The first step, my father knew, was to ascertain whether the blood of acutely manic patients differed from that of healthy patients. For his experiments, he obtained blood from mental patients staying at the nearby McLean Hospital, keeping the vials of blood refrigerated at the laboratory, hopeful that if he could just unlock the secrets of their contents he might find some way of helping not only himself, but the many thousands of patients across the country suffering with manic depression.
Dr. Cannon had pioneered the study of the adrenal gland using laboratory cats. My father followed his lead. He had twenty cats in all, allowing him to divide them into two groups, ten for his test group and ten for the control group. First he sedated the two groups, removing their adrenal glands with a surgeon’s quick precision. After the gland was removed, the cats’ lives would be reduced to a span of no more than a few days. The cats in the control group were then injected with regular blood, while the cats in the test group were injected with blood from manic patients. My father’s plan was “to determine whether or not these injections might lengthen the life of the animals.” Early results proved promising: the cats injected with manic blood survived 40 percent longer than those injected with blood from nonmanic patients.
This breakthrough in his research arrived late in 1934. At this juncture, however, he was forced to put his investigations on hold. In November of that year, he experienced a second manic episode. He was admitted to McLean psychiatric hospital, the same hospital where he had obtained blood for his experiments.
McLean Hospital, 1934
On November 3, 1934, the patient suddenly became over-active, euphoric, and excited. His hyperactivity became extreme restlessness and sleeplessness. He had developed an idea for making a million dollars through a suit against the Westinghouse Electric Company who had apparently given him a defective machine. He worked terribly hard. He was advised by his doctors to go to McLean Hospital. He arrived at McLean on November 11, 1934.
He remained in a wildly maniacal state for ten days. When no physician was around he seemed to lose all control. He became aggressive, combative and very destructive. He smashed light fixtures, windowpanes, furniture, some of which he attempted to use as weapons. He broke a transom with his hand, after which he had to be restrained. After a brief period of quiet, apologetic, cooperative behavior, the patient, about twenty days after admission, had become mildly depressed. In early December, he again was quite active, mildly exuberant and enthusiastic. The patient felt that he and his wife were not very happy together. Two nights before admission he had a long talk with his wife, at the end of which she had stated that she hated him. He was discharged from McLean after twenty-nine days at the hospital, on December 10, 1934, as improved.
After his release, Dr. Cannon was gravely concerned. He felt my father should hold off on laboratory work for the foreseeable future. “Everybody has a critical stress which he can stand and that varies greatly with individuals,” Dr. Cannon wrote in a letter immediately after my father’s release. “The prudent person is one who learns by careful observation where that stress lies and manages his life so that he lives within the limits. Of course, research is exacting because animals have to be attended to, and it is very likely to be exciting if results prove favorable. Both these conditions are to be avoided, I believe, at present.”
My father took Dr. Cannon’s advice to heart. Beginning in 1935, his medical records confirm, he set aside his research and threw his energies into his private practice in Boston. Three years later, I was born. Although the letters make clear that my father was proud of his new family, conscientious in his work as a dermatologist, and stimulated by the interactions with his patients, he clearly missed his laboratory work. “It is sort of starvation to stay out of academic circles and deny one’s self the privilege of doing scientific research,” he wrote to Cannon. In the waning months of 1939, he wrote again to his mentor expressing his strong desire to resume his research on manic depression.
Dr. Cannon replied with increased caution. “I do not like to discourage anyone’s enthusiasm,” he wrote, “but in this present situation I should say that it would be wise to weigh carefully all the considerations before taking a step which may involve you in the expenditure of a large amount of money.”
On December 19, 1940, my father again wrote to Dr. Cannon: “I have decided in my own heart that I am going to find a way of continuing these experiments—even if I have to build a laboratory in my home and use my own blood with Gretta’s as a control. My mood to continue these experiments is recent and comes as a relief from these six years of meditating upon those unfinished experiments and of regretting the absence of time and courage to continue them.”
Dr. Cannon was persuaded—in the next letter, he agreed to support the work. My father continued his laboratory research, intent on establishing a connection between his illness and the body’s biochemistry. Again, blood he obtained from McLean was injected into cats with their adrenal glands removed. This time, my father observed that the manic cats lived five times longer than the control group.
In the early spring of 1942, my father completed a first draft of his article “Biochemical Component of the Manic-Depressive Psychosis.”
“These experiments have provided biological evidence that the blood of manic patients may differ from the blood of healthy subjects,” he wrote. He made clear that his findings were preliminary in nature, and that he had proven only that animals injected with manic blood behaved differently than animals injected with regular blood. His hope, however, was that his approach might create a significant shift in the study of manic depression.
“Perhaps this report will stimulate added interest in the manic psychosis as a physiological and general medical problem rather than as a purely psychological one. It may be hoped that other investigators will continue these studies.”
Dr. Cannon responded with a very detailed letter with a long list of amendments. A reply to Cannon’s suggestions came not from my father, but from my mother this time. It was May of 1942, and my father was unable to write. He was being held at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, in the throes of another manic break. He stayed there for nine days.
On his release, my father continued to rework his article. He wrote to Dr. Means expressing the hope that his manuscript might soon be published. He described his recent confinement as “those ten days of dark psychiatry,” and added, “I shall be willing to make whatever sacrifices are necessary to speed the progress of these experiments.” The following year, he fell ill again, being readmitted to Boston Psychopathic Hospital before being transferred to Westborough for a stay of a month.
Toward the end of 1943, my father learned that his article “Biochemical Component of the Manic-Depressive Psychosis” had finally been accepted for publication in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. It was published in the spring of 1944, while he was being held again at Westborough.
My father had run out of time—the race to cure himself was lost. While he was locked away in hospital writing his manuscript, the Massachusetts medical board removed his license to practice medicine. From the confines of his cell, he could do nothing to promote his article. Many of his peers were away overseas in the war, so there was no one left to champion his discoveries. My father’s research was quickly overlooked and, soon enough, forgotten.
CHAPTER TWENTY
My father had been convinced that there was a biochemical cause for his illness. Psychiatrists and other doctors caring for the mentally ill in 1944 were a long way from reaching a similar conclusion.
While my father was at Westborough—subjected to straight-jackets, cold packs, and solitary confinement—a Portuguese neurobiologist, Egas Moniz, was becoming famous for a new and radical brain surgery that he claimed could effectively treat mental illness. The surgery was called the lobotomy. Moniz and his followers believed that if the frontal lobes of the brain could be severed, then the patient’s emotions could effectively be cut away. In the United
States, the lobotomy’s greatest proponent was the neurologist Dr. Walter Freeman, who helped popularize the procedure by traveling to state mental hospitals across the country, demonstrating the technique on patients while doctors and staff looked on.
My father would eventually receive his lobotomy in 1949, soon after Freeman visited the hospital where he was being held. Dr. Freeman’s particular technique involved inserting an instrument shaped like an ice pick through the inner corners of the eye sockets, before moving the pick back and forth within the brain, as if scrambling eggs. After the surgery, it was observed that patients were less agitated, and therefore Freeman and his converts considered the operation successful. The vast majority of patients who received lobotomies, however, were permanently brain damaged and unable to function normally. Stripped of character, mobility, and energy, they were unrecognizable when compared to their former selves.
In 1949, the same year my father was lobotomized, Dr. Moniz won the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Over the next three years, somewhere in the region of fifty thousand Americans were subjected to the lobotomy “cure.” With hindsight, it can be difficult to comprehend how so many respected medical professionals subscribed to such a brutal “solution.” But doctors and families were desperate for hope. Nothing else was working. At that time, psychiatric patients occupied 55 percent of all hospital beds in America, and over half of those patients had been residents for over five years.
My father was no exception. In the years after he escaped from Westborough, his mental health only continued to worsen, and he bounced from hospital to hospital. After eight months at his parents’ home in Dallas, he returned to Boston in early March 1945. A few days after his arrival—medical records confirm—my father paid us a late-night visit at our home. I must have slept through events as he broke our garage window, climbed inside, and drove away in the car he had once owned. Later in the night—my mother having reported the car as stolen—he was apprehended in Boston and turned over to the Newton police, who delivered him to Westborough once more. Soon after, he was transferred to the Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.
From there, my father wrote the following letter to his old friend and faculty advisor at Harvard, Dr. James Howard Means. It was Saturday, May 19, 1945.
Dear Dr. Means,
Life here on State Farm is not exactly an entrancing experience for more reasons than one, but it has taught me a lot about people “and things.” I was arrested in front of Copley Plaza on charges of stealing my own car (now in Gretta’s name). I was of course taken first to Boston police station and then thrown in a cell at Newton police station where I went berserk and became as wild as a jungle beast, tearing the plumbing out and raising Hell in general.
After transference to Westborough I grew vastly worse and “tore the place to pieces,” was put in a straight jacket and beaten unmercifully. Arrived at State Farm Prison Hospital three days later with Ecchymoses from head to foot—my nose bruised and swollen, my left eye black down to middle left cheek.
Here I am among a lot of patients and assorted criminals and as usual my psychiatrists and lawyers claim they can do nothing for me. My lawyer, Talcott M. Banks Jr of Palmer, Dodge & Co. wants me to leave Massachusetts permanently—and I have become reconciled to this fate. I came back merely to see my children and friends. Oh boy what a pack o’ trouble! So I guess it’s goodbye forever to dear ol’ New England. I’ll try out Texas or Michigan again. There are plenty of pretty girls in Texas and elsewhere. I’ll marry again and have more chicks and maybe I’ll pine less for my daughters, who bind me to New England, where I want them to stay.
Please write or come to see me.
Ever sincerely,
PERRY
Dr. Means replied on June 1, 1945:
Dear Perry,
Many thanks for yours of May 19th. I had heard the unhappy news that you had been transferred to Bridgewater. It’s most unfortunate, but I fear inevitable, if you cannot manage to get under cover voluntarily in the brief space of time that free choice remains to you during the prodromal stages of an attack, that you will be treated more or less as you have been this time and others. I suppose society just isn’t organized to deal with the kind of problem your case presents when you enter upon a manic phase of your disease.
About going to Texas, I don’t believe I can advise you wisely. It seems possible that a totally new environment there might diminish the chance of relapses, but one cannot be sure.
As I see it, you are suffering from a chronic malady, characterized by remissions and relapses, cause and specific treatment for which are as yet quite unknown. Dr. Tillotson thinks electric shock treatments offer something. I just don’t know. Aside from that, I think regardless of where you are, the important thing is to have constant psychiatric control. If you could bring yourself to let your psychiatrist tell you when to get under cover, and obey him, you might spare yourself and your friends, a lot of grief. One thing you could do when you are discharged is to go on the water wagon for life. But you haven’t been willing to do this, and no one can force you.
With kindest regards,
HOWARD MEANS
It was the last time my father ever heard from his loyal friend and advisor. Like so many of my father’s friends and colleagues, Dr. Means was no longer able to maintain a connection with someone so unstable. My father’s mental illness had finally severed their many years of close friendship.
From this point on, my father entered a period of marked isolation. For the next three years, he remained institutionalized in various hospitals in Massachusetts. Eventually he was transferred to Butler Hospital, a much smaller and well-respected sanatorium in Providence, Rhode Island. By now, the records make obvious that he was severely ill.
Butler Hospital, 1948–1949
The patient spends a considerable amount of time talking to the other patients about murder and explained to them how legal murder could be accomplished.
At one time he told his physician of an experiment he had performed in which, through the action of delta rays, two ten-pound cats were combined into one cat weighing ten pounds. When asked to explain this, he said, “I don’t know about this. I’m just telling you the facts. This is what we did.” When asked to explain this further, he said that this was most secretive.
The patient’s paranoid ideation concerns abstract matters, systematized into what he calls “neo-physics.” In this system various types of rays can be made to fuse the bodies of 500 men into one body, or fuse a male and female animal into one hermaphrodite animal. Also, as relates to himself, he at times states that he was in a “super-intelligence” service of the government during the late war fused into the personality of other men, and in this capacity saw action on all the great battlefields and was in all of the enemy capitols. Through these experiences he, or one of the many personalities that had been placed within him, was wounded and killed numberless times.
Several times while in seclusion he claimed he was a horse and at other times would roar like a lion. Only once was he assaultive, when in a moment of panic he suddenly hit two attendants. He immediately apologized profusely and asked to be secluded. Other than this his destructiveness was in terms of his own clothing that he would rip off.
He once explained a hemorrhoid that he had developed as caused by Communist super-intelligence service beaming rays from many miles off at his rectum, and the converging beams squeezed out the hemorrhoid. He considered that since no one in the hospital was responsible for his difficulty, they could not have been expected to prevent him from being harmed.
My father stayed at Butler for one year, after which time he was released to his family in Dallas for a brief period of freedom. In September 1949, he decided to pack his bags and begin walking across the state into Mexico, where he was determined to start his life over. A week later, he woke up in the hospital, severely beaten, but with no recollections of events. After he had recovered, he hitchhiked south, until he reached Galveston’s
city limits. The police found him, disheveled and bloody, walking along the highway, whereupon he was soon transferred to Galveston State Hospital.
Galveston State Hospital, 1949
Dr. Baird’s stay in the hospital was a long, rough and rugged one. It was punctuated by frequent moves from the disturbed ward to the open floor and back to the disturbed ward. Almost immediately after coming into the hospital, Dr. Baird’s behavior became quite frankly psychotic and he was placed on electro-shock therapy three times a week and deep insulin comas every day.
For a while, Dr. Baird seemed to be doing very fine with his treatments. However, suddenly he relapsed again, began talking about people walking in the hall in just a certain manner that was intended to annoy him. He also spoke of how they communicated signals to one another by the way that they shuffled their feet.
From here on he went back again to his frankly psychotic behavior. Altogether Dr. Baird received about 60 full-hour insulin comas and received a total of 33 electro-shock treatments. After this very extensive course of treatment, Dr. Baird’s clinical presentation was certainly no better than it had been when he first came to this hospital, and it was felt that further treatment with electro and insulin shock would be useless.
It was finally decided that lobotomy was the only procedure that could possibly help this patient’s psychosis.
So began the concerted campaign by the doctors at Galveston to persuade my father’s family to agree to a lobotomy. During the fall and winter of 1949, a series of letters (preserved with his medical records) went back and forth between my father’s family and his doctors at Galveston. The doctors’ advice was that my father should undergo a lobotomy as soon as possible. My grandparents were initially opposed, but my uncles were easier to convince. My father had been subjected to every other treatment available, from cold packs and straightjackets to insulin-induced comas and electric shock therapy. On December 15, 1949, my father’s brother, Philip, wrote to the doctors at Galveston: “My feeling is that we have done everything we can do and if your operation is successful it will be a momentous occasion for all of us.”
He Wanted the Moon Page 16