Free Gracefully Insane by Alex Beam

home in Brookline, a comfortable Boston suburb. On account of his nerves, Stanley and Katharine spent that summer at a cottage in Maine. Once back at home, in the words of his doctors, “the patient’s wife reminded him that he had had a good rest, and that he was improved. Accordingly, she told him that there was no reason he should not discharge his physical obligations; an heir was wanted.” That effort, in late September, came to naught. Stanley went downhill rapidly and initially consulted the Dexters’ friend, the eminent Harvard neurologist James Jackson Putnam, who advised that he take fencing lessons and study German to distract his mind. A few days later, Stanley assaulted a dentist, whom he had allowed to pull a tooth without using anesthesia. Then he attacked an elevator operator, and he subsequently dragged a German tutor out of his office and into the McCormick home to administer the prescribed lessons. On the night of October 16, Katharine took him to McLean.
    With the admitting doctors, Stanley was alternately pugnacious and delusional: “While looking into vacancy, he exclaimed, ‘Jack London! I’m glad to see you.’ When no one had spoken he repeatedly said, ‘Who is calling me?’ When restrained in bed he shouted ‘To Windsor! To Windsor!’” Katharine explained to the doctors that Stanley’s appeal to Jack London was not random: “She thinks at this time he was thinking of turning over his fortune to the socialists,” a notion that probably shocked Stanley’s family a good deal more than it shocked her. 6 On the admission form, the doctors noted under “Heredity,” “All the family of nervous temperament, mother eccentric, sister insane.” The diagnosis on admission was “Manic-depressive? Dementia praecox? Fixed ideas?” Two years later, when two male nurses wrestled Stanley into a private railway car bound for his new home in Santa Barbara,
the diagnostic question marks remained. “Diagnosis on discharge: Psychopathic-inferiority + manic-depressive insanity? Dementia praecox?”
    The hope in the fall of 1906 was that a period of complete rest and “detension” in one of the luxurious suites in Upham Memorial Hall would restore Stanley’s spirits. And for a period it did. In late October, he experienced “a period of steady improvement,” according to a summary of the doctors’ notes. “Patient perfectly clear, natural in attitude, showed good insight, and discussed his symptoms frankly.... Gaining in weight and sleeping well.” He received birthday gifts in early November and wrote daily letters to Katharine, who visited him often.
    But in what would soon become a pattern, his clear periods were interrupted by episodes of abnormal behavior. His wife’s visits sometimes upset him; in conversations with his doctor, Gilbert van Tassel Hamilton, Stanley confessed that he had been impotent in his marriage. He remarked that his nurses were calling him a dog, and in response, he put his plate on the ground and lapped up his food with his tongue. He masturbated openly and flew into a rage when the nurses tried to stop him. Then a major setback occurred in December. Even though he admitted that he could feed himself, he chose to be fed through a tube forced down his esophagus. He attacked a doctor and tried to hang himself with the drawstring of his pajamas. That was viewed as a feeble suicide gesture because he was never left alone.
    By the winter of 1906, Katharine and the McCormicks had already squared off in what would prove to be a forty-year battle for control of Stanley’s care and of his estate. Faced with evidence of Stanley’s decline, both sides agreed to appeal to Swiss-born Adolf Meyer, then viewed as the preeminent psychiatrist in America. Meyer journeyed from Manhattan to Belmont, examined Stanley, and delivered the bad news: Nettie’s youngest son was becoming catatonic.
    Meyer, who would later become even more prominent as chief of Johns Hopkins’ prestigious