Free Gracefully Insane by Alex Beam Page A

Phipps Clinic, seemed to have the
Stanley McCormick case pretty well nailed. He reported that the patient
    had an early center of trouble in the excessive development of frustrated sex-functions. He had an excessive sensitiveness in his adjustment to his mother, the business responsibilities and rather abstract standards of a socialist and moral-religious system of accounting for everything. Under the strain of special conflicts the patient went through courtship and marriage, only to find himself utterly unable to cope with the new problems, not at all sexually and socially only with a hopeless expense of energy.
    The December setback and Meyer’s bleak diagnosis engaged Stanley’s family in the worst possible way. It was Katharine who had had him committed and who for a time visited him every day. A trained biologist, she demanded and received daily, written reports from superintendent Tuttle, and she monitored Stanley’s care closely. But Nettie and her daughter Anita Blaine were quite wary of Katharine’s education and firmness of mind. “She thinks like a lawyer,” Anita remarked. “Her mind has the characteristics of a man’s mind,” Nettie told a friend, and neither comment was intended as a compliment. Nettie, of course, blamed the assertive and self-confident Katharine for her son’s breakdown. “[We] feel that heretofore in his times of perplexity and uncertain health K did not evince devotion to him, and did not, in illness, tenderly watch over him—and has not appeared that she was proud of him,” she wrote to a friend. Meyer, stupidly, enmeshed himself in the family drama. As a paid consultant to the McCormicks, he began agitating for Katharine to divorce Stanley, an outcome fervently desired by Nettie and her other children. Even the McCormicks’ lawyer knew that Katharine had a strong claim on Stanley’s fortune, which did not prevent him from offering her a generous financial settlement to divorce her husband and leave him to his family’s care. Katharine spurned the buyout offer.

    Inevitably, Katharine and Nettie clashed over Stanley’s care. Katharine opted to stick with McLean’s genteel regimen, or moral treatment, for two years. McLean’s superintendent Tuttle opined that Stanley “will pull out of it if he can be kept quiet and given time.” Nettie was much more critical of the McLean doctors’ approach. During the first few weeks of her son’s convalescence, she sent her family doctor, Henry Favill of Chicago, to Waverley to check up on Tuttle and Hamilton. Nettie wanted to bring “the great Vienna doctor [Richard von Krafft-]Ebing,” or France’s Valentin Magnan 7 into the case. Favill let her down gently, saying in a letter that no foreign doctor could work miracles in absence of a precise diagnosis: “I think that the matter would have to be determined by individuals in this country.” When Stanley experienced his brutal relapse in December, Nettie claimed that “the doctors who are relied on to know things were incautious—and unaware of the brittle condition of Stanley’s mind.” The following month, Nettie wrote to Dr. Tuttle from the Watkins Sanitarium in Glen Springs, New York:
    I find benefit to my nerves from electricity applied to me through the warm water of the bath given here. The battery is at the head of the bathtub. The bath is a warm tub bath—not hot. The electricity produced a simple, pricking sensation. Can you give such a bath to Stanley, I mean have you the bathtub equipped with such a battery?
    I also have benefited from static electricity—I sit in a chair and a wire arrangement shaped just like a simple crown, or cap, is swung above my head after I sit down and the current is turned on, until a pricking sensation is produced. It is the most sleep producing treatment I have here. It soothes.
    Have you appliances to give this static electricity?

    At the end of the letter, she wrote, “I am not hearing as I wish from my son.” In fact, the