he awoke early,
perfonned his Devotions, held his chain in his hand full fas-
tened to his leg, and deliberately got out at the Window into the
Garden, mounted the Garden-wall with much difficulty, lost
one of his slippers, and jumped down into the back-way, just
before the clock struck two. He went towards Mile-End, and his
left-foot that wanted a slipper was sorely hurt by the gravel-
stones, which greatly afflicted him, and obliged him to put the
slipper on his left-foot. From thence he went towards White-
Chapel, and in his way met with a kind Soldier, who, upon
hearing his Case, endeavoured to get him a Coach, but in vain;
therefore he and the Soldier walked undiscovered til they came
to Aldgate, where the Watchmen perceiving a chain, and sus-
pecting him to be a person broke out of Gaol, several Watchmen
and the Constable Mr. Wardly followed him to Leadenhall-Street,
and brought him back to Aldgate watch-house. He acquainted
the two Constables Mr. Ward and Mr. Wardly with his Case,
which did much affect them. They allowed him some refresh-
ment, and promised to carry him before my Lord Mayor, but
sent a Watchman privately to Bethnal-Green, to know the certain-
ly of the Account; upon which Davis and two more of their
bull-dogs came to the Watch-house with handcuffs to carry back
the Prisoner; but the Constable perceiving his meek and sedate
Conversation, would not allow it, but desired Wright their mas-
ter to come before my Lord Mayor, at Grocers Hall, about 11
o'clock, where he would see his Prisoner.

The Prisoner after five o'clock desired the Constable to carry
him in a coach to North's Coffee-House near Guild-Hall, where he
was much refreshed and heartened about five hours. A Printer
at Aberdeen in Scotland came this morning to the Coffee-house,
and artfully insinuated to the Constable, that it would be the

The London-Citizen Exceedingly Injured 55

best way to deliver up the Prisoner to be confined some time
longer. This Printer lodged at Grant's in White's-Alley, and it is
supposed that he was sent thither by Wightman and Oswald,
with whom he became suddenly much acquainted; and it's cer-
tain that he falsely said to the Prisoner, that he came to the
Coffee-house accidentally without knowing of his being their.
He was received kindly by the Prisoner, he being lately come
from Scotland; but this false man, as the Constable rightly-
judged, proved very treacherous in several respects; and partic-
ularly upon his going to Scotland he greatly injured the Prisoner
by poisoning his relations with false reports; and his falshood is
attended with great ingratitude, he being some years ago great-
ly obliged to the Prisoner, upon his first coming as a Journey-
man to London, but now Oswald is become his Correspondent,
and the Printer appears to be a selfish, ungrateful man.

The Prisoner went to Grocers-hall about eleven o'clock, with
his chains on, for he would not have them taken off till the Lord
Mayor should see them. Before he appeared, Wightman with
some of his friends had been with his Lordship, in order to fill
him with Prejudices against the Prisoner: And Wightman hear-
ing the Constable speak very favourably of the Prisoner, and of
his rational Behaviour, gave him half-a-crown, which the Const-
able looked upon as a bribe to be silent; and Wightman was so
base as afterwards to charge it to the Prisoner. The Constable
told his Lordship the situation of the Prisoner when he seiz’d
him; and the Prisoner gave his Lordship a just and full account
of his illegal and barbarous Imprisonment, and demanded that
Wightman might be immediately sent to Newgate, or held to bail.
To which his Lordship made no reply.

The Prisoner was several hours in bed at North's Coffee-house,
and had not time to send for his friends; but Wightman was
surrounded both with friends and wretched Tools; for London
the Apothecary and Grant of White's-Alley, both took their oath
before his Lordship that the Prisoner was Lunatick, tho’ Grant,
poor Creature, knows no more what is meant by Lunatick, than
a Child of a year old, and had not seen the Prisoner for nine
weeks and six days before. The Prisoner told his Lordship that,
if he had complied with Wz'ghtman’s earnest request to pardon
him, he had long ago been out of that dismal place, but that he
was always resolved to vindicate his own Character, and to have

56 ALEXANDER CRUDEN

legal satisfaction. For proof of which the Prisoner shewed his
Lordship the joint Letter of Dr. Stukeley and Dr. Rogers, which
his Lordship read. His Lordship asked why he appeared before
him with his Chain? To which the Prisoner replied, that this
chain being put on by illegal power, he was resolved to have it
taken off by legal authority; and accordingly the Constable un-
locked the chain in the presence of his Lordship. He also told his
Lordship that base Wightman had intercepted all his Letters, and
several to his Lordship, particularly one writ last week, which
Wightman, like a cat who had lost her tail, sneakingly took out of
his pocket, it being opened, and gave it to his Lordship. Vile
Wightman said to his Lordship, that no body would receive the
Prisoner as a lodger: To which the Prisoner answered that it was
abominably false, and he named an honest family that would
heartily receive him. Then the Lord Mayor said to the Prisoner,
Will you submit to Dr. M0nr0’s judgment? Which he refused to
do with indignation, knowing him to be intirely Wz'ghtman’s
Creature from his gross lies and calumnies against him. He
offered to refer his Case to Dr. Stukeley, but no Physician came. It
is supposed, that Monro, Wightman’s Tool, was at hand, ready to
assert any thing, right or wrong, to screen guilty Wightman.

But when the Prisoner saw Wightman endeavouring to have
him still under his care, he fell upon his knees before Sir Iohn
Barnard, and begged most earnestly not to be delivered into the
hands of cruel Wightman, but rather into the hands of an honest
Constable, or any body his Lordship pleased: And rising from
his knees he pulled up his courage, and told his Lordship plain-
ly, that he perceived Wightman had poisoned him too much, but
that if his Lordship, or the greatest subject in England should
send him to a Madhouse (when he was not mad) he would
pursue him to the utmost. Then Providence soon gave a turn to
the matter, and his Lordship recommended him to a lodging in
Downing-street. And so Mr. C. glad to be delivered out of Wight-
man’s power, went in a Coach from Grocers-hall, to Mr. Morgan's
Joiner in Downing-street near H ide-park-corner this 31st of May,
1738; and there Mrs. Morgan his landlady took great care of him,
particularly of his foot that had been greatly hurt this Morning,
and was now much swelled. Wightman was much chagrined at
the Prisoner's Escape, and refused at first to pay Wright, saying
that he could not answer for his Escape.

1774'-E~

One More Proof of the Iniquitous Abuse of Private
Madhouses, by Samuel Bruckshaw

Samuel Bruckshaw was a wool merchant in the town of Bourn, near
Stamford, in Lincolnshire. In 1769 he bought some property in Stam-
ford and quickly moved in, preparing for business. But soon some-
thing went wrong. It appears he overextended his credit and was
forced into some kind of bankruptcy in which much of his property
was sold, including considerable business stock and his new resi-
dence. Bruckshaw was upset about the sale of his home. He insisted
that he gave pennission only for the disposal of his business stock
and refused to sign the note of sale for the property. Finally he went
to the new owner, a Mr. Langton, and warned him not to spend
any money on improvements because he intended to reclaim the
house. Langton was not sympathetic. Eventually, the town sergeant
visited Bruckshaw and told him the mayor didn't want him to bother
the Langtons any longer. Bruckshaw then asked the mayor to go with
him to the Langtons and arbitrate. First the mayor agreed, then he
declined. Bruckshaw decided to go on his own, whereupon he was
”co1lared” by two constables, ”dragged through the public streets,”
and locked up. According to Bruckshaw, he was then beaten by two
of his jailors and bound hand and foot to a bed. Later he was shackled
and transported to a private madhouse some distance north of Stam-
ford, in Yorkshire, under a warrant issued by the mayor.

The private madhouse in Yorkshire was run as a family business by
the Wilsons. Bruckshaw says that the Wilsons kept his clothes from
him and chained him to a bed for about a month, that he was fed
poorly, insulted, threatened with violence, refused medical treat-
ment, and chained a second time to a bed for eighty-two days. In
addition, his mail was read without his permission, his journal was
taken from him, he was robbed of a ten-pound note, and was not
allowed visitors. He was finally released after two hundred and
eighty-four days under the Wilson's hospitality.

After his release, Bruckshaw was unable to reestablish his busi-
ness, due in part to the stigma of having been in a madhouse. He
spent a great deal of time and money on two attempts to sue the
mayor of Stamford and others for false imprisonment, but the only
profit gained was by his lawyers—both times the case was thrown
out of court. In 1774, as a last, desperate measure, Bruckshaw wrote

57

58 SAMUEL BRUCKSHAW

and published One More Proof of the Iniquitous Abuse of Private Mad-
houses, stating his hopes for general public benefit from the exposure
of his case and for the advancement of his legal pursuits.

Even more than Cruden’s pamphlet of 1739, this pamphlet has all
the traits of a legal proceeding. The narrative portion of the pamphlet
comprises only slightly half the full length, and is followed by a
lengthy, complicated, and rather boring discussion of Bruckshaw’s
misadventures in the courts, followed in turn by an appendix of perti-
nent documents and affidavits.

What may seem at first glance to be an unbiased presentation of a
legal case, calling upon witnesses both pro and con, in fact contains a
good deal of bias and of artful, positive self-presentation. But in
spite of his carefully, even artfully presented defense, Bruckshaw
may have revealed more of himself than he intended. He was
obviously a contentious man, rough, probably humorless, possibly
overbearing, and obsessed with getting his just due. For instance, the
town constables come to arrest him, but he does not go quietly, meek-
ly, as many might have. Instead, when one of the constables seizes
him by the collar, Bruckshaw turns around and seizes him by the
collar, demanding to know his authority. He was a bristly man, but
beyond that, he reveals himself to have been suspicious to the point
of pathology. He writes in detail of an extensive conspiracy perpe-
trated by several Stamford citizens. It was that conspiracy that caused
his years of trouble: his financial collapse, his false arrest, and false
imprisonment. Not only does he suspect many of the local people, he
suspects his lawyer in London as well. And when a physician visits
him in jail, Bruckshaw thinks that he is part of the conspiracy as well
and that the physician's bottles of ”physick” might be some kind of
poison. After his financial collapse, not long before his troubles at
Stamford, Bruckshaw also fell ill with what he describes as an
”anguish disorder,” obviously a severe depression, for which he re-
quired several months’ medical treatment. And twice during his
imprisonment, he heard anonymous voices, which may have been
hallucinations.

From our distance of two hundred years, it is of course impossible
to know whether Bruckshaw was sane or not at the time of his incar-
ceration. We have no other significant documents about the events,
nothing other than Bruckshaw’s side of the story. Yet we have no
reason to doubt his detailed and methodical descriptions of being
chained, threatened, tormented, and poorly fed. It seems clear
enough that he was locked up by arbitrary authority.

I have chosen to reprint here Bruckshaw’s account of his first meet-

One More Proof of the Iniquitous Abuse of Private Madhouses 59

mg with the Wilsons and his unhappy residence in their madhouse in
Yorkshire. Bruckshaw has carefully tried to reproduce his keeper's
Yorkshire dialect. The immediate effect is comic; yet the portrayal of
Wilson's insouciance and ultimate brutality reveal a personality more
cruel than comic.

Jusr BEFORE MY DINNER was brought up, on the 26th of June
1770, two strangers came abruptly into the said garret, and with
an air of great familiarity addressed themselves to me thus;
”Well, Mr. Bruckshaw, how doone you, Corn yoo’sen go with us,
t’see yoor friends i’ Yorshire.” I asked their names; they
answered, Wilson. I replied, ”I came from thence only a fort-
night ago. My business lies in London, requires my immediate
attendance, and I will be there as soon as possible.” They still
importuned me to go with them, to which I answered, If your
business here is to insult me, I desire you will immediately quit the
room, which will save me the trouble of shewing you the way
out. If you choose to behave civilly, sit down, and welcome, my
dinner is coming in.” Upon which they sat down, and after some
time said, ”Wel1, Maister, if yoo winnow goo with us ween be
getting towards hoom, han-you any messuage that yoo
chus’en to send by us to your friends.” I thanked them and
said, ”You may tell them the situation I'm in; that I have been
most barbarously treated: but these men who are placed in my
next room as my guard have repented of what they have done,
and that they were hired to it by the mayor and his friends; and
since that they have behaved to me with some civility. I expect to
be released every minute, and then they shall hear from me, and
that I am very well.” To which they answered, ”We win, so fare
yoo weell, they'll be glad to hear fro’ yoo;” and immediately
withdrew.

In the evening, to my great surprize, the aforesaid Wilsons
returned into the said garrett, and with the assistance of Clarke
the gaoler, Walker, Whittle, and White, seized me, threw me
upon the bed, clapped irons on my hands and legs, and dragged me
into a chaise». In the first stage, Wilson Senior said, ”The mayor
wanted us tak yoo with us without his warrant, but I knew better; I

60 SAMUEL BRUCKSHAW

have one i’ me pocket, signed by the mayor and one alderman Exton:
the mayor seemed to sit on thorns when he had ge’en me the
warrant.” Walker, who went with us the first stage, informed
me of two other Persons who executed the aforesaid bond.

1- 36- 3(-

When Wilson shewed me to bed, he carried me up into a dark
and dirty garret, there stripped me, and carried my cloathes out of
the room, which I saw no more, for upwards of a month, but lay
chained to this bad bed, all that time; this appears to be their
breaking in garret; under the ridge-tree is a box for the harbour
of pigeons, which they disturb in the night time, to affright their
prisoner when he should rest. For this purpose some of Wil-
son's family are up all night long, sometimes they throw pails of
water down under the window, now and then brushing across,
with a few small rods, or rubbing with a stone or brick upon the
wall, sometimes put a light up to the window, and every now
and then make a disagreeable noise, to awake you in a fright. In
the day-time the window is darkened, and common necessaries
denied; they gave me bad victuals, short allowance, with sour
beer, oftener water, and sometimes not that; no attendance, but
what was as contradictory and provoking as they could possibly
invent, and frequently the most barbarous stripes; and to keep
these inquisition-like transactions a secret from the world, Wil-
son's wife does the office of a barber, but I refused to come
under her hands, and by that means got a Barber, who is a very
respectable evidence. 5

At the expiration of about a month, I was permitted to have
my cloaths for a day, and to walk about the house in irons; when
any person was in conversation with me, Wilson made it a rule
to interrupt us with ”Why maister, yo’r weel us’d, yoo getten
plenty of good victuals and drink, and rest in your bones, yoon be fitt
for any thing when yoo gone from here; I'm liken to be the best
friend yoo han’;” which generally had the intended effect of
enraging me.

This Wilson never failed to observe to the person who I had
been conversing with, adding, ”that I was very subject to rave in
this manner, and that I behaved very audaciously at Stamford; or
the mayor (who is a very good kind of man) would not have impris-
oned him.”

One More Proof of the Iniquitous Abuse of Private Madhouses 61

In this manner I was treated, (now and then a day below stairs,)
in the said garret, till the beginning of November, when I was
reduced to a skeleton; I really thought I must have died with
pining, cold, and severity of treatment; Wilson had the like
apprehensions, allowed me a fire, but refused me a doctor and
nurse, pennitted me to come down into the family as soon as I
was able to stir about, where Wilson's wife threatened me thus:
”I’ll lay yoo o’ the head with the poker, zfyoo doo make complaint to any
body that comes into th’ house.”

While I enjoyed this privilege, there came a servant maid out
of a respectable family in Manchester, and wanted Wilson to
cure her complaint in one week, which he undertook to do;
Wilson's family gave it out, ”that her disorder was a dropsey, and
lowness of spirits, which made her incapable of doing her busi-
ness.”—I being of opinion that this woman might have got
superior advice in Manchester, and that real dropsies were not
to be cured in a week, happened to say, that this woman's
disorder must certainly, from her applying to Wilson, be of a
nature that required secrecy and the assistance of a rogue, and
the next day I was chained up in this second garret, which was
exceedingly smoaky; sometimes allowed no fire at all. Here I
was confined EIGHTY-TWO DAYS.

I was at length permitted to write letters to my friends, which
Wilson promised to send as directed, yet stopped, broke open,
and read them; one of which was found by a fellow prisoner
and brought to me.

My journal was taken from me, when they perceived I took
minutes of their transactions, along with a ten pound bank note,
my charge for false imprisonment, and the list of names which I
took from the mouths of the ruffians at Stamford, who they
confessed executed to them the aforesaid Bond.

On the eighty second day of the close confinement in this
garret, Wilson came up and addressed me thus: ”weel maister, as
this chimney smooks so, if yoon behave mannerly, yoos’en go down
into’ith house;” and took the irons off my leg. I immediately
found that it was through the persuasion of a respectable gentle-
man, well acquainted with maladies of the nature Wilsons and
the magistrates of Stamford publicly reported that I laboured
under. When I thanked him for my release from the irons, &c.

62 SAMUEL BRUCKSHAW

he told me he prevailed upon Wilsons, by reasoning with them
in these words: ”I have spent more than once, some hours with
Mr. Bruckshaw, and I find him no more disordered in his senses,
than any one of your own family, or any person in this parish;
you are destroying his health, which I find he has been as care-
ful in preserving as if directed by a physician and called in for that
purpose, you cannot mean any good by such treatment. He is
naturally of a strong, healthy constitution, which requires exercise;
why don't you let him come down into the family, and take a little
air? I am moreover informed that he never was otherwise than
he now is, and that it is unanimously allowed by a number of
your own neighbours who saw him get out of the chaise at
Lusley, upwards of six months ago, that he was no more dis-
ordered in his senses at that time than any person there present,
which is well confirmed to me, by what I have seen myself, and
been informed by the Barber who has shaved him all the time he
has been confined here, and the same is avouched by your
neighbours all round you.” This gentleman is a surgeon and
physician of eminence.

I being thus released, out of the said garret; my friend and I
walked out together, and called upon several of the neighbours,
who informed me, that my confinement would soon be at an
end; for the neighbours took such notice, that Wilsons were
very uneasy that they had any concern in the matter, notwith-
standing all the money they got from the people of Stamford;
which they had reason to believe was a considerable sum, and
that they might have had more, if they had asked it, and that
they were very poor before they fell into this way, scarce able to
keep themselves off the parish. That they had seen my brother
come and go several times, seemingly in great trouble, and that
Wilson's landlord had taken him to task respecting my confine-
ment, and that Wilson answered him, ”I want to know how I'm
to be paid before I let him goo’a.”

They advised me not to think of running away, as my enemies
would gratify their malignaty with observing, that I run away
from a madhouse. I answered them, that I would not, and told
them of the young woman from Manchester, as aforesaid, to
which they answered, that they had heard Wilson accused of
the like before, but were always willing to hope it was not true.

One More Proof of the Iniquitous Abuse of Private Madhouses 63

When I returned back, I made some enquiry of my fellow
prisoners, if they had seen my Brother, to which they answered
they had, he had been several times, and was very importunate to
see me; but that Wilson always put him off, with saying, ”it’ll be
better for him, that yoo don't, he's so bad, that he'll be ready to
tear you too pieces; I hardly dar go ney him sometimes mysel,
and it all as makes him worse.” And that Wilsons had denied
many others in the same manner, yet they durst not contradict
them, for fear of their cruel resentment; they threatened me
with close confinement again, if I dared to caH in at any of their
neighbours houses. I gave them no answer, but walked out, and
importuned the neighbours to make a complaint in my behalf,
before a magistrate; some of them promised they would, if I was
not released soon; they would speak to Wilson first; as he was a
desperate fellow, and their neighbour, they had rather not incur
his resentment. On my return, I again demanded their author-
ity for detaining me, whereupon they brought me the aforesaid
order of John Hopkins, and ]ohn Exton, and after reading it, I
put it into my pocket, and Wilson's wife immediately called her
husband and son, and gave them orders to take it from me by
force, which they obeyed, at the same time promising me thus:
”yoo’son hav a copy on’t when yoo gune fro here.” I also pre-
sumed to to arraign their judgment, in the management of pre-
tended Lunatics; to which they answered, ”Yoo’en been used
just as twas fixt on before we touch’t yoo.” The neighbours
importuned them so closely to release me, that they at length let
my Brother know I was recovered, and might be at liberty as
soon as he pleased: my brother came over on the 25th of March,
1771, and I was released from the aforesaid imprisonment of Two
hundred and Eighty-four days, by order of John Hopkins, and John
Exton, Magistrates of Stamford, under their aforesaid charge of
insanity.

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa. 15260

Copyright © 1982, University of Pittsburgh Press
All rights reserved

Feffer and Simons, Inc., London

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Main entry under title:
A Mad people's history of madness.

(Contemporary community health series)

Bibliography: p. 353

1. Mental il1ness—History—Biography. 2. Psychiatric hospital care—History—
Biography. I. Peterson, Dale. II. Series. [DNLM: 1. Mental disorders—Biog-
raphy. WM 40 P485m]
RC464.A1M32 362.2’09 81-50430
ISBN 0-8229-3444-2 AACR2
ISBN 0-8229-5331-5 (pbk.)

1816'~E-
Memoir of the Early Life of William Cowper, Esq.

At least four times in his life William Cowper (1731-1800), the English
poet and hymnist, experienced severe crises of depression which ren-
dered him irrational and at times even suicidal. In 1773, at the begin-
ning of his third crisis, Cowper had a dream which led him to believe
that God had forsaken him. Except for three days of respite, Cowper
lived in despair for the rest of his life, briefly diverting himself with
gardening, caring for pets, taking walks, indulging in conversation,
and writing letters and poems. His first volume of poetry (1782)
brought him recognition, while his second volume (1785)—including
his best remembered poem, ”The Task”—brought him fame. While
neither the best nor the most significant poet of his age, Cowper’s
studies of English village and domestic life remain well worth reading.
Around 1765, at the rnid-point of his life and after recovering from a
major breakdown, Cowper wrote his Memoir of the Early Life. The subject
of the book is his second crisis, an experience of despair and self-hatred
great enough to lead him to an attempt at suicide and a breakdown into
madness. But the book was written well before the onset of his penna-
nent state of despair; thus the tone of the narrator is hopeful and
religiously orthodox.

As Trosse did before him, Cowper places his story of mental break-
down within the framework of the Puritan spiritual autobiography: a
familiar tale of youthful rebellion and final regeneration told through
traditional Puritan language. At the age of twelve or thirteen, the poet
was taken ill with smallpox, but his young heart was already hard-
ened against God's usual means of chastisement. He was hardly out
of his sickbed before he returned with even more intensity to his old
sinful ways. By his thirty-second year, he had not a thought ”of the
things of my salvation.”

Unlike Trosse, Cowper does not detail the nature of his early sins,
other than to mention that he was skilled in the ”infemal art of
lying.” But the pivotal moral transgression seemed, in his mind, to
lie in the explicit wish that a certain clerk in the House of Lords would
die, so that Cowper could take his place. The clerk did die, and
Cowper was offered the position. To his horror, he learned that the
appointment was being contested. He would have to be examined
openly before the House of Lords. Public scrutiny in Parliament
seemed to Cowper an intolerable prospect, and he resolved on

64

Memoir of the Early Life of William Cowper, Esq. 65

suicide. In his words: ”N ow came the grand temptation; the point to
which Satan had all the while been driving me—the dark and hellish
purpose of self murder.” He tried suicide in several ways and failed.
Until then, he had been unconcerned with spiritual truths, but after
his most serious attempt at self murder, he felt that ”Conviction of sin
took place.” He paced back and forth in his room, telling himself,
”There was never so abandoned a wretch; so great a sinner!” He
began to think he was damned for all eternity. And then it seemed
that he was simultaneously attacked by both Satan and madness:

Satan piled me closely with horrible visions, and more horrible voices.
My ears rang with the sound of torments, that seemed to await me.
Then did the pains of hell get hold on me, and, before day break, the
very sorrows of death encompassed me. . . . If it were possible, that a
heavy blow could light on the brain, without touching the skull, such
was the sensation I felt. I clapped my hand to my forehead, and cried
aloud through the pain it gave me. At every stroke, my thoughts and
expressions became more wild and incoherent; all that remained clear
was the sense of sin, and the expectation of punishment. These kept
undisturbed possession all through my illness, without interruption or
abatement.

Cowper was taken to Dr. Cotton’s private madhouse in St. A1ban’s
where he stayed from December 1763 until June 1765. Finally, in a
moment of spiritual insight, Cowper found relief from his depression
through conversion to an evangelical kind of Christianity. Like
Trosse, Cowper did not see his madness as an accidental sickness of
the mind, but a manifestation of the workings of spiritual forces. The
experience of madness was at once attributable to a chastisement by
God and a possession by Satan. Cowper’s cure came from the experi-
ence of conversion and the realignment of personal belief.

I have chosen to reprint here Cowper’s description of his most
serious attempt at suicide, his attack of madness, and his recovery in
Dr. Cotton’s private madhouse. This is one of the earliest clear, sub-
jective descriptions of an experience of madness, which Cowper chose
to mold into the traditional framework of the Puritan spiritual
autobiography.

IN THIS MANNER the time passed till the day began to break. I
heard the clock strike seven, and instantly it occurred to me

66 WILLIAM COWPER

that there was no time to be lost. The chambers would soon be
opened, and my friend would call upon me to take me with
him to Westminster. ”Now is the time,” thought I,—”this is the
crisis;—no more dallying with the love of life.” I arose, and, as
I thought, bolted the inner door of my chambers, but was mis-
taken; my touch deceived me, and I left it as I found it. My
preservation indeed, as it will appear, did not depend upon
that incident; but I mention it, to show that the good provi-
dence of God watched over me to keep open every way of
deliverance, that nothing might be left to hazard. Not one hesi-
tating thought now remained; but I fell greedily to the execu-
tion of my purpose. My garter was made of a broad scarlet
binding, with a sliding buckle being sewn together at the end:
by the help of the buckle I made a noose, and fixed it around
my neck, straining it so tight, that I hardly left a passage for my
breath, or for the blood to circulate, the tongue of the buckle
held it fast. At each corner of the bed, was placed a wreath of
carved work, fastened by an iron pin, which passed up
through the midst of it. The other part of the garter, which
made a loop, I slipped over one of these, and hung by it some
seconds, drawing my feet under me, that they might not touch
the floor; but the iron bent, and the carved work slipped off,
and the garter with it. I then fastened it to the frame of the
tester, winding it round, and tying it in a strong knot. The
frame broke short and let me down again. The third effort was
more likely to succeed. I set the door open, which reached
within a foot of the ceiling; and by the help of a chair I could
command the top of it; and the loop being large enough to
admit a large angle of the door, was easily fixed, so as not to
slip off again. I pushed away the chair with my feet, and hung
at my whole length. While I hung there, I distinctly heard a
voice say three times, ” ’Tis over!” Though I am sure of the fact,
and was so at the time, yet it did not at all alarm me, or affect
my resolution. I hung so long, that I lost all sense, all con-
sciousness of existence.

When I came to myself again, I thought myself in hell; the
sound of my own dreadful groans was all that I heard; and a
feeling like that produced by a flash of lightning, just beginning

Memoir of the Early Life of William Cowper, Esq. 67

to seize upon me, passed over my whole body. In a few seconds
I found myself fallen with my face to the floor. In about half a
minute, I recovered my feet, and reeling, and staggering, stum-
bled into bed again. By the blessed providence of God, the
garter which had held me till the bitterness of temporal death
was past, broke, just before eternal death had taken place upon
me. The stagnation of the blood under one eye, in a broad
crimson spot, and a red circle about my neck, showed plainly
that I had been on the brink of eternity. The latter, indeed, might
have been occasioned by the pressure of the garter; but the
former was certainly the effect of strangulation; for it was not
attended with the sensation of a bruise, as it must have been,
had I, in my fall, received one in so tender a part. And I rather
think the circle round my neck was owing to the same cause; for
the part was not excoriated, nor at all in pain.

Soon after I got into bed, I was surprised to hear a noise in the
dining-room, where the laundress was lighting a fire. She had
found the door unbolted, notwithstanding my design to fasten
it, and must have passed the bed-chamber door while I was
hanging on it, and yet never perceived me. She heard me fall,
and presently came to ask if I were well; adding, she feared I
had been in a fit. I sent her to a friend, to whom I related the
whole affair, and dispatched him to my kinsman, at the coffee-
house. As soon as the latter arrived, I pointed to the broken
garter, which lay in the middle of the room; and apprized him
also of the attempt I had been making.—I-Iis words were, ”My
dear Mr. Cowper, you terrify me;—to be sure you cannot hold
the office at this rate—where is the deputation?” I gave him the
key of the drawer where it was deposited; and his business
requiring his immediate attendance, he took it away with him;
and thus ended all my connexion with the Parliament-House.

To this moment I had felt no concern of a spiritual kind.
Ignorant of original sin, insensible of the guilt of actual trans-
gression, I understood neither the law nor the gospel; the con-
demning nature of the one, nor the restoring mercies of the
other. I was as much unacquainted with Christ, in all his saving
offices, as if his blessed name had never reached me. Now,
therefore, a new scene opened upon me. Conviction of sin took

68 WILLIAM COWPER

place, especially of that just committed; the meanness of it, as
well as its atrocity, were exhibited to me in colours so inconceiv-
ably strong, that I despised myself, with a contempt not to be
imagined or expressed, for having attempted it. This sense of it
secured me from the repetition of a crime, which I could not
now reflect on without abhorrence.

Before I arose from bed, it was suggested to me, that there
was nothing wanting but murder, to fill up the measure of my
iniquities; and that, though I had failed in my design, yet I had
all the guilt of that crime to answer for. A sense of God's wrath,
and a deep despair of escaping it, instantly succeeded. The fear
of death became much more prevalent in me now than even the
desire of it had been. A frequent flashing like that of fire, before
my eyes, and an excessive pressure upon my brain, made me
apprehensive of an apoplexy; an event which I thought the
more probable, as an extravasation in that part seemed likely to
happen, in so violent a struggle.

3? if 3(-

Satan plied me closely with horrible visions, and more hor-
rible voices. My ears rang with the sound of torrnents, that
seemed to await me. Then did the painsof hell get hold on me,
and, before day break, the very sorrows of death encompassed
me. A numbness seized the extremities of my body, and life
seemed to retreat before it. My hands and feet became cold and
stiff; a cold sweat stood upon my forehead; my heart seemed at
every pulse to beat its last, and my soul to cling to my lips, as if
on the very brink of departure. No convicted criminal ever
feared death more, or was more assured of dying.

At eleven o'clock, my brother called upon me, and in about
an hour after his arrival, that distemper of mind, which I had so
ardently wished for, actually seized me. While I traversed the
apartment, in the most horrible dismay of soul, expecting every
moment that the earth would open and swallow me up; my
conscience scaring me, the avenger of blood pursuing me, and
the city of refuge out of reach and out of sight; a strange and
horrible darkness fell upon me. If it were possible, that a heavy
blow could light on the brain, without touching the skull, such
was the sensation I felt. I clapped my hand to my forehead, and
cried aloud through the pain it gave me. At every stroke, my

Memoir of the Early Life of William Cowper, Esq. 69

thoughts and expressions became more wild and incoherent; all
that remained clear was the sense of sin, and the expectation of
punishment. These kept undisturbed possession all through my
illness, without interruption or abatement.

My brother instantly observed the change, and consulted
with my friends on the best manner to dispose of me. It was
agreed among them, that I should be carried to St. Alban’s,
where Dr. Cotton kept a house for the reception of such pa-
tients, and with whom I was known to have a slight acquaint-
ance. Not only his skill, as a physician, recommended him to
their choice, but his well-known humanity, and sweetness of
temper. It will be proper to draw a veil over the secrets of my
prison house; let it suffice to say, that the low state of body and
mind, to which I was reduced, was perfectly well calculated to
humble the natural vain-glory and pride of my heart.

These are the efficacious means which Infinite Wisdom
thought meet to make use of for that purpose. A sense of self-
loathing and abhorrence ran through all my insanity. Conviction
of sin, and expectation of instant judgment, never left me from
the 7th of December, 1763, until the middle of July following.
The accuser of the brethren was ever busy with me night and
day, bringing to my recollection in dreams the commission of
long forgotten sins, and charging upon my conscience things of
an indifferent nature, as atrocious crimes.

All that passed in this long interval of eight months, may be
classed under two heads: conviction of sin, and despair of mer-
cy. But blessed be the God of my salvation for every sigh I drew,
for every tear I shed; since thus it pleased him to judge me here,
that I might not be judged hereafter.

After five months’ continual expectation, that the divine
vengeance would plunge me into the bottomless pit, I became
so familiar with despair, as to have contracted a sort of hardiness
and indifference as to the event. I began to persuade myself,
that while the execution of the sentence was suspended, it
would be for my interest to indulge a less horrible train of ideas,
than I had been accustomed to muse upon. ”Eat and drink, for
tomorrow thou shalt be in hell,” was the maxim on which I
proceeded. By this means, I entered into conversation with the
Doctor, laughed at his stories, and told him some of my own to

70 WILLIAM COWPER

match them; still, however, carrying a sentence of irrevocable
doom in my heart.

He observed the seeming alteration with pleasure. Believing,
as well he might that my smiles were sincere, he thought my
recovery well nigh completed; but they were, in reality, like the
green surface of a morass, pleasant to the eye, but a cover for
nothing but rottenness and filth. The only thing that could
promote and effectuate my cure was yet wanting;—an ex-
perimental knowledge of the redemption which is in Christ
Jesus.

I remember, about this time, a diabolical species of regret that
found harbour in my wretched heart. I was sincerely sorry that I
had not seized every opportunity of giving scope to my wicked
appetites, and even envied those, who being departed to their
own place before me, had the consolation to reflect, that they
had well earned their miserable inheritance, by indulging their
sensuality without restraint. Oh, merciful God! what a tophet of
pollution is the human soul! Wherein do we differ from the
devils, unless thy grace prevent us?

In about three months more (July 25, 1764), my brother came
from Cambridge to visit me. Dr. C. having told him that he
thought me greatly amended, he was rather disappointed at
finding me almost as silent and reserved as ever; for the first
sight of him struck me with many painful sensations, both of
sorrow for my own remediless condition, and envy of his happi-
ness.

As soon as we were left alone, he asked me how I found
myself; I answered, ”As much better as despair can make me.”
We went together into the garden. Here, on expressing a settled
assurance of sudden judgment, he protested to me, that it was
all a delusion; and protested so strongly, that I could not help
giving some attention to him. I burst into tears, and cried out,
”If it be a delusion, then am I the happiest of beings.” Some-
thing like a ray of hope was shot into my heart; but still I was
afraid to indulge it. We dined together, and I spent the after-
noon in a more cheerful manner. Something seemed to whisper
to me every moment, ”Still there is mercy.” Even after he left
me, this change of sentiment gathered ground continually; yet
my mind was in such a fluctuating state, that I can only call it a

Memoir of the Early‘ Life of William Cowper, Esq. 71

vague presage of better things at hand, without being able to
assign a reason for it. The servant observed a sudden alteration
in me for the better; and the man, whom I have ever since
retained in my service, expressed great joy on the occasion.

I went to bed and slept well. In the morning I dreamed that
the sweetest boy I ever saw came dancing up to my bed-side; he
seemed just out of leading-strings, yet I took particular notice of
the firmness and steadiness of his tread. The sight affected me
with pleasure, and served at least to harmonize my spirits; so
that I awoke for the first time with a sensation of delight on my
mind. Still, however, I knew not where to look for the establish-
ment of the comfort I felt; my joy was as much a mystery to
myself as to those about me. The blessed God was preparing me
for the clearer light of his countenance by this first dawning of
that light upon me.

Within a few days of my first arrival at St. Alban’s, I had
thrown aside the word of God, as a book in which I had no
longer any interest or portion. The only instance, in which I can
recollect reading a single chapter, was about two months before
my recovery. Having found a Bible on the bench in the garden, I
opened it upon the 11th of St. John, where Lazarus is raised
from the dead; and saw so much benevolence, mercy, goodnes,
and sympathy with miserable man, in our Saviour’s conduct,
that I almost shed tears even after the relation; little thinking
that it was an exact type of the mercy which Jesus was on the
point of extending towards myself. I sighed, and said, ”Oh, that
I had not rejected so good a Redeemer, that I had not forfeited
all his favours!” Thus was my heart softened, though not yet
enlightened. I closed the book, without intending to open it
again.

Having risen with somewhat of a more cheerful feeling, I
repaired to my room, where breakfast waited for me. While I sat
at table, I found the cloud of horror, which had so long hung
over me, was every moment passing away; and every moment
came fraught with hope. I was continually more and more per-
suaded, that I was not utterly doomed to destruction. The way
of salvation was still, however, hid from my eyes; not did I see it
at all clearer than before my illness. I only thought, that if it
pleased God to spare me, I would lead a better life; and that I

72 WILLIAM COWPER

would yet escape hell, if a religious observance of my duty
would secure me from it. Thus may the terror of the Lord make
a Pharasee; but only the sweet voice of mercy in the gospel, can
make a Christian.

But the happy period which was to shake off my fetters and
afford me a clear opening of the free mercy of God in Christ
Jesus was now arrived. I flung myself in a chair near the win-
dow, and seeing a Bible there, ventured once more toapply to it
for comfort and instruction. The first verse I saw, was the 25th
of the 3d of Romans: ”Whom God hath set forth to be a propitia-
tion through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for

the remission of sins that are past, through the forebearance of .

God.” Immediately I received strength to believe, and the full
beams of the Sun of Righteousness shone upon me. I saw the
sufficiency of the atonement he had made, my pardon sealed in
his blood, and all the fulness and completeness of his justifica-
tion. In a moment I believed, and received the gospel. Whatever
my friend Madan had said to me, so long before, revived in all
its cleamess, with demonstration of the Spirit and with power.

Unless the Almighty arm had been under me, I think I should
have died with gratitude and joy. My eyes filled with tears, and
my voice choked with transport. I could only look up to heaven
in silent fear, overwhelmed with love and wonder. But the work
of the Holy Spirit is best described in his own words, it is ”joy
unspeakable, and full of glory.” Thus was my heavenly Father
in Christ Jesus pleased to give me the full assurance of faith;
and, out of a strong, unbelieving heart, to ”raise up a child unto
Abraham.” How glad should I now have been to have spent
every moment in prayer and thanksgiving! I lost no opportunity
of repairing to a throne of grace; but flew to it with an earnest-
ness irresistible and never to be satisfied. Could I help it? Could
I do otherwise than love and rejoice in my reconciled Father in
Christ Jesus? The Lord had enlarged my heart, and ”I ran in the
way of his commandments.”

For many succeeding weeks, tears were ready to flow, if I did
but speak of the gospel, or mention the name of Jesus. To rejoice
day and night was all my employment. Too happy to sleep
much, I thought it was but lost time that was spent in slumber.
Oh that the ardour of my first love had continued! But I have

Memoir of the Early Life of William Cowper, Esq. 73

known many a lifeless and unhallowed hour since; long inter-
vals of darkness, interrupted by short returns of peace and joy
in believing.

My physician, ever watchful and apprehensive for my wel-
fare, was now alarmed, lest the sudden transition from despair
to joy, should terminate in a fatal frenzy. But ”the Lord was my
strength and my song, and was become my salvation.” I said, ”I
shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord; he has
chastened me sore, but not given me over unto death. 0 give
thanks unto the Lord, for his mercy endureth for ever.”

In a short time, Dr. C. became satisfied, and acquiesced in the

soundness of my cure; and much sweet communion I had with
him concerning the things of our salvation. He visited me every
morning while I stayed with him, which was near twelve
months after my recovery, and the gospel was the delightful
theme of our conversation.

No trial has befallen me since, but what might be expected in
a state of welfare. Satan, indeed, has changed his battery. Before
my conversion, sensual gratification was the weapon with which
he sought to destroy me. Being naturally of an easy quiet dis-
position, I was seldom tempted to anger; yet, that passion it is
which now gives me the most disturbance, and occasions the
sharpest conflicts. But Jesus being my strength, I fight against it;
and if I am not conqueror, yet I am not overcome.

Publication of this book was assisted by a grant
from the Maurice Falk Medical Fund.

1818'~B-

The Interior of Bethlehem Hospital,
by Urbane Metcalf

Bethlehem Hospital, one of the earliest European asylums, began as a
priory, St. Mary's of Bethlehem, in 1247. It was officially recorded as a
”hospital” in 1329, but not until 1403 was it noted that Bethlehem had
mad patients. It was never very large. In 1403 there were onlysix mad
patients. Toward the end of Elizabeth's reign, the last years of the
sixteenth century, Bethlehem had only about twenty mad patients}
There were a few other similar institutions in Europe during that
time, but until the seventeenth century, Beth1ehem—known collo-
quially as Bedlam—was the only significant asylum in England.

During England's great period of reform in the first half of the
nineteenth century, government committees investigated Bethlehem
several times. An investigation in 1815 reported to the House of Com-
mons that patients were often chained to the walls as well as mana-
cled and that one of the female patients had been chained without
release for eight years. They also reported the case of a patient named
Norris who had been chained for twelve years. Artist's prints, depict-
ing Norris’s confinement, were exhibited before the House. An iron
collar, attached by a chain to a pole at the foot of his bed, restrained
him by the neck. His ankles were chained to the foot of his bed, and
an iron frame enclosed his torso. The governors of Bethlehem,
however, defended his treatment insisting that his confinement
appeared ”to have been, upon the whole, rather a merciful and
humane, than a rigorous and severe imposition.” At the same hear-
ing, Dr. Thomas Monro, one of Bethlehem’s physicians, testified on
the medical treatment of Bethlehem patients: routing bleeding,
vomiting, then purging. Said Dr. Monro: ”it was handed down to me
by my father, and I do not know any better practice/'2

Those 1815 hearings caused little immediate change at Bethlehem.
A report in 1837 noted that some patients were still chained and that
hospital funds were being misused by employees. The reform acts of
1845 specifically excluded Bethlehem (as the only asylum legally be-
longing to the City of London, Bethlehem was always in a unique

1Tuke, Chapters in the History of the Insane, pp. 52, 63.
2Ibid., pp. 80, 153.

74

The Interior of Bethlehem Hospital 75

position), and as late as 1851 investigations showed unsatisfactory
conditions. In 1853, however, Parliament at last officially directed that
Bethlehem be subject to legislation, thus placing it under the jurisdic-
tion of a permanent inspection and licensing committee. By 1877 an
investigation by the House of Commons into all types of institutions
for the mad, including Bethlehem, found nothing seriously wrong.3

Urbane Metcalf, however, wrote The Interior of Bethlehem Hospital
over half a century before, when Bethlehem was without question a
very unpleasant place. His account may well be the single surviving
patient’s description of the inside of the oldest existing asylum in the
world. Metcalf tells almost nothing about himself in the pamphlet,
except that he had been a patient at Bethlehem at that time and
several years earlier, between 1804 and 1806.

Bethlehem began keeping case notes on its patients a short time
before Metcalf’s second admission, and most of the information I have
about this obscure man comes from those notes.4 He was admitted to
Bethlehem for the second time on October 16, 1817, at which time he
considered himself to be the son of Matilda, sister to the king of
Denmark, and therefore an heir to the throne of Denmark. He was
put into the ”incurable Gallery,” according to a note of November 1,
1817, where he remained for about a year. The following case notes
describe the official view of his progress during the last five months of
his stay at Bethlehem:

June 1: This patient is extreamly orderly . but seems somewhat de-
pressed in spirits . his appetite . digestion and sleep is good . he is
frequently engaged in the occupation of a Tailor . but I am informed
that he gets his living out of Doors as a Hawker and Pedlar.

July 1: I am informed by Thomas Rodbird the Keeper of N° 4 in which
Gallery this patient has constantly resided . that he has now ceased to
consider himself as heir to The Throne of Denmark—-and I observe that
he does not seem so depressed.

July 3: A yellowness of the countenance is remarkable and his digestive
organs are a little out of order.

August 1: Notwith standing his having given up the idea of being The
Son of Matilda and Altho the depression is not so manifest still there is
something peculiar in his manner . as there is abundance of evidence of
his having been frequently deranged I cannot help thinking that there
is some latent disorder existing——he continues his medicine.

3Ibid., p. 197.
“From Bethlem Royal Hospital Archives.

76 URBANE METCALF

September 1: This patient appears rather irritable at this period and has
complained to me about the badness of the provisions and of the ill
treatment which some of the patients have endured from their respec-
tive keepers . he has also made the complaints to Dr. Munro—but I
cannot ascertain any fact upon which his accusations are grounded-
his health is improved and he continues to take the Pills.

September 4: Upon my return from Bridewell this morning I found that
Urban Metcalf had made the same complaints to Dr. Tuthill that he had
told to Dr. Munro and myself but as I was not present I do not conceive
that any entry of his narrative upon that occasion needs any comment
from me . Dr. Tuthill desired that he might be confined to his room.

September 7: His health is good . but he is irritable and full of com-
plaints respecting the economy of the Hospital as well as against the
Keepers.

October 15: Dr. Tuthill considered him well enough to have a months
leave of absence . it was this day granted him by The Committee.

November 12: Discharged Well.

Metcalf may well have been an ordinary patient in many ways. But,
from the entries made on September 1 and after, we see he was also a
troublemaker. Although cooperative up to the point of taking his
pills, he tended to be ”irritable.” He was ”full of complaints,” with-
out justification. "I cannot ascertain any fact upon which his accusa-
tions are grounded,” says the note-taker. A note on September 4
informs us that Metcalf was confined to his room, though it does not
tell us why, or how long.

Metcalf’s pamphlet, published very soon after his release, may ex-
plain that mysterious confinement:

About the end of August last I mentioned most of these abuses to the
physicians, apothecary, and steward, who treated them with indiffer-
ence and neglect, and to three gentlemen who visited the house on the
first Thursday in September, who I think belonged to the Committee of
the House of Commons, I attempted to acquaint them with the cruelties
and abuses . . . for this attempt I was confined to my room by Dr.
Tothill’s orders till the 20th of October, 1818, the day I was discharged,
during that time they refused my friends admittance to see me, though
they applied several times.5

5I'he discrepancy of dates may be more apparent than real. On October 15 he was
granted a “leave,” which may have taken effect a few days later; in any case, to Metcalf
it must have seemed equivalent to a "discharge/’

The Interior of Bethlehem Hospital 77

Perhaps the confinement was simply a deliberate attempt to control a
troublesome malcontent: they confined him then quickly released
him, hoping that he would return to the matrix of anonymous human-
ity from which he had emerged a year earlier. Instead, Metcalf wrote
The Interior of Bethlehem Hospital, selling it all over London for three
cents a copy.

Like Alexander Cruden before him, Metcalf attempts to present
himself as a reliable narrator, describing briefly who he is and how he
obtained his information about Bethlehem. He tells of a past propin-
quity, during his first stay at Bethlehem, to the patient Norris, whose
peculiar chaining caused serious scandal in 1815: ”Part of the time, I
occupied the next room to that occupied by the truly unhappy Norris,
(whose case is already before the public,) the iron bar to which he was
fastened stood at the foot of my bed, 0 what a disgrace!” How the
iron bar to which Norris was fastened could have been at the foot of
Metca1f’s bed when Norris was in another room is a mystery, and
perhaps a bit of self-dramatization by the author. But certainly-
whether the situation actually occurred or not—Metcalf is trying to
establish an image of himself as a narrator who was there, who has
experienced firsthand the awful truth of the interior of Bethlehem.

Except for the discussion of his confinement at the end, Metcalf
speaks of himself only as a witness to the cruelties and abuses prac-
tised against others. He says: ”I myself have not cause to complain as
I was generally treated with great civility, but I am, from a sense of
humanity, pleading the cause of the unfortunate.” And it is probably
the lack of a central figure, a central ”I,” that accounts for the lack of
coherence in this pamphlet. Metcalf gathered all infonnation possi-
ble, but he was unable to organize that information effectively. The
result is a slightly confusing survey which moves with equal empha-
sis from Dr. Munro's neglect of his patient Lloyd, to Blackbum’s
murder of the patient Fowler, to Rodbird’s inattention to the patient
Stockley’ s dirty socks. At times, the writing resembles a blurred
photograph. Nonetheless, this pamphlet’s historical position as one
of the earliest protests against the abuse of the mad, as well as its
interest as a rare survey of Bethlehem’s interior, make it well worth
reading. It is reproduced here in its entirety.

IT WILL BE NECESSARY to say something of myself, that it may
appear how I obtained my knowledge of the cruelties and

78 URBANE METCALF

abuses that are daily practised in the first establishment of the
kind in Europe. During the years of 1804, 5, and 6, I spent
twenty-two months in that dreary abode, Old Bethlehem Hos-
pital; not more I believe than six weeks during that time I was
incapable, through indisposition, of judging of the occurrences
that daily took place. From the supineness of the then physi-
cian, the cruelty of the apothecary, the weakness of the steward,
and the uncontrouled audacity of the keepers, such scenes
passed, that if the hospital had stood in a solitary place, where
only six sensible and humane persons could have access in the
course of a year, it would even then have been astonishing that
they remained unexposed; but what was the fact? it stood in the
midst of the most populous city in Europe, and was under the
management of governors, some of them men the most humane
and respectable in their private characters that Britain could
boast; had officers that bore respectable characters, and keepers
that passed for honest men: and was almost daily visited by
some of the most exalted characters in the country, as well as by
foreigners. Part of the time, I occupied the next room to that
occupied by the truly unhappy Norris, (whose case is already
before the public,) the iron bar to which he was fastened stood
at the foot of my bed, 0 what a disgrace! I was under a keeper of
the name of Davies; far be it from me unnecessarily to rake up
the ashes of the dead, but this I must say, he was a cruel, unjust
and drunken man, and for many years as keeper secretly prac-
tised the greatest cruelties to those under his care; he was some
time previous to his death, porter, and when he died the com-
mittee had the goodness, thinking he had been a good servant,
to give a handsome sum towards the expences of his funeral,
but they were greatly deceived.

I, on the 16th of October 1817, became again a patient in the
New Bethlehem Hospital, and am happy to be able to state that
I found many alterations in the provisions, and in other things
that greatly added to the comfort of the patients, and to the
honour of those governors through whom those alterations
were effected. I found there were four galleries, and that the
patients in one gallery had seldom access to those in another,
except when in the green yard, and the establishment to be
considerably larger, but not so many patients. I became Dr.

The Interior of Bethlehem Hospital 79

Tothfll’s patient, and was put in the upper gallery, Thomas
Rodbird keeper, I wish to observe that I have read the printed
rules of the establishment, and their principle is good, the com-
forts of the patients are secured in every respect, but these
regulations are departed from and the keepers do just as they
please.

 £C.)t'l’1.1l1l\,/Iunro, } PHYSICIANS’

Mr. Wallett, —APOTHECARY.

Mr. Humby, —STEWARD.

Simmons —PORTER.

égggeand } First gallery or basement.
KEEPERS, Dowie, Second gallery.

Blackburn, Tlzird gallery.

Rodbird, Fourth gallery.
CUTTER, Vickery.

It is to be observed that the basement is appropriated for
those patients who are not cleanly in their persons, and who, on
that account have no beds, but lay on straw with blankets and a
rug; but I am sorry to say, it is too often made a place of punish-
ment, to gratify the unbounded cruelties of the keepers.

The present physicians, I think too supine: providence has
placed them in situations wherein they have it in their power
greatly to add to, or diminish from the comfort of the unfortu-
nate; I have known patients make just complaints to them,
which have been received with the utmost indifference, and not
at all attended to; one instance, to Dr. Tothill, Mr. Parker, in my
hearing, in the green yard, told him that he had been used very
ill by another patient, and conceived that Dowie the keeper, in
his gallery had set him on, likewise that Dowie had three shil-
lings of his, which he had in his pocket when he first came there;
why Dowie had kept it so long I cannot conceive, for no doubt
during nearly twelve months, Mr. Parker would often have been
glad to have made use of it to purchase snuff and other little
articles, but my opinion is, that if Mr. Parker's memory had been
bad, Dowie’s would not have been much brighter on the sub-

80 URBANE METCALF

ject; I myself, at my first admittance, twice applied to Dr. Tothill
to allow me butter instead of cheese, but in vain, it would not
have been setting a precedent as some other patients had that
indulgence, but whether it failed Dr. Tothil1’s memory in the
hurry of business, or whether I ought to have got Rodbird to
interest himself in the affair by giving him 5s. I leave to their
better judgment.

I well remember on Saturday, the day after Good Friday, a
patient of the name of Lloyd, Dr. Munro's patient, was in the
green yard, no other patient being there, during two or three
hours excessive rain, Dr. Munro going through the upper gal-
lery with a friend with him, came to the window of the keeper's
room, Iwas standing by, he observed to his friend that that was
the airing ground, I opened the window hoping that he would
see Lloyd in the green yard, but he took no notice of him,
though he, Lloyd, appeared to me to stand in full view.

I will allow that Mr. Wallett the apothecary is a very pleasant
man in his deportment, but I think he is very negligent as being
the resident apothecary, a great deal depends on him with re-
gard to the management of the house, and the comfort of the
patients.

Mr. Humby the steward, in my humble opinion acts with
great injustice, he admits provisions of the worst quality; the
beer during the twelve months that I speak of was exceedingly
bad, not fit in general, for any person to drink, the cheese was
very bad; the butter was very often bad; the meat in general
very bad; the potatoes very bad; none of the provisions fair
upon an average but the bread, and I have understood that is
not under his management. Though I have known that re-
peated complaints have been made to him, I believe that the
governors contract with the tradesmen for good wholesome
provisions, and if Mr. H. admits inferior he is doing the
patients an injustice, and no doubt is a gainer by it.

With regard to the beds, I think there is great mismanage-
ment, there are beds which frequently get wetted; those flocks
are taken into an upper room, emptied out of the ticks, the ticks
washed and mended, but the flocks never thoroughly dried, so
that when they are put again in the ticks they are still damp and
of course very dangerous for any person to sleep on, though I

The Interior of Bethlehem Hospital 81

believe that every clean patient on going into the house is
allowed a new bed. I myself had a damp bed given me which I
laid on for some time, and fear I shall feel the effects of it
through my future life, as I have for some months past been
subject to a pain in my loins, which I never had before. That
economy in every establishment is necessary I will allow, but to
be carried to such lengths as to deprive the unfortunate of com-
forts, to fill the pockets of an individual is an act of the most
cruel injustice; another thing, Mr. H. has snuff and tobacco at
his disposal, to give to any patient who stands in need of them,
but I have observed that there are but few individuals who
obtain it, and those whose real wants do not warrant an applica-
tion on their parts, while the poor and friendless go without:
Mr. Humby’ s injustice as steward, has very bad effects, not only
as far as it is carried on by himself, but setting an example to the
servants under him, who never fail to make the amplest use of it
in plundering the unfortunate, when any man placed in the
same situation, by acting with integrity could produce the most
incalculable benefit to the unfortunates under his charge.

Rodbird, keeper of the fourth gallery.

The gallery I was in, there is a patient of the name of Samuel
Breeze, he and fourteen more were in the old house when I was
there, in the year 1804; last February, for a trifling affair he was
locked up in his room for four days, and I know that during that
time he had no breakfasts nor suppers, but only a dinner each
day; another patient, Charles Saunders, had in the old house,
though as inoffensive as a child, had been kept chained for
years, that the keeper might have his clothes to sell. On the
sixteenth of October, when I went in, his age was nearly 70
years, he appeared dropping into the grave through the decays
of nature, and gradually got worse; I three distinct times re-
member him asking Dr. Munro his physician, to put him on the
sick mess, as his appetite was so bad he could not eat the regu-
lar provisions, but his request was disregarded, he was not put
on the sick mess till two days before he died: he died on the last
day in the year. Another patient of the name of Leonard, is in
general a very quiet man, I have known Rodbird the keeper,

82 URBANE METCALF

abuse him repeatedly and set the other patients on to do it: I
remember well I was once at the pump and Rodbird came to
rinse out a drinking horn, Rodbird said he had been giving
Leonard physic, and there were two doses of it, and damn the
B-gg-r he wished it was poison. And though it was Dr. Tothill,
his physician's order that he should go to chapel when he
chose, he used to hinder him whenever he pleased. Another
patient of the name of Brown, some months back it was thought
necessary to keep in a strait jacket, but afterwards he was
allowed in the day time to have it off. On Tuesday's, Thursday’ s
and Saturdays, the evenings that Rodbird went out, he would
put the jacket on before Brown had had his supper, and I have
seen him put to the greatest difficulty to contrive to eat his
supper as he had not the use of his hands, and this was done
merely to save Blackburn, who on those evenings supplied Rod-
bird’s place, the trouble of putting the jacket on at bed time.
Another patient of the name of Nugent, a quiet, well behaved
man, from what cause except Rodbird’s cruel manners, I cannot
tell, he would abuse in a very shameful manner. Another pa-
tient of the name of Rophy, who is a man of mild manners, and
has moved in a respectable sphere in life, and has a great aver-
sion to obscene language, I have known him often to insult in
that way in a very gross manner; once I remember Rodbird had
been out, and when he came in he told Mr. Rophy that his,
Rophy’ s son was sitting under the wall with a fiddle, begging,
and as it rained at the time, he observed, that he was very wet;
0 what cruelty! I well remember on new year’ s evening four of
us were playing at cards, William Kendal and Freeman got quar-
relling and at last to fighting, the keeper Blackburn was present,
Rodbird being out that evening; though he Blackburn might
have prevented them from fighting if he had pleased, they went
to bed in the greatest perturbation of mind against each other; in
the morning Rodbird opened another patients room door and
returned to bed leaving that patient to open the other doors, in a
short time Kendal and Freeman got again to fighting, Freeman
with a broom cut Kenda1's head; Rodbird had to get again out of
bed to part them, they were each confined to their rooms, and
as the greatest blame fell to Freeman's share, he was sent down
into the basement to sleep on straw for two or three months,
this appeared all fair to the officers, but there was an under plot

The Interior of Bethlehem Hospital 83

to be carried on; at that time and for some time previous, Free-
man had had a shilling a week and most of Rophy’s provisions
for waiting on him, but Rodbird thought this a fair opportunity
to get it out of his hands into his own, and which he has ever
since retained, this is the way in which patients are used, and
the officers deceived to gratify the avarice of cruel keepers. I
humbly imagine that when the alarm bells were put up they
were thought necessary, but during the summer months they
are entirely useless in the gallery I was in, as Rodbird is scarcely
ever in the gallery and his room door is kept shut, so that
whatever accident might happen they are useless; there is
another thing I wish to mention, the tray in which the suppers
are brought, instead of being brought into the dining room, and
each patient having his supper given him, it is set by Rodbird
outside the gallery door, and the patients are called to get their
suppers, any poor confused patient that neglects to go for his
supper, Rodbird in his great kindness forgets too, but no doubt
he does not forget to make use of the victuals another way.
There is a patient of the name of William Stockley, who is a poor
confused creature, he is a strong young man, but he is entirely
made a slave of by the keeper and by any other patient that
pleases in the gallery, and not only so, but he is sent a great deal
of his time down into the laundry to be made a drudge of there,
and this with Mr. H. the steward’s knowledge and leave; and
very often is sent to bed without his supper through Mr. Rod-
bird’s kindness, and I know that he has not a clean pair of
stockings more than once in three months, though his friends
and the governors no doubt, think he is made comfortable. I
myself have not cause to complain as I was generally treated
with great civility, but I am, from a sense of humanity, pleading
the cause of the unfortunate, this I will say of Rodbird, that he is
an idle, skulking, pilfering soundrel, and during the time I am
speaking of, he was not upon an average, in his gallery three
hours in the day and this could not be without the stewards
knowledge and connivance. Another circumstance, about four
months back when the patients that were at Hoxton belonging
to the sick and hurt office were removed to Hasler Hospital,
there were six men who came to Bethlehem, four were put in
Rodbird’s gallery, and two in the basement, one of the four
named Coates, had been disordered, he had some ways with