Back from the Disability History Conference

Spent last week on a combination family vacation and conference trip, to the Disability History Conference at SFSU. It was a good conference, small, no book display or anything, just two sessions running concurrently, probably 50-100 people? (I'm bad at guessing such numbers.) I was on two panels, one for the forthcoming Encyclopedia of American Disability History (Facts on File 2009), and one for my project about Marion Brown (1843-1915), with Iain Hutchison (more on that here). Iain brought me a wonderful gift: The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women (Edinburgh University Press 2007). It has an entry on Marion Brown in it (written by Iain), but it has loads of other great stories, and if you're a longtime reader of DS,TU, you know I'm already scanning it for post subjects. Better than popcorn.

One example, for starters: Christian Gray (1772-c1830) was a farmers' daughter from near Perth, who became blind when she survived smallpox as a little child. She was read to, daily, for her education; in time, she began composing poetry, and her first volume of poems was published in 1808. She pointed to Milton and Ossian as her predecessors, and wrote poems about being blind (I can't find any of those verses online yet, though).

July 18: Hermann of Reichenau (1013-1054)

[Image description: A painting showing a brown robbed monk, Hermann, holding a crutch in one hand and a book in the other, with a harp nearby, and the words "Salve Regina," the name of his best known composition; found here]

Maybe some of the fine medievalists blogging about disability history can help with this one: I saw reference to Hermann von Reichenau's birthday today (the Catholic Encyclopedia gives the date as 18 February instead; still, five years till his 1000th!). The son of a nobleman, he didn't walk, and was hard to understand when he spoke, so the assumption is usually that he had CP or something similar. He was called "Hermann der Lahme," or "Hermannus Contractus" or Hermann the Lame, Hermann the Twisted. At age 7 Hermann entered the monastery at Reichenau. There, he became an expert on Arabic mathematics and astronomy, composed hymns and poetry, and wrote historical chronicles and treatises on music theory and math games. He seems to have introduced the astrolabe to central Europe, among his other accomplishments.

The relics on display here seem to include part of Hermann's skull? Am I seeing that right?

While I'm on the subject of cloisters, I recently read Mark Salzman's Lying Awake (Vintage 2001), a short novel about a cloistered nun in 1990s California who's diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy. But Sister John, a published poet, experiences her seizures as ecstatic spiritual revelations, and isn't sure she wants to lose that by having the recommended neurosurgery. The story follows her decision-making, the conversations she has with doctors and priests and her sisters in the community. It's thought-provoking, because the life of a woman religious involves vows and habits of selflessness that affect her criteria for deciding about medical treatment. (If the author's name rings a bell, Mark Salzman is married to filmmaker Jessica Yu, who won the Academy Award for her 1996 short-subject documentary Breathing Lessons--about Berkeley poet Mark O'Brien, who used an iron lung.)

July 14: Woody Guthrie (1912-1967)

[Image description: Woody Guthrie, guitar in hands; guitar displays a sign that reads "This Machine Kills Fascists"]

"The note of hope is the only note that can help us or save us from falling to the bottom of the heap of evolution, because, largely, about all a human being is, anyway, is just a hoping machine." --Woody Guthrie

Legendary American folk singer and songwriter Woody Guthrie was born on this date 96 years ago, in Okemah, Oklahoma. At age 52, he was picked up for vagrancy in New Jersey, and alcoholism or schizophrenia were suspected as underlying causes of his increasing erratic behavior and health changes. But at the Greystone Psychiatric Hospital he was instead diagnosed with Huntington's Chorea (now known as Huntington's Disease)--an incurable degenerative neurological condition. He died thirteen years later, at a state hospital in Queens, NY. Guthrie's ex-wife went on to work with other affected families on securing funding for research into HD.

This birthday gives me an opportunity to mention Alice Wexler's new book: The Woman Who Walked into the Sea: Huntington's and the Making of a Genetic Disease (Yale University Press, available September 2008) takes the story of Huntington's in America back long before Woody Guthrie, to the early 19th century, to the communities on Long Island where HD was a familiar reality in many leading local families. She follows the story of the disease through generations, through the eugenics era (where HD's strong genetic pattern made it an obvious subject of study), and into the present of genetic technology.

July 13: John Clare (1793-1864)

[Image description: Engraved portrait of the poet John Clare, shown with tousled hair, wearing a suit with a heavy coat, vest, and a shirt loosely tied up with a print kerchief]

English poet John Clare was born on this date in 1793, in Helpston, near Peterborough. He was the son of a laborer, and himself a laborer, a gardener, who wrote poetry when he could, to be published by an acquaintance. His earnings were never enough to adequately support his wife and seven children (and his alcohol consumption); he experienced depression and later erratic behavior. In 1837 he was placed in a private asylum. After four years, he tried to live at home again, but his wife soon committed him again, this time to the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, where he eventually died in 1864. It was at Northampton that he wrote his best known poem, "I Am," reflecting his sense of being abandoned by friends and loved ones, his vivid torments, and his longing for rest, "untroubling and untroubled."

I AM
John Clare

I am; yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost

Into nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
And e'en the dearest--that I loved the best--
Are strange--nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil'd or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below--above the vaulted sky.

July 4: Christine Lavant (1915-1973)

[Image: Black-and-white photo of a woman, Christine Lavant, wearing a headscarf, gazing at an empty glass of tea on the table she's seated behind]

"Illusions, to be sure, are safe, are precious, but the truth is
usually more important."

--Christine Lavant

Austrian poet Christine Lavant was born on this date, the youngest in a big family based in a Carinthian village. Her father was a miner, her mother a seamstress. Christine was sick a lot as a kid--one infection damaged her vision when she was an infant, another made her deaf in one ear as a teenager; her face and neck bore the scars of experimental x-ray treatments; tuberculosis and depression were also in the mix. At 20, she was hospitalized for six weeks after a suicide attempt; in 1946 she recorded the experience in "Memoirs from a Madhouse," but wouldn't allow its publication until decades after her death. It's now available in an English translation (Ariadne Press 2004).

Lavant became a highly respected poet in Austria, and won the Grand State Prize for Literature in 1970. One of her short stories, "Das Kind" (1948) is about a hospitalized child, bandaged, confused, lonely, dreaming of her family. Her 1956 volume of poems, Der Bettlerschale (The Begging Bowl) reflects her themes of need, abandonment, alienation, and melacholy. A 1978 collection of her poetry appears under the title Art Like Mine Is Only Crippled Life (from a quote by Lavant). There are English translations of a few Lavant poems here and here.

June 8: Ida Saxton McKinley (1847-1907)

[Image description: head-and-shoulders photograph in black-and-white, of a woman with an elaborate jeweled hairstyle and high-necked lacy dress or blouse]

Every election cycle, Americans are treated to another round of speculation about "the role of the First Lady," complete with the kind of questions reporters ought to be ashamed to ask about any woman in public life: should she have a job? what will she wear? do we like her hair, or does she need a makeover? It's tedious and worse, to see the spouses of candidates forced to chat about cookie recipes and "good causes." So, while I write here about a past First Lady, be assured that I don't ordinarily find them too interesting. (Except Lou Henry Hoover--a geologist who translated a 16c. Latin metallurgy text, and lived overseas much of her adult life.)

Ida McKinley (born on this date in 1847; portrait above right) was disabled throughout her adulthood--she had epilepsy, and intense headaches, and phlebitis that made it difficult for her to walk. She was probably overmedicated with sedatives. And she had a rough time emotionally--both her daughters died young in the 1870s, and in 1898 her only brother was murdered by his mistress, with an ensuing sensational trial.

A discreet press was mostly silent about her "fainting spells," and "a special campaign biography" of her was released to frame her health in the most gentle terms. Reporters, forbidden to write about her health, instead focused on her gowns. Her husband, President William McKinley, was devoted to Ida's care: like many partners, he could see the subtle signs of an impending seizure, and knew how to cover for her during required periods of rest. And that devotion became part of his public reputation. Even her absence on the campaign trail was seen as helpful--a gap that reminded voters of the candidate's tender personal life. Her "frailty" was held up as ladylike and unthreatening, in contrast to Mary Baird, Mrs. William Jennings Bryan, the trained lawyer and reform-minded woman who was rumored to write her husband's fiery speeches. (McKinley defeated Bryan in the 1896 and 1900 elections.)

Privately, some in Washington read Ida McKinley as a manipulative "invalid," using her perceived delicacy to demand indulgences (think of Zeena in Ethan Frome for a well-known literary version of this archetype). She would appear at state events propped in a velvet chair, with the understanding that she would neither rise from her seat nor shake hands. She wore luxurious lacy gowns and jewels, to enhance her persona as a fragile beauty. (She was the first First Lady to appear in newsreels, so she had a much wider audience for her fashion choices than previous First Ladies). Ida McKinley crocheted a lot--a fine sickbed tradition; while in the White House she reportedly made 3500 pairs of slippers to raise money for charities. There's some evidence that she was sedated not only for medical necessity but to control her "irrational" personality.

Unfortunately, we have little of Ida's own writing to know her experience at the center of all this rumor and spin: her early correspondence with William was burned in a warehouse fire, and the couple used the telephone a great deal in later years. Ida Saxton McKinley didn't write an autobiography, or give any in-depth interviews. And she had no surviving children to recall her.

When William was assassinated in 1901, among his last words were concerns about how Ida would learn the news: "My wife--be careful, Cortelyou, how you tell her--oh, be careful." Ida was a widow for six years, living with her sister in their hometown of Canton, Ohio. Her childhood home is now a restored historic site in that town.

See also:

Nancy L. Herron, "Ida Saxton McKinley: Indomitable Spirit or Autocrat of the Sickbed?" in Molly Meijer Wertheimer, ed., Inventing a Voice: The Rhetoric of American First Ladies of the Twentieth Century (Rowman & Littlefield 2003).

Diana Price Herndl, Invalid Women: Figuring Feminine Illness in American Fiction and Literature, 1840-1940 (UNC Press 1993).

June 5: Sophie Bell Wright (1866-1912)

[Visual description: A statue of Sophie Bell Wright, in New Orleans. Against a background of trees, there's a grey seated figure, leaning a bit to her right, wears a shawl and long skirt; she is seated, holding a book.]

Sophie Bell Wright fell, hard, when she was three years old. It was 1869, and in her time and place (New Orleans), there wasn't much to be done for the little girl's injured spine and pelvis. The home solution? She was strapped to a chair for the next few years, in the hopes that immobilizing her would bring healing. At age 9, she was able to get around on crutches and wearing a steel brace; for the first time, Sophie attended school. Five years later, Sophie B. Wright (like a lot of 14-year-olds) was tired of being a student. So she opened her own "Day School for Girls," using some discarded benches to furnish a room in her mother's house. By 18, she was renting a larger space to accommodate all her pupils, and she had opened a free night school for (white) daytime workers, too.

Sophie Bell Wright worked for temperance, playgrounds, and prison reform, and was president of the New Orleans Women's Club. During a yellow fever epidemic in 1897, she suspended classes and turned her schoolrooms into makeshift infirmary. She published a collection of essays based on her advice to students. In 1903 the Times-Picayune made her the first woman honored with their "Loving Cup" for outstanding social contributions. In 1904, she raised funds to build a home for "crippled orphans" in the city, and later raised funds to expand a specialist hospital. In 1912, a city school was named for her, the first public building in the city named for a woman, shortly before her death from heart disease at age 46.

The statue of Wright pictured above was created by Enrique Alferez and erected in 1988, in Sophie B. Wright Park in New Orleans. Her nearby home is also a historic landmark.

April 19: Shunsuke Matsumoto (1912-1948)

[Image description: "Back Side of Tokyo Station," by Shunsuke Matsumoto, a painting of a railyard in blacks and greys, with much of the station in silhouette against a grey sky]

Japanese artist Shunsuke Matsumoto was born Sunshuke Sato on this date in 1912, in the Shibuya district of Tokyo. He grew up in northern Japan, at Hanamaki in the Iwate prefecture. When he was 13, he became deaf after surviving meningitis. He moved back to Tokyo when he was 17, intent on becoming a painter. His works in oil and his drawings depict detailed, dreamlike images of the city--bridges and cathedrals, crowds and windows--and later, a series of figure studies, portraits and self-portraits, among other subjects. He exhibited often in Tokyo, opened a studio, married Teiko Matsumoto, and took her surname. With his wife, he produced a magazine, Zakkicho (Notebook) that ran 14 issues, devoted to art and essays. In another journal of commentary, Mizue, he published a famous 1941 essay, "The Living Artist," defending modern art from charges of degeneracy, when most other young artists were serving in the military. In this passage from that essay, he refers to his deafness as he compares visual arts to music:

I often have to defend the meaning of abstract works. When it happens, I have no way to explain them other than to use the example of music, even though I am not really qualified because I have lost my hearing. It is possible that the nuances of color, line, or shape describe the movement of human feelings, as melody can stimulate all kinds of emotions.

After WWII, he started an artists' organization to revitalize Japanese communities. He died at 36, from heart failure (he had chronic health problems from asthma and tuberculosis). In 1998, the art museum in Iwate marked the 50th anniversary of his passing with an exhibit of 92 paintings and 45 drawings. "All of these pictures filled with his joy in the painterly process evoke a sense of Shunsuke's faith in the painting and his deep love for the human condition," declared the exhibit catalog.

See also:

Mark H. Sandler, "The Living Artist: Matsumoto Shunsuke's Reply to the State," Art Journal (September 1996). Online here.

Why I love biographical dictionaries (#2)

(Here's #1.)

A few sentences from the first paragraph of the entry on chemist Ida Freund (1863-1914), in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online; entry written by Marilyn Bailey Ogilvie:

"During her youth she lost a leg as a result of a cycling accident and the disease that followed. The artificial leg that replaced it was never very satisfactory. Throughout her life she moved about by means of a tricycle worked with the arms."

And I can't find any other mentions of Freund's tricycle anywhere. Anyone know more about it? There has to be an interesting journal article waiting to be written here--she was a chemistry demonstrator and then lecturer at Cambridge, 1887-1912, a gifted teacher, supporter of women students in the sciences, author of two textbooks. Her colleagues or students must have made some mention of her tricycle over the years?

Why I love biographical dictionaries

One sentence, from the entry about writer Ethel Anderson (1883-1958) in the Australian Dictionary of Biography online, written by Martha Rutledge:

"Somewhat formidable in later life, Ethel became quite deaf and brandished an immense, silver ear-trumpet, adorned with chiffon to match her dresses."

Somewhat formidable, indeed!

September 19: Frances Farmer (1913-1970)

If a person is treated like a patient, they are apt to act like one.

--American actress Frances Farmer, born on this date in 1913, in Seattle, Washington.

Farmer was in and out of mental hospitals for much of the 1940s. She was originally committed on the basis on erratic behavior that was caused primarily by alcoholism. I didn't realize that the most sensational later accounts of her treatment have been debunked: there is apparently no credible evidence that she was ever subjected to a lobotomy, although biographies and the film Frances (1982) depict that event as a biographical fact.