Free Gracefully Insane by Alex Beam Page B

doctors had cut her out of the reporting loop. Tuttle and Stanley’s attending physician, Hamilton, were sending their medical notes only to Katharine and the “reasonable” family member, Anita. This did nothing to silence Nettie, who wrote to Hamilton, “Can you not devise a purely oxygen cure for him—that is—live in a cloth room—with one side removed—adjacent to a closed room, with fire warmth—then live in the cloth room, having it warmed if needed, but live in a cloth room most of the time. He gets but little oxygen—the real article.” Or, “How would it do to begin with rubbing just one leg, at first with cool water—not too cold— just one leg below the knee, then, next day, the whole leg. ... The method of doing only one member at a time does away with the argument that application of cool water would throw him into excitement.”
    When Stanley was clear, which was much of the time, he was the typical McLean patient, puttering around the golf course, pedaling the Zander machine (an early version of the stationary bicycle), or regaling his attendants with stories of his hunting trips in Maine. On May 13, 1907, the anniversary of his father’s death, he addressed a letter to his mother:
    I have thought of you today as we have indeed been together on this day many times in love and thought.... I have played 24 holes of golf today. Started out before breakfast with one of the nurses named French & we had six. This morning Dr. Hamilton and Mssrs. MacKillop & Tompkins who is also a nurse here had a round of the course in a foursome match. This afternoon the two latter and I played another round. I have been doing some work in charcoal in between my outings.
    But Stanley’s moments of clarity alternated with long periods of catatonic inactivity and with outbreaks of violence. In the spring of 1907, he hid in the bathroom of a neighboring suite
rather than meet with his wife. A few months later, he assaulted Katharine, prompting Dr. Hamilton to curtail all visits from women. Katharine and Anita agreed on a radical intervention: They decided to relocate Stanley to a family-owned estate, Riven Rock, in Montecito, California. The gorgeous stone mansion overlooking the sea had initially been purchased as a home for Mary Virginia, who had since been moved to a private sanitarium in Alabama. Katharine lured Hamilton, who was doing research on primate sexuality, to the West by endowing the nation’s first freestanding primate research institute on the estate grounds. Similarly, she convinced two of McLean’s male nurses to pull up stakes and spend what proved to be the rest of their lives caring for her husband.
    Stanley spent the next thirty-nine years at Riven Rock. 8 Hamilton drifted away, to be replaced by McLean’s chief research pathologist, August Hoch. The ensuing psychiatric quadrille will become a familiar tale in later chapters of this book. Just after Stanley left McLean, the family paid a small fortune—$2,000 a week in 1908 currency—to bring Emil Kraepelin, the world’s most famous psychiatrist, to Stanley’s bedside. Kraepelin’s lengthy report essentially recapitulated Meyer’s conclusions of the previous year, with one exception. Whether out of politeness or conviction, Kraepelin held out a slim hope for recovery, noting that Stanley was suffering from an “active disease,” catatonic schizophrenia, as opposed to a “terminal condition.” As for treatment, Kraepelin had no suggestions to improve upon the Hamilton-Tuttle regime imposed on Stanley from the first day of his breakdown: “rest treatment ... should be continued ... continuous baths ... warm packs” and so on. Kraepelin was aware that some voices might be calling for Stanley to be psychoanalyzed. Stanley himself said twice that “he would like to have Dr. Freud visit
him.” But Kraepelin ruled that out: “Any definite mental treatment is not practicable at the present time, since the patient is essentially