by Stephen Wade
Amazingly, the parents wanted Dr Hughes arrested and charged with assault; the magistrates found no case to answer and no action was taken. Strangely, he waited nine months before he wrote about the examination for the Western Mail. Perhaps he was waiting for the potential for a sensation to die down; after all, some members of the public would be happy to believe that the good doctor might be ‘shady’ and really did do something possibly immoral to the girl. He then wrote that it was a case of hysteria. The fact that he reported that she was ‘fatter and heavier than before’ and that, ‘gurgling was heard over the stomach and intestines’ led him to doubt the story of the fast. What is particularly important in Dr Hughes’ report is how much he repeated what he had been told by the parents – details he had to take on trust and clearly did not believe. He was told that she had ‘more than half left this world’ and that she had not opened her mouth for ten months.
Was a massive hoax being fabricated, and the man of science who went to explore the situation suitably unimpressed by the myths and overstatements he heard? Here was a girl who was plump and healthy and yet who, supposedly, had not taken food for ten months. But one telling detail struck Hughes: the girl ‘played her hands about freely and took a testament from her mother and turned the leaves for a certain chapter’ yet Mr Jacob told a Rev. Thomas that one arm was paralysed and that he, her father, had to turn the pages of her book.
It was inevitable that something had to be done to determine what was going on in that isolated farmhouse in which the laws of nature were apparently being changed by a child, lying in her increasingly sacrosanct bed. The reports by medical men, and the attempted prosecution of one of them, had turned a lot of opinion against them though, and Evan Jacob was keen to have his daughter watched, so that the miracle could be proved. That in itself is odd: Jacob, who apparently controlled all movement and all thinking about Sarah inside his own home, actually instigated what became a series of watches, with a rota, day and night, aiming at finding the truth about the fast – whether indeed, it was a fast at all.
Within the framework just described, concerning the Victorian backing for scientific certainty, the watch was shambolic. A committee was formed with the Rev. Jones in command; they resolved to have two men there by day and by night, and these men were to swear that they observed Sarah constantly during their watch. They also agreed to be quizzed on what they did and saw, and that three medical men would be involved to supervise. This would cost money, so subscriptions were suggested, and also there was to be a ‘Watching Fund’ so that visitors could leave money also.
If ever any scheme was devised that would intensify public interest in a supposed sensation, then this was it. The watch began, and it was a shambles. There was no proper supervision of watchers and too much trust in their abilities and judgement. The worst feature of the supposed regime of vigilance was that their powers were limited and so if there had been a con being worked, it would have been easy to manage. The most percipient was a farmer of 72 years of age, one Thomas Davies of Llwynbedw, who told the committee when asked for his thoughts that he suspected ‘some secret connected with the affair.’ He had been the most attentive observer, noting that the source of the secret was something to do with Sarah’s frequent kisses and caresses with her younger sister. He also added that Sarah could not, allegedly, turn a page of a book, but could scratch her head.
The mystery remained, but there were to be two medical visits which provide the best information we have as to the physiological condition of the patient at that time. First there was Dr Lewis from Carmarthen, who sent a report to the British Medical Journal. He was able to examine Sarah’s chest and pelvis, and found no emaciation; he heard some ‘flatulent rumbling noises in the abdomen’ and that note fitted well with the profile for hysteria, of course. Her breathing was natural, and there were generally marks of good health; although her pulse was weak, she was sleeping well and was cheerful. His most telling observation was that, when the bed clothes were changed and she was moved out of the bed, she was unconscious, and that the parents called this ‘a fit’. When returned to her bed, she would recover. The good doctor undertook the examination, he wrote, ‘to satisfy the curiosity of persons at a distance who are desirous of knowing the history and present state of the Welsh Fasting Girl…’
The way he expressed that is interesting. It hints that Dr Lewis was well aware that he was dealing with a media celebrity, and his report is meticulous on the surface, making much of measurements of bone and inspection of skin, but most prominent is his awareness that he was not dealing with simply a little daughter of a local farmer, but of ‘The Welsh Fasting Girl’ – something almost akin to a display in a dumb show or a procession.
Lewis was succeeded by the new scientific attitudes, embodied in the forthright and practical Dr Robert Fowler. What he did exemplifies the changes in medical practice which were gradually taking place after the 1858 Medical Act: the objective methods of close study, deduction and the formulation of a reasoned diagnosis were seeping through into everyday practice, and the focus was on physiology. The fact that emotional and indeed mental factors might be important was eclipsed by the observed corporal condition: organs, cardio-vascular system, anatomy and muscular movement, and so on. Dr Fowler arrived in the August of 1869, a few months after a certain Rev. Young had called to try some laying on of hands. That had achieved nothing, so the ebullient and overconfident physician must have gone to Lletherneuadd in a mood to show the world what proper medical ability could achieve.
Fowler explained, in a letter to The Times, that he was on holiday, staying with a solicitor friend in Carmarthen, when he saw the opportunity to add his own medical examination of Sarah to the list. His very first words were that he was, as any ‘medical man’ would be, suspicious of her behaviour and what it suggested. He chose to describe the clearly ritualistic state of the bed: ‘The child was lying in her bed decorated as a bride, having round her head a wreath of flowers, from which was suspended a smart riband, the ends of which were joined by a small bunch of flowers after the present fashion of ladies’ bonnet-strings’. Everything he saw, in terms of her physiology and also of her movement, convinced him that here was a case of what he termed ‘simulative disease’.
What he saw and noted contradicted the laws of nature: Sarah had supposedly been without food a very protracted period yet his friend said that ‘she looked even better than she did about a twelve-month ago’. Fowler reported on a girl with sound breathing and pulse. He used a stethoscope, which previous doctors had not mentioned in use. The stethoscope was a relatively new instrument: it had been invented by René Laennec in France, and first used in England in the 1830s by Thomas Hodgkin. Fowler was keen to show that he had used more than simple observation of obvious features. He had answers to all the established features of Sarah’s behaviour. Her ‘fits’ he explained as no more than ‘a little hysterical crying and sobbing’. He used the normal percussive taps across her body, along with the stethoscope, and noted that she reacted with pain to all this.
He wrote that ‘the whole region of the body was tympanic’ but one thing he saw that is worthy of note was that the whole left side of her body was ‘of lesser temperature and was said to be weaker’ than the right. He was told that Sarah’s back had not been seen or washed for almost two years: the back was the cause of extreme concern when Dr Hughes had touched her and had consequently been threatened with legal action, of course. Fowler went further, asking permission, and did other basic tests such as tickling the soles of her feet and checking for signs of malnutrition by looking at nails and tissue. Finding no physical cause of any definable illness, he concluded that ‘The power I believe to be there; the will I believe to be morbidly perverted.’
Fowler was sure that, after his examination and following talks with Mrs Jacob, Sarah was subject to convulsions of hysterical epilepsy and that there had been collusion within the family to create a ‘complete show-child’. He pointed out that the posi
tion of the furniture in the bedroom was such that food could easily have been hidden, and that he could see that ‘these poor, simple parents’ could be ‘deceived by their own child’. He accepted that Evan and Hannah were the types to be convinced that a miraculous event was occurring under their own roof.
Wider and respected medical opinion would have backed up these conclusions. One of the most respected doctors of the time, Sir Benjamin Brodie, who had died in 1862, had done innovative work in what was then described as localised nervous disease, and Fowler had clearly read Brodie’s work. Brodie had written on psychological factors in illness, and his work, Psychological Enquiries was published posthumously. His work had clarified the possibility that specific, localized pain in muscles and organs was potentially related to the nervous system, and that there was a psychological factor. Fowler was confident that Sarah’s case was typical of many studied by Brodie, commenting that the great man had detailed ‘many analogous cases and the successful treatment thereof.’ We have to admire Fowler’s methodical approach, and his hard-headed response to the supposed ‘miraculous’ case he had witnessed.
Fowler’s conclusions were consequently obvious: Sarah needed hospitalization. He recommended that if she were to be taken to the Carmarthenshire Infirmary or elsewhere, she would be ‘quickly relieved from the malady…’. There had been, in that visit of the man of science to the long house at Lletherneuadd, a confrontation of the extremes at either end of the spectrum of beliefs in Victorian Britain, confirmed in Fowler’s mind by the fact that Evan Jacob had said to him, ‘How can you London doctors make my child eat, without making a hole in her?’
From the 1860s there had been an acceleration of the culture of learning among what would soon be called the ‘social scientists’, meeting every year in the major cities across the United Kingdom to discuss matters legal, educational, political and medical. Public health was moving to centre stage, along with the improvements in the medical profession, but there was another knowledge, and that was embodied in the literature Fowler observed piled on Sarah’s bed – in both Welsh and English. Fowler had blamed the church, at least in part, for Sarah’s success in her ruse. He wrote that ‘During the last parliamentary session, we heard a great deal of the influence of the ministers of religion, and of the power of the territorial aristocracy in Wales… In vain I tried to convince the father that at this young age such a disease was in all probability perfectly curable.’
When Sarah, with her Congregational Church of England background, lay in her bed and read, for months and ultimately for two years, she was part of a generation which had been growing up at a time when there was a revolution in printing and popular book production, much of that being religious in nature, naturally. The 1860s was the time when book illustration boomed as never before, and there had been a huge expansion of literacy among the working class, with religious literature at the core. From 1780 when Robert Raikes established the Sunday School movement, there had been other initiatives, notably the Religious Tract Society and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. This meant that thousands of tracts were printed and circulated among ordinary people. By the time Sarah attended her local elementary school, the RTS and the SPCK had together printed and promoted twenty million tracts and thirteen million copies of magazines. These had worthy and uplifting narratives on Biblical heroes, saints and various exemplary lives, along with powerful fables illustrating the Christian virtues. In 1867, as Sarah first took to her bed, the SPCK publications had established a widespread influence: as early as 1818, the RTS had published around thirty million publications for children.
In 1862 the ‘Payment by Results’ teaching system in the Revised Code was implemented too. The creator of this, Robert Lowe, wanted rote learning – the kind satirized by Charles Dickens in his novel, Hard Times, in which Mr Gradgrind shouts out to his class that what he wanted was facts – nothing more. Dickens sets against each other, in the Gradgrind classroom, the world of the new, defined, circumscribed knowledge of nature, expressed by facts, and the imaginative, whimsical world of fancy and poetry, exemplified in the girl, Cissie.
When Stamp Duty was removed from newspapers, and duty removed from paper production generally, in 1855 and 1861 respectively, there was a great incentive for organisations like the SPCK to print and spread the gospel of work, morality and ‘the good Christian life.’ The Newspaper Press Directory for 1865 has around 2,000 periodical and newspaper titles; illustrated magazines proliferated, so that the Christian stories could be hammered home to little minds by both text and emotive pictures. Books in general also became cheaper after the domination of the Booksellers Association was challenged in the 1850s, because there had been a retail price maintenance in force, keeping most books at too high a price for poorer people. Books for popular reading were subsequently discounted. In addition, it was also during the 1860s that the hand-press began to disappear as the new wood-engraving techniques appeared and pictures in books were easier and cheaper to produce.
Sarah Jacob’s bedroom was indeed a library: there were bookshelves by the linen-press in her room, and her visitors brought her books and periodicals. Fowler noted that she was very much devoted to religious reading, and various visitors commented that she always had a book propped up by other volumes on her bed, in English and Welsh.
Fowler’s letter and detailed report of his examination, was an open assertion of the dominance of the new knowledge, against the superstition he saw in Evan, who had accepted that Dr Mawr – the ‘Great Doctor’ God was the only one to cure his daughter.
It is worth recalling, that in the mid-Victorian years, the press across the land regularly carried adverts for remedies and treatments in a world in which ailments of the digestive tract were an everyday affair. Typical of this was Du Barry’s ‘Revalenta Arabica Food’ which promised the purchaser that the mixture would ‘impart a healthy relish for lunch and dinner and restore the faculty of digestion’. In other words, many could not afford a doctor’s fees or could not access a cottage hospital or dispensary. One G.P. working in Oxford in the 1840s was called in to attend a patient and write a prescription; the man expected the ‘top’ doctor to charge a guinea, compared to the actual charge of eighteen pence. In other words, the working class would see eighteen pence as a very costly enterprise in the hope of being cured. By Sarah’s time, according to economic historians, the sum paid for treatment needs to be multiplied by around fifty to estimate the equivalent modern cost. That eighteen pence cost would therefore be £9 today. The average weekly wage of a working man at the time was around £2. Understandably, when it came to medicine, they preferred to buy something over the counter. It therefore raises the question: was there any more stubbornness and ignorance in that trust in ‘Doctor Mawr’ at the time than there was trust in fringe medicine?
The medical establishment considered Fowler’s report and examination to be excellent. The editor for the British Medical Journal in response to Fowler’s first letter stated: ‘Our readers have doubtless had an opportunity of perusing Dr Fowler’s sensible letter, and they will see that the view taken by him is in perfect accord with that which we ourselves expressed long ago.’ The writer added that ‘This case leads us to say that perversions of volition, similar to those observed in hysteria, are by no means uncommon among children.’
That view, along with Fowler’s, illustrates the ambiguity at the heart of Sarah’s story: on the one hand, the details of how she was bedecked with colour and paraphernalia on her bed might be seen as expressions of religious symbolism and indeed, of comfort. But on the other hand, in the eyes of a medical man, a man of science, all this might have been as primitive and useless as the trappings of an African shaman as reported in the tales of missionaries to the Dark Continent of the time.
Medicine was not prepared to look beyond the blanket term of hysteria. The extensive writings on that subject had had such a profound impact on medical thought that almost anything could be ascribed to it. There
was clearly, we see today, an element of mental illness or of genuine nervous disease; there may even have been another source of the illness, but the Fowler attitude, and the solid establishment verdict of the British Medical Journal was that a physical examination would answer all questions and provide an acceptable solution.
3
The Main Attraction
A spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men.
Romans 4:9
Sarah was a tourist ‘draw’ in an age of spectacle and sensation. The High Victorian age was one of dumb shows, tableaux, raree shows and circuses of extremes. The 1860s was the decade in which music halls flourished; people expected to be entertained, but also surprised and amazed. The notion of a ‘sensation’ came along with the mass media. Although there had been plenty of criminal tales and chapbooks about murders and atrocities, it was not until the revolution in print and in periodical production in the 1850s and 1860s that the new public for astonishment and revulsion, admiration and celebrity, developed in great numbers, fired with enthusiasm even from afar. This came when railways made it possible to travel to see a sensation, after the new mass market print instigated the curiosity.
The notion of a stationary spectacle was particularly attractive. The idea was that one would arrive at a scene prepared in some way, laid out much as the picturesque scenery of Cumbria or Wales had been composed of set scenes to draw and write about in the Romantic age. But there was a difference around 1860. Then it was the notion of the gaze that began to emerge. In modern cultural studies, in the visual culture we now have as something integral to the way we think and feel, the gaze is accepted everywhere: we look at scenes on television, on stage, on film, in galleries and museums. These images have their integral narrative, composed in the way that a photographic image is composed. In the 1860s there had been a development from the Regency aesthetic of dressing for display, to be seen, to promenade: now it was a focus on the pattern of moral meanings in a spectacle.