The historian Merrill J. Mattes estimated that one of every twelve immigrants died on the overland trail; the presence of doctors did little to improve the odds. In fact they probably made them worse. Nor had treatments improved all that much in the two and a half decades since Julia had first arrived in Santa Fe.
No wonder she sought treatment in Germany.
After an initial consultation in Berlin with Olshausen, Julia returned to Hanover. There, she visited with her mother and four of her sisters—Adelheid, Sofie, Regine, and Auguste. A cousin, Paul Schuster, called on the Staab women in their hotel almost every day. “We like him very much,” Bertha wrote, “he is lively and quite good looking.” Bertha noted, too, that Tante Auguste gave her a spoon. Souvenir-spoon collecting, I learned, was a fad in the late nineteenth century; they were collected like postcards, or Beanie Babies.
On Julia’s next visit to Dr. Olshausen, Bertha accompanied her, diary in tow. “Mamma has had an operation,” Bertha wrote, “performed in Berlin.” Bertha made no mention of what the operation was or what condition it set out to treat—perhaps such things were simply too delicate to discuss in that era, even in the private pages of a journal. I suspect, however, that it was a hysterectomy, since that was the surgery for which Olshausen was most famous.
It is clear that Julia was unwell, and that her problem was gynecological. But this still tells us little about her suffering, because in the late nineteenth century, nearly everything involving female health was considered gynecological. All sorts of ailments—and especially emotional ones—were lumped in the general category of “female problems.” The word “hysteria”—that diffuse mental diagnosis common among genteel white women in the nineteenth century and characterized by convulsive fits, trances, and tearing hair—derives from the Greek word “hystera,” which means uterus. The womb was linked indelibly in the medical mind to mental illness. Plato had believed that a woman’s uterus roamed the passages of the body like a ghost, unleashing emotional disturbances.
Nineteenth-century diagnoses were more clinical than Plato’s wandering womb, but they were essentially similar: the Irish physician Thomas More Madden, in his 1893 book Clinical Gynaecology, described female mental illnesses as “the reflex effects of utero-ovarian irritation,” while Joseph R. Buchanan, a mid-nineteenth-century American neurologist, argued that the woman’s womb was her “region of insanity.” “The organ of baseness,” he wrote, “lies along the posterior margin of the abdomen, and between the ribs and ilium, connecting above with irritability and below with melancholy, through which it approximates the region of mental derangement.” An illustration from his book, Outlines of Lectures on the Neurological System of Anthropology, superimposes the map of that terrifying region on a lithograph of Praxiteles’s Aphrodite of Knidos. Dr. George Beard, the nineteenth-century American neurologist who invented the diagnosis of neurasthenia, suggested that all women with mental problems should undergo a gynecological exam.
Thus, hysterectomies such as the one that Dr. Olshausen may have performed on Julia were expected to alleviate not only diseased wombs but also distressed female psyches. Doctors removed the womb to treat hysteria, “excessive female desire,” as well as neurasthenia, another nervous disorder common to middle- and upper-class women in the nineteenth century. The symptoms of that disorder were even more diffuse: they included languor, sleeplessness, nightmares, headache, noises in the ear, heaviness of “loin and limb,” palpitation, flushing, fidgeting, “flying neuralgia,” spinal and uterine irritation, hopelessness, claustrophobia, germophobia, and general morbid fear.
It is hard to know, then, if Julia’s surgery was aimed at her physical or mental ailments, since the suggested treatments for both were essentially the same: gynecological treatment or what was known as “the rest cure”—in Julia’s case, both surgery and the rest cure were prescribed. The latter involved bed rest, seclusion, a bland diet, and the renunciation of all intellectual pursuits. Writing, painting, drawing, and education were considered too stimulating for the mentally infirm female, as was reading novels, especially exciting ones. Women were counseled instead to read books on practical subjects, like beekeeping. The idea was both to calm the nerves and to regress the patient to a receptive, infantile state. Doctors also prescribed the rest cure for tuberculosis, arthritis, asthma, and bad hearts, but they were particularly fond of its use in the treatment of mental illness.
The nineteenth-century author Charlotte Perkins Gilman took the rest cure for depression after the birth of her first child; her doctor forbade her from writing, sketching, or reading, and, she explained later, she was reduced to playing with a rag doll on the floor. “I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months,” she wrote in a 1913 magazine article, “and came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over.”
At the extreme end of the rest cure, institutionalization was an option; Julia was fortunate to avoid this. In 1887, Nellie Bly, the crusading newspaperwoman, feigned madness to expose the torturous treatments imposed at the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island in New York, a hospital that served mostly immigrant women. Quickly diagnosed—“Her delusions, her apathetic condition, the muscular twitching of her hands and arms, and her loss of memory all indicate hysteria,” explained the admitting physician—she was made to sit in the cold for much of each day, fed spoiled beef and tainted water, and doused daily with buckets of cold bathwater. “Take a perfectly sane and healthy woman,” Bly wrote in her subsequent exposé, “shut her up and make her sit from 6 am to 8 pm on straight-back benches, not allow her to talk or move during these hours, give her no reading and let her know nothing of the world or its doings, give her bad food and harsh treatment, and see how long it will take to make her insane.” Her newspaper, The World, arranged her release after ten days. Other inmates weren’t so fortunate. For that reason the wealthy, like Julia, preferred to undergo treatment in their homes.
Julia was, in some respects, lucky. She had money, and a family—including, yes, a husband—who worried for her and supported her, though Abraham, like most men of the time, did so mostly from afar. Depression is lonely and often terrifying now, but back then there was even less recourse for those in its grip. There were no antidepressants, no cognitive-behavioral treatments; there was no talk therapy or Valium. Julia could have squeezed into Dr. Scott’s electric corset, a girdle fitted with steel electrodes where the whalebones should have been, or tried other forms of “electrotherapy” intended to recharge a patient’s enervated nervous system through the application of low-voltage current.
She could have taken patent medicines—dubious, sometimes dangerous herbal concoctions. Dr. R. C. Flowers’s Nerve Pills were designed to “Overcome Sleeplessness, Restlessness, and Hysteria,” while “Dr. Pierce’s Favorite Prescription” was supposed to build up “the shattered nerves” by acting “directly on the delicate and important organs concerned in wifehood and motherhood.” An 1890s advertisement in a Santa Fe newspaper for Dr. Pierce’s remedy urged readers to imagine full recovery. “The fan that long lay listless and idle in the lap of an invalid again speaks the eloquent language of a healthy, happy woman.” Julia probably did not have access to a treatment available in East Coast cities, in which doctors massaged women’s genitals to elicit therapeutic “convulsions.” This would have been a pleasant course of treatment, no doubt. So, too, would visits to a spa for a dose of healing and rest.
And this is what Julia did after a week’s recovery from her surgery in Berlin. It was time for gentler treatment. So she and Bertha boarded a train heading west and slightly south, past Hanover, past Hameln, to an elegant spa town called Bad Pyrmont.
sixteen
LOW SEASON
The Montezuma, New Mexico, hotel and hot springs, 1888.
Dana Chase, Courtesy of Palace of the Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA), Neg. No. 56980.
A hundred and twenty-odd years later, I followed in Julia’s and Bertha’s footsteps—
this time seeking not a cure , but a ghost. I boarded a plane, not a train, to Bad Pyrmont, and it wasn’t July but late October—low season. Like Bertha, however, I brought my mother—not because she suffered from any noticeable neurasthenic ailment, but because she speaks German.
My mother was a good sport in abetting my quest for Julia. She thought my ghost-hunting efforts amusing, if silly. It was the search for my father’s German family history that lay closer to her heart. She had studied German for many years as a young woman. I had studied it for a few weeks when I was in kindergarten and had learned only to count to six. So I deputized her as my translator and travel companion and dragged her along on my hunt. Our first task was to meet a local historian named Manfred Willeke.
Herr Willeke—we never addressed each other by first name—lived in Lügde, Julia’s Lügde, which was only a few kilometers from Bad Pyrmont. By happy coincidence, he was the designated historian for both cities, and he agreed to help me trace Julia’s path in both. Arranging to meet with Herr Willeke had had its roadblocks, however: he spoke little English, and I spoke even less German. After making contact, I wrote an email to him in English confirming our appointment. He responded in German, asking why I insisted on visiting on a day when he was busy. “Why have you not taken this into account?” he wrote. “It is a pity that apparently everything is so strange and does not seem to fit when I wanted so much to help you. . . . I doubt that we’ll see you at all.”
“No, no!” I wrote back, in German this time, with the help of my mother. “I’ll come whenever you can see me!” Our relations from then on were quite cordial, provided they were in German. He signed his emails thus: Herzliche Grüße aus dem Tal der sprudelnden Quellen—Warm greetings from the valley of bubbling springs. The valley of Bad Pyrmont—Lügde’s valley, Julia’s valley: what a lovely spot it portended.
Germany had never before appealed to me as a vacation destination. I always pictured a gray and industrial landscape, flattened by war and brutalized by modernity. My mother’s father, a Baltimore Jew of eastern European ancestry who had watched the Holocaust from afar in horror, disapproved of all things German. My grandfather refused to buy German cars, or chocolate, or anything else from that hated place, and he tried, rather pointedly, to steer my mother from studying German in high school—he urged her to take French.
But she loved the solidity of the German language—the clear and structured grammar, the way the words were contained in little consonantal boxes. And it was also a not-too-dramatic way to prove herself a rebel. So she went ahead and studied German in high school, and then in college, and when she graduated she moved to Germany. Back home in the States, my mother studied yet more German in graduate school, reading Lessing, Goethe, Rilke, and Brecht in the music of their own language. My own act of rebellion, perhaps—a very small one of many I inflicted on my mother—was to have no interest in anything remotely German or Jewish. Until this ghost hunt.
I left home with some trepidation. I was excited to learn about my family, but also nervous that I would find no information at all about Julia and Abraham and the world in which they had grown up. It would also be the longest time I had been away from my children, then five and two years old. Of course the journey was nothing like what Julia had undertaken when her children were similar ages—no stagecoaches or trains or weeks-long steamer journeys across the ocean, leaving some of her children with nannies, taking others with her.
But Herr Willeke was right. There are lovely spots in Germany—many of them. The countryside there has a restrained and tended beauty—the towns and cities, too, with their meticulous flower boxes and carefully considered architecture. Bad Pyrmont, in 2012, wasn’t all that different in appearance from the high-baroque city that Julia had visited more than a century earlier. It was a lovely, well-ordered town, full of old colonnaded buildings and cobbled roads. Square neoclassical hotels lined the streets, along with ornately gabled boardinghouses, all quite grand, if slightly gone to seed. Elderly German “healthwalkers”—angular and white-haired, in brimmed hats and beige parkas—promenaded carefully along the wide boulevards, past the doctors’ offices cum gymnasiums, and through the enormous baroque Kurpark at the edge of the city center, the gardens all soothing straight lines and symmetry: flower beds, ponds, arched bridges, weeping trees, palm gardens, topiary, a moated castle. “Mental health is body health,” we read on a placard.
It wasn’t hard to picture Julia and Bertha wandering the same wide, well-tended paths, seeking health and consolation in the manicured woods of the Kurpark—another mother and daughter trying to reconnect, each in her own way, to a diffident Mutterland. On our first night, my mother and I wandered the restaurant district browsing menus. It was a homecoming, of sorts, for both of us—my mother trying to recapture her fluency in German and relive her student years there, me trying to understand the world my ancestors had inhabited so many years before. We were having fun, my mother and I, and it made me feel even more poignantly how the pages turned toward the end of Bertha’s diary, the time ticking down toward Julia’s decline and death five years hence.
Though Bad Pyrmont had once attracted tourists from all over the world, it mainly hosted elderly Germans now, big-boned and red-cheeked. We stood out: my olive-skinned and petite Jewish mother, with a dramatic streak of gray-white hair framing her face and matching gray glasses, and me, slightly fairer, taller, an American mishmash of culture and blood. We wandered past German restaurants, generally empty, a few Italian places, generally packed, and a Greek restaurant, where we ate food that resembled a German fantasy of Mediterranean cuisine: feta cheese, but also cabbage and the ubiquitous Schwein in various configurations. Julia and Bertha wouldn’t have known what to do with such crossbred cuisine.
After dinner, we wandered into a Nachtclub where a band was playing, though I thought at first it was a karaoke act. A doughy German woman with black-dyed hair belted out a disco version of “Volare” to the graying crowd, and she harmonized not altogether well with a Turkish fellow in loose soccer clothes. Phantoms of smoke furled at eye level. The city was so well preserved, in both its architecture and its intent, that I half expected Bertha and Julia to wander in and perch full-skirted at the next table, expressing their displeasure with the barbaric harmonies coming from the stage.
Julia had gone to Bad Pyrmont to heal; I’d come there to discover what inside Julia was broken. While I wasn’t sure what I could learn, the city, with its old cobbles and healthwalkers and pedimented buildings, made it easy to dwell in the past. With Bertha’s diary in hand, I half lived there already. Our hotel, the Fürstenhof, helped in this regard. A yellow, block-long early baroque establishment, the Fürstenhof had stood just off the city’s main square since 1777 and felt little changed: threadbare carpet, peeling paint, rickety elevators, surly front-desk employees. It was, like everything in Bad Pyrmont, elegant if spartan and a bit bedraggled. But there was a familiarity to it—from knowing that it had been there when Julia visited, and that my great- and great-great-grandmothers may have dined in the same hotel restaurant where we planned to eat breakfast with Herr Willeke the next morning.
We did eat breakfast with Herr Willeke the next morning, though only after further miscommunication—we waited to meet in the lobby, he in the breakfast room. Herr Willeke was in his mid-forties, but his hair was already white, thick, and arranged in a neat pompadour. He wore a navy blazer with a pocket square and an open-collared shirt, and there was an antiquarian sense of displacement about him—as if he, too, inhabited the past. He ushered us into a 1959 Audi that had been his father’s, and drove us up above the springs to the town archives. Herr Willeke spoke briskly, turning around frequently as he drove to make sure I was listening. My mother translated furiously from the front seat while I sat white-knuckled in the back, willing Herr Willeke’s eyes back on the road. He wove the Audi through the ever-narrower streets that climbed from the city center and stopped, finally, at a neo-Gothic spire: the town library.
Herr Willeke took out a large set of keys and ushered us in. The archives resided at the tippy-top of the tower, and we curved up an elaborately vaulted spiral staircase plastered with German Harry Potter posters until we arrived at a sunlit room that smelled of old papers. Herr Willeke extracted from the shelves a large bound book containing many years’ worth of the city’s Kurliste—the daily “cure list” for the spa.
I knew that Julia and Bertha had traveled to Bad Pyrmont in July. “Left for Pyrmont July 1,” Bertha had written in her diary. So we pulled out the book that covered the summer of 1891 and began leafing through brittle pages that listed each visitor’s name, date of arrival, place of origin, and place of lodging. The guests mostly came from Germany—Berlin, Bremen, Hanover, Munich, Düsseldorf—but also from Chicago, New York, and St. Louis. In the July 15 edition, across from advertisements for Suchard Chocolat and Leibig’s Fleisch-Extract—drinkable beef syrup imported from Uruguay—we found Frau und Fräulein Staab, hailing from Neu-Mexico. Julia had arrived in Bad Pyrmont, and was there, lurking in those pages, waiting to be healed. And I realized that I was hoping, somehow, that she could be.
American Ghost Page 15