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In the Patent Office Hospital: An Experiment in Biography
by
Thomas Lisk
I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I
myself become the wounded person,
My hurts turn livid upon me as lean
on a cane and observe."[1]
Whitman
"The man who is
his own master knocks in vain at the doors of poetry."[2]
Plato
It's O for a manly life in the camp."[3]
Whitman
During the Secession War, the Patent Office in
Washington was pressed into service as a hospital. Arrayed in the dark cases
in the night no longer candle-lit or gas-lit, details stood sentry for the
wounded: the steel apple-corer, the egg beater, the lignum vitae hammer, a
combination plane and rasp, the conical minié ball (a French invention, patented
in the U. S. too), the brass firescreen, a patented fragment of the true cross,
vulcanized fishermen's trousers, lead tubes for artists' colors, a fully adjustable
drum head, the phrenological skull modifier, the game of cities, the by-laws
of a new religion, the double-pinned copper hinge, Franklin's bi-ocular spectacles
and glass harmonica, everything that does and does not fit the mystery, dry
now and covered with thin dust under the smudgy glass, the imaginary, the
actual and the believed-in, loose detritus arrayed in something like order,
though nothing really connects with the thing next to it, and the whole is
larger but less than life.
Among
the cases, a victim lies in a cot, detached from himself but tethered in his
own pain. Moans from a pneumoniac echo between the glass cases looming over his
bed; the amputee on the other side is silent. Further, behind the cases are
other cases: intermittent and remittent fevers, rheumatics and phthistics,
poison victims, sunstroke victims, the contused, bruised and fractured--and of
course, the wounded: incised and lacerated wounds, healing and suppurating
wounds, gunshot and blade wounds, foot wounds and scalp wounds.[4]
"Let
us examine this case," a doctor had said to a student colleague that afternoon,
and wheeled in the patient's direction a patented version of Mesmer's
"baquet," half an oak cask honeycombed with bottles of magnetized
water and covered with a sieve-like lid through which jointed steel rods could
be made to touch the magnetized water and pass its currents to his ailing
parts.
A
little while later, while the sun was still shining, a heavy, gray-haired man
with a furled umbrella and an open fan came and asked if he could do any little
thing for the patient. He looked old to the patient. A mist of sweat covered
the man's forehead, but he smelled of jasmine. He called the patient
"dear," offering him a stick of horehound candy and touching his
motionless hand on the mattress. Under his cascading mustache the old man's
mouth was twisted, ugly; the stick of bitter candy looked like the rod of
Satan. Refusing to be mesmerized, the patient turned his head away and closed
his eyes. The old visitor shuffled off between the cases. No alienist, no
doctor for the psyche replaced him. The patient was on his own.
Now
the room is dark but for moonlight and starlight coming through the big
curtainless windows. The night is beautiful, bare-bosomed, girdled in stars.
There is no reason to die.
Is
the light this night the light of this world or some other?
*
In
three large rooms on the second floor, the wounded and sick were bedded between
"high and ponderous glass cases, crowded with models in miniature of every
kind of utensil, machine or invention, it ever enter'd into the mind of man to
conceive, and with curiosities and foreign presents--"[5] Walt
Whitman’s own words in Specimen Days. To patent something is to lay
claim to it, to try to own and control it, and to regard such ownership as a right.
The by-laws of a new religion would not be patented but copyrighted; authors
too have a right to own their work. The patient would say he would give
everything he owns to have the right to be free from pain. If there were such a
right.
Two
rows of patients' beds were placed between the glass cases down the center of
the room. "Between these cases are lateral openings, perhaps eight feet
wide and quite deep, and in these were placed the sick."[6]
Around the upper part of the hall ran a gallery where more beds were placed.
"It was, indeed, a curious scene, especially at night when lit up. The
glass cases, the beds, the forms lying there, the gallery above, and the marble
pavement under foot--the suffering, and the fortitude to bear it in various degrees--occasionally,
from some, the groan that could not be repress'd--sometimes a poor fellow
dying, with emaciated face and glassy eye, the nurse by his side, the doctor
also there, but no friend, no relative--such were the sights lately in the
Patent office. (The wounded have since been removed from there, and it is now
vacant again)."[7]
*
The
old man, proud of his loafing, jotted notes for the big picture but ignored
details. What was in the glass cases? What did some of the patients look like,
beyond their emaciated faces and glassy eyes? Do all the victims of Dachau and
Belsen standing on the wrong side of the fence begin to look the same? But
perhaps it is not fair to compare the wounded soldiers of the Secession War to
the victims of concentration camps. In an army hospital, victims and
victimizers are sometimes reversed. Nor is it fair to fault the old man for
withholding detail. Elsewhere in Specimen Days he lists specifics about
other things. And of course, he's famous for the lists in his poems. A little
later in his notes about the war he says, "I go around with an umbrella
and a fan,"[8]
and that umbrella and fan create a character.
*
The
Patent Office housed the office where the old man worked when he wasn’t
visiting the hospitals. In January 1865 he was appointed to the position of
“first-class clerk (lowest grade) in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Department
of the Interior.”[9]
The Bureau of Indian Affairs was “located in the northeast corner basement of
the Patent Office.”[10]
*
Maybe
the old man too had grappled with rage. Had smiled more beatifically when the
bad smells in the hospitals reminded him of his crazy older brother Jesse, who
never wore perfume a day in his life. Or his sister-in-law Nancy who smelled so
bad after Andrew’s funeral that Jeffy had to leave the room.[11]
Maybe he saw the patient's name on the little card in the rack on the wall at
the head of his bed: name, disease and prescribed diet. Maybe what he read
stuck inside him and when the patient turned away he started thinking of his
rage in the ugly monosyllable "Lisk, that helpless dying bastard," as
if he were afraid of becoming the patient, becoming lost to posterity. Maybe
the old man hated his family, his solitude, his body, but would never admit it.
He had listened to the phrenologist Lorenzo Fowler, whose firm distributed his
books. The Fowler and Wells slogan was "Self made or never made."
Never made. Ex nihilo nihil fit.
If
the old man came close again and if the patient could only stand up for
himself, he'd show the old man he is a good four inches taller than the old man
(as if the patient were proud of his body, which he was given as a gift, as if
the old man had anything contrary to be proud of.) The patient had wanted to be
exactly as tall and weigh exactly as much as Lincoln, and he made it, but
Lincoln was angular and rawboned and strong and he was soft and tubular and
weak. Is it the patient's destiny to feel helpless, like his father? (His
boozing ex-soldier father was helpless. Who knows how he felt?) Was
it the patient's destiny? For he has only a past, the past, now.
Pneumonia, pneumonia, pneumonia, the
sweet low call of a Greek goddess beckoning the man in the cot. But his
problems are all in his head. He can breathe freely, inhale the smells of wool
and wood and dust and human sweat, with now and then a draft of empty air.
"Pleuropneumonia," he heard one of the doctors say gravely at someone
else's bedside, and imagined his own chest full of wet cells, lungs like hot
red sponges. Every breath reminds him of images disappearing into the waiting
dark. Can we conquer disease? Malaise?
Never
made. One has a duty to improve oneself. Who, having dreamt of naked slaves
sleeping under blankets of the odor of magnolia and jasmine, the men tumid and
smooth, the women moist and yawning; who, having hated his brother, can say his
own heart is pure and that the thoughts or actions of another are not--not
wrong, but not pure. As the old man's brother Jesse, a syphilitic sailor, was
pure. Walt loved his brother as himself. Wrong as a man can be, full of evil as
a pleasure palace teeming with spirochetes. But pure. The quintessence of
himself. Having enslaved himself to identity, having chained himself to himself
away from any consummation with the outside world (except it come into him
through his senses) how could the old man fail to understand the slave's
yearning for freedom. But freedom may be harsh, for as the slave gains freedom
he loses identity as a slave. And one losing identity becomes afraid and
sometimes indulges in bravado to display a reassuring false identity. Did
Whitman think: As I remain integral with myself I keep identity while losing
it, keep freedom too by losing it. All around me are slaves. How can I help
them if I can't free myself?
*
At
about the same time Whitman headed South to look for his wounded brother George
and to do good works and get out of himself, further north a forty-one year old
Caucasian woman was chained in her suffering.
In
October 1862 in Portland, Maine, "Dr." Phineas Parkhurst Quimby
emancipated Mary B. Patterson from a life of comprehensive female
invalidism.
In
December, 1843 Mary Baker, age 22, had married Washington "Wash"
Glover and moved with him shortly thereafter from New Hampshire to Charleston,
South Carolina, where he started a contracting firm. Six months later, on a
business trip, Glover caught yellow fever and died, leaving his wife pregnant
and destitute in South Carolina. With help from the members of Glover's masonic
lodge, Mary made her way to New York, where her brother George picked her up
and brought her back to the Baker farm in Concord, New Hampshire. In September,
1844, Mary Baker Glover gave birth to a son, George Washington Glover. (In
1829, when Walt Whitman was ten, Louisa Van Velsor Whitman gave birth to a son,
George Washington Whitman, who was to become a success on the Union side in the
Secession War, the brother Walt went into the war to find.)
Several
years later, having reluctantly farmed her son out to be cared for by others,
on June 21, 1853, Mary Baker Glover married a handsome dentist, Daniel
Patterson, who used the title "Dr." as an honorific he had bestowed
on himself. His business did not thrive and they moved frequently, trapped in
penury. Increasingly miserable, Mary Baker Glover Patterson became an almost
complete invalid.
On
October 14, 1861, just before Dr. Patterson left for Washington "with a
commission from the governor of New Hampshire to smuggle certain funds to
northern sympathizers in the South,"[12] he wrote
from Rumney, New Hampshire to Dr. Quimby at the International House Hotel in
Portland, Maine, beseeching the healer to travel to Concord to examine Mary:
"My wife has been an invalid for a number of years is not able to sit up
but a little and we wish to have the benefit of your wonderful powers in the
case."[13]
Quimby
declined to make the trip, and it took Mary exactly a year to get to Portland
under her own power. Meanwhile, having trooped off to war, Patterson was
captured by rebels and ended up in a Confederate prison. By the time he escaped
and made his way north to his wife, she no longer needed him. She had Dr.
Quimby.
Another
self-styled "Dr." with no medical credentials, Phineas Quimby was a
white-haired man with a modest pompadour, a white mustachless beard like Lincoln's
and dark, serious eyes. He was past sixty when he wet his hands and stroked
Mary Patterson's head and listened attentively to her story. Then he issued her
Emancipation Proclamation. He told her that her problems were all the result of
a too ardent belief in material sense. He helped her to see that she was first
and foremost a creature of spirit, and that her pains were only errors of
thinking. A dozen years later, during Reconstruction, this same woman wrote:
Filled with revenge and
evil passions, the malpractitioner can only depend on manipulation, and rub the
heads of patients years together, fairly incorporating their minds through this
process, . . . . Through the control this gives the practitioner over patients,
he readily reaches the mind of the community to injure another or promote
himself, but none can track his foul course. . . . Controlled by his will,
patients haste to do his bidding, and become involuntary agents of his schemes,
while honestly attesting their faith in him and his moral character. . . . Try
it, whoever will, manipulate the head of an individual until you have
established a mesmeric connection between you both, then direct her action, or
influence her to some conclusion, . . . you will find the more honest and confiding
the individual, the more she is governed by the mind of the operator.[14]
The book in which that venomous passage appears,
Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, became the textbook of a
new religious sect. The text was neither scientific nor healthy. Like Leaves
of Grass, it went through several editions. This passage disappeared.
*
In
April 1855, the monthly Phrenological Journal explained that the firm of
Fowler and Wells had "established a Patent Agency."[15]
The magazine invited readers to send in descriptions, rough sketches and
models. "Our agency for the sale of patent rights will not in the least
interfere with our business of procuring patents for new inventions. Both will
be conducted independently, and with care and fidelity."[16]
Thus from early on, the phrenologists' confident belief in the human capacity
for self-improvement was, not unnaturally, linked to inventiveness and
money-making. As was Christian Science for Mary Baker Eddy.
*
In
a photo taken when she was forty-two, Mary Baker Glover Patterson had beautiful
cheekbones, big even eyes, a little smile. She looks like a woman the patient
could love in the future, after the war, maybe even a little like a woman he
does love. But the patient also wanted to think that, like Phineas Quimby, he
could have healed a woman like Mary Patterson of her valetudinarian life simply
by not being a doltish husband but a kind and gentle partner who would find
ways to delight her. But there Quimby and he would part company. The patient
would awaken her senses, for, like Whitman, the patient thinks the way to the
soul is through the senses.
*
The
patient lies in his cot, wishing he could write, but this pain in his head
makes the light nauseating, makes him gag on himself when he tries to sit up
straight. All around him the inventions of better minds and stronger wills
oppress him with their solidity. If it weren't for his pain he would feel as
ephemeral as smoke. If the old visitor could read the patient's mind . . . . So
much of his skull under the bandages is bare now, it would be an easy read for
Fowler or Wells, whose Broadway Emporium the patient would like to visit if he
could go back in time (for him there is no certainty of future). But this room
full of cases reminds him of what he has read about the Phrenological Cabinet,
except that the Cabinet was only a Golgotha, a place of skulls, as a joke, and
this is a real place of suffering, this cabinet of horrors.
It
gives him a little escape to think of the displays at Clinton Hall, a place he
will never actually see. There Fowler and Wells displayed dozens of skulls, as
well as busts, heads, life masks and death masks, and not one of them exhibited
the slightest feeling, all of them looking like Wordsworth's "marble index
of the mind." Obsessed with heads, this actual family--Fowlers
intermarried with Wellses--collected symbolic representations of saints and
thieves, cannibals and Christians, giants and pygmies, but only from the neck
up. In their cases the patient could have examined casts of the heads of Chang
and Eng, the celebrated Siamese Twins, a living meditation on identity, a
walking manifestation of the paradox of the one and the many. He could have
compared his head's circumference with Washington's, learned whether his
"vitativeness" was greater or lesser than Clara Barton's, measured
his cerebral capacity for veneration against that of an African-American woman
who prayed from sunup to sundown with a diseased brain.
Perhaps
in one of the Clinton Hall display cases is an engraving of the hold of a slave
ship, stiff black figurines lined up in airless rows like Islamic calligraphy,
head to aching head, with no cots to soften their sleep or cabinets to separate
them from their kerosene-smelling sweat of terror and despair. Here was the
real Golgotha, a nightmare to exceed the worst delirium tremens. Did hope
enable them to survive? Did they think life would better when they arrived? What
an exhibit such a ship would make today. But what never survives (and always
survives) is the minds of the victims. If they were like us, we already know
what they thought and felt.
The
sick and the well were packed together. No one recognized emotional
indispositions or subtle derangements. Imagine being chained in a dark space so
small you couldn't stand up, smelling shit and urine and listening to the
pissing and moaning of others. What a luxury to get attention merely for being
blue. But thrashing in your chains earned you no favors, no relief. And if you
went mad in your manacles, so much the worse. Why didn't slave traders protect
their investments better? A healthy slave could be worth a thousand dollars.
Try Dr. Lisk's patented slave cabinet and capital protector. Think, man.
Physician, heal thyself. "There is nothing either good or bad, but
thinking makes it so," one of the epigraphs to Science and Health
is not the voice of Shakespeare but of one of his characters, Hamlet. The voice
of Shakespeare himself is hard to hear. Some, including the old man’s friend
William O’Connor, doubt he even existed.
Would
the patient have plotted and planned and been ready twenty years later when
Brigadier General Edward Wild, a white medical doctor with a degree from
Harvard, commanded two regiments of black troops who marched into the
northeastern counties of North Carolina "to clear the country of slaves
and procure recruits for his brigade?"[17] Would he
have become a member of that "wild African brigade”[18]and calmly
shot and bayonetted the Secessionist blackguards who had, at least
symbolically, raped his mother and hamstrung his (unknown) father?
"Blackguards" is a curious term; its use in the English language
antedates wide familiarity with Africans.
But
the ignominious fact is that the patient didn't fight. He fell ill before
he got the chance. Now he lies, at death's door--a black, arched portal leading
nowhere, not even to blackness, but to annihilation. Maybe was there some comfort in knowing he was not alone, that dozens
of others were in the same drunken boat. An African woman leans over him to
comfort him, dangling her wet nipples in his face, gently offering him sustenance,
calling him her son. (He has seen engravings of bare-bosomed African women.)
As
he lies suffering and thinking about women's bosoms, there are no breasts in
the display cases. All the figures stop just above the place where he would
like to lay his weary head. What a peculiar form of touch to palpate only the
head, to ignore the soft mammalian hair and seek the gentle ups and downs of
the bony substructure. With his peculiar head wound he prefers not to be
touched there, at the seat of the feelings. But back home he longed to touch
and be touched, derived a voluptuous pleasure from thinking about the soft
curves of women in loose, flowing dresses, not laced up in muslin, steel and
whalebone. Contemplating the contents of the Phrenological Journal, he
found much to agree with and daydream about in Orson Fowler's advocacy of the
natural, his temperance and anti-lacing stances, his frankness about sex. The
gentleness of vegetarianism appealed to the patient too, and his experience
with a drunk father inclined him to be cautious about intoxicants.
But
here whisky is easy to come by, and other drugs and painkillers dispensed
freely. Behind one of the display cases, a man suffering from delirium tremens
reminds the patient of his father fighting air filled with hissing snakes and
alligators with bared fangs. Nothing seems to help the patient. It helps the
patient to contemplate Nothing.
*
"Rub
a pickaninny's wool for luck," they used to say, a selfish touch from
which the child might well recoil, a touch offering nothing, no love, and
hoping to take away only luck, not pain.
*
Phineas
P. Quimby--what a perfect name for a mountebank. But Quimby was apparently wise
and sincere according to his gifts. He never claimed the ability to heal by
touch; he knew the therapeutic power of talk, and the need for a little
mumbo-jumbo, hocus pocus to put the subject at her ease. He wet his hands and
stroked her hair to control the electricity that can constrict follicles and
make women swoon. When Quimby stroked her hair, Mary Baker Glover Patterson
closed her eyes and opened her lips. She felt the pain begin to drain away.
Quimby's pink tongue began to flicker, probing the secret places of her pain
and slowly turning them into pleasures, then into serenities beyond pleasure.
*
"Many
years later the Phrenological Journal would carry an article entitled, 'Will
the Man of the Future Be Able to Control His Dreams?'"[19] Because of
all the booze, delirium tremens was one of the commonest "diseases"
in the hospitals wards during the war. What goes on in your head in dreams?
What did Whitman dream of after a day of visiting sick and wounded young men?
How would I feel in a hospital full of sick young women? Would I be drawn to
them because of, or in spite of, their wounds and ailments? Blood and bloody
muslin may have reminded Whitman of what he preferred to forget about women,
what--for all its frankness about sex--is absent from Leaves of Grass.
Women in muslin summer dresses. Women used to seeing blood. Did he know the
suckling mother doesn't menstruate? Courtesy of Fowler and Wells,
Obstetricians and prospective
mothers could be supplied with obstetric plates, improved breast pumps, and
nipple shields; students could obtain Prince's Protean fountain pens and
symbolical self-sealing envelopes.[20]
*
From his vantage point in the cot he can't see
everything at once, but he can imagine all around him beautiful skeletons the
color of cream vellum and articulated with fine wires, head after head of
plaster or stone or wood lined up like elliptical periods on plank after plank
of shelving, "manikins imported from Paris and priced at a thousand
dollars,"[21]
and items such as "Dr. Briggs' Patent Suspenders and Woodruff's Patent
Self-Acting Gate,"[22]
which helpfully clicks shut behind him. Here is the black skeleton of a
patented sewing machine, the skeletal arms of the patented Vermont windmill, a
bony wheel with digital cogs (patented) for poking holes in the earth to plant
corn, and a new, improved (and patented) handmill especially "for Farmers
and Emigrants,"[23]
and The Patent Hat: Designed to promote the growth of certain undeveloped
bumps, and thereby to increase the thinking, reasoning and acting powers of the
wearer (the title of a book by a firm competing with Fowler and Wells).[24]
*
“I am the man, I suffered, I was there” is a
curiously detached statement of identity. If it were true as a statement of
imagination, the patient would be embarrassed to say it, for fear that someone
who had actually been there and suffered might hear and be offended, or
contradict. Imagining suffering is not the same experiencing it, though much
suffering is the result of imagination rather than "objective
experience." A depressed person may suffer constantly, imagining the
accumulated but temporary suffering of others, but to say one empathizes with
another’s suffering does nothing to relieve that other’s suffering. For the old
man’s experience of the patient’s suffering wouldn’t be the same experience as
the patient’s. Though he can imagine experience other than his, he has
no way of gauging the intensity of the feelings of others, or the relative
intensity of his own.
Would the old man have absorbed the patient
somehow, taken away his identity and made him a cipher that stood for Walt
Whitman: the patient’s longing to be with his girl on a warm summer's night,
his skill with tools, his deep conviction of his mother's love, his cowlick,
his memory of the afternoon the dog bit the letter carrier? Would the old man
have taken away the patient's identity and made him into an everyman, imagined
him as if he were a pleasant multi-colored blur, or already dead? Hoping to
slip free of nightmares and suffering, to heal your wounds inside, the patient
imagines waking on a Saturday morning free of obligations, happy and fully
alive. He may not be old Walt, but what he is is neither more nor less.
Everything is the same as it was before the gray-haired visitor touched his
hand, but the patient has left and returned whole again.