Asleep: The Forgotten Epidemic That Remains One of Medicine's Greatest Mysteries (13 page)

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driver picked Tilney up at the station for the drive toward East Island. Tree-lined roads offered shade and scattered, kinetic light that skittered along the pavement. The auto slowed and pulled onto a long cement drive over a bridge guarded by a high wrought-iron gate and two wardens. At the end of the long drive, lined with linden trees, a great Georgian estate loomed in the distance. It was three stories tall and made of brick, with a porch on the lower level. Throughout the grounds were well-tended gardens and musky roses in bloom; the estate had several dozen gardeners. Even the grand stairway in the entry held fresh flower arrangements.

Tilney hurried into the house and was shown to a second-floor bedroom where a local physician, Dr. Everett Jessup, waited for him. Jessup had already made a diagnosis of sleeping sickness, but given the circumstances, he wanted a more experienced opinion as well. Epidemic encephalitis had come suddenly into Long Island, killing six people the week before, and five people the week before that. The disease had also made world news the month before when Viscount Milner, Britain’s former Secretary of War, died of encephalitis lethargica.

Tilney reviewed the notes on the patient’s charts, and he looked at the woman now languishing in the bed before him. Tilney knew that this was a case that would make international news. He wanted to give a sure diagnosis before the staff issued a radio message to the yacht drifting in Long Island Sound, telling J. P. Morgan his wife had sleeping sickness.

M
rs. Jane Morgan, called Jessie, had gone to St. John’s Church of Lattingtown on that June morning. It must have been an unusually beautiful summer day because her husband, Jack, spent most Sundays at the church, usually passing the collection plate. On that Sunday, however, he had taken his yacht, the Corsair, out into the sound and planned to pick Jessie up that afternoon. But, during church, Jessie had turned to friends in the pew and said she felt ill, as though she might faint. A few minutes later, she mentioned again feeling faint and left during the service. She found her auto, and her driver hurried through the several miles of road that lay between the church and the estate on East Island. As they snaked their way toward the house and pulled into the long, linear driveway, her head began to ache violently.

Jessie was carried into the house, taken to her second-story room, just above the library and ground-floor porch, and put to bed. Her condition declined rapidly and her personal physicians were called.

A summons was flashed across the wireless telling Morgan to return home immediately. He arrived by sundown and went straight to her bed, where Jessie was barely conscious and severely ill. There could not have been a greater blow to Jack P. Morgan.

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essie and Jack Morgan had been married for thirty-five years and had two sons and two daughters, all grown. Both Jessie and Jack were loving parents, but they were devoted to each other even more. Their children would later say that the couple was so close, the children themselves felt excluded at times. Although their marriage had bound two prominent families together, and their wedding made front-page news in the
New York Times
and the
New York Post,
theirs seemed to be a genuine love affair.

Jack had originally wanted to be a physician, but was pressured into the family banking business. Perhaps, then, his marriage and family were the only real source of happiness to him. It is also likely that Morgan had grown up watching his philandering father wreck their family life. Whatever the reason, Jack Morgan remained a faithful and steadfast husband. In his biography of the Morgan family, Ron Chernow described their marriage: “She propped up his ego, and he relied implicitly on her judgment in many matters. Jessie was strict with the four children and ran the estates with a firm, expert hand. She was cool and businesslike.... But to Jack, Jessie was the supportive presence who compensated for his lifelong insecurity and guaranteed he would be spared his father’s terribly loveless fate.”

Jessie was known to be an independent, confident, and decisive person. She was described as feminine, but strong to the core. Still, Jessie Morgan kept completely out of society life. Her generous philanthropic contributions were made anonymously. And her life revolved entirely around her husband, her children, and her gardens—all three of which she tended with expert care.

One morning in 1915, a crazed gunman made his way past the butler into the entry of the Morgans’ home. When the Morgans heard the commotion and came down the stairs, they found the gunman, holding their daughters, pointing two pistols up the staircase. Without hesitation, Jessie Morgan threw herself at the gunman and attacked him. Jack Morgan managed to push his wife out of the path of the first bullet, but was hit himself. When the gunman struggled with Jack over the gun, Jessie again stepped in, pinning down his arm and preventing him from firing a second shot. After the gunman had been subdued, they found a large stick of dynamite in his pocket as well. Jack always credited his wife with saving his life.

Now, Jack Morgan stood at his wife’s bedside as she struggled for her own life. As the light grew dim and the sky copper-colored, night approached, and Jessie Morgan fell into a deep sleep. It was decided then to give her a blood transfusion. A message was sent to St. Luke’s Hospital in Manhattan to find a donor, and the next morning a surgeon named Dr. Bishop arrived to donate eight ounces of his own blood. The operation took place at ten o’clock that morning, while Jack waited in the next room. The transfusion was successful, and because of the swelling in the brain, intravenous dextrose was given to Jessie Morgan as well. The effect was immediate improvement. Every morning after that, for the next nine weeks, Jessie would receive the dextrose treatments. As Jessie slept indefinitely, she also had to be fed by a tube three times a day with pureed vegetables or creamed soups. And, not taking any chances, Jack Morgan assigned five physicians and five nurses to her care. With alternating schedules, someone was with her at all times.

Tilney routinely made trips to Glen Cove, not only as an expert on epidemic encephalitis, but as a trusted family doctor—he had been the personal physician of Jack’s mother, who had died the year before. Tilney and Jessie’s other doctors believed that she might have contracted the illness through the close contact she had had with several grandchildren who had the flu that spring.

Jessie’s health seemed to improve, and Jack returned to the bank at 23 Wall Street, tacking up bulletins every day on his wife’s condition. He wrote to a friend: “Jessie is getting on well, the doctors assure me, and they all assure me that the recovery, though very slow, will ultimately be complete.... Of course no one can tell how long she must sleep, but while she sleeps she is not conscious of any pain or discomfort, and the cure is proceeding all the time.”

With Jessie improving and a staff to watch over her, Jack left for Manhattan on the morning of August 14. Late that morning, he received a phone call from home telling him that Jessie had taken a turn for the worse. He raced out of the bank to the docks and onto his boat. As the boat approached Long Island’s Gold Coast, the vaulted rooftops, chimneys, marble archways, and blocks of silvered window-light rose above treetops and boxed hedges. The coastline was so glamorous that it had been the inspiration for a novel just released that spring,
The Great Gatsby.
To anyone else, Jack Morgan, one of the wealthiest men in America, drifting on a boat toward an estate on his own island would seem to be a man who had luck on his side.

As the boat dropped speed and edged toward the dock, Jack could see the servants spread out along the coast to keep reporters or curious bystanders from sneaking onto the property. The only other way onto the estate was through the heavily guarded, gated bridge, which had been under the watch of a superintendent ever since the 1915 break-in by the crazed gunman. Jack climbed out of the boat and hurried across the lawn, only to be met with the news that Jessie had already died, at the stroke of noon. Her heart had stopped.

Another radio summons went out to the
Corsair,
but this time it was for Jessie’s two sons. As they made their way through Long Island Sound toward home, a storm was gathering to the east. A deep, gray-blue ceiling of clouds narrowed the distance between the water and the sky. Wind whipped the tree limbs, and lightning lit the underbelly of clouds every few minutes. By the time her sons arrived at Glen Cove the severe storm had knocked out power at the island’s electrical plant. Their home was alight with candles in every room, like a house burning from within.

After her death, a notice was posted.

Mrs. Morgan, who for the past two months suffered from lethargic encephalitis and had slowly improved until a few days ago, died at noon today as the result of a sudden cardiac arrest.

It was signed by her doctors, including Tilney.

The funeral for Jessie Morgan was private and for family members only, many of whom arrived directly from their summer homes on that hot August afternoon. The services were held at the ivy-covered Gothic church, St. John’s, where Jessie had first become ill. The mourners filed in wearing black crepe satin or silk, veils, gloves, and fans for the heat. She was buried in a family plot beneath white oaks and maple trees. Western Union had to send an extra telegraph officer to the Glen Cove office to manage the flood of condolences. Guards were employed to stand along the roads and hold back crowds as the Morgan family drove past in a procession of polished black limousines.

E
pidemic encephalitis, as it turned out, formed a sad coincidence between two warring families. Both Jack’s father, Pierpont Morgan, and his grandfather, Junius, had fought bitterly with the Rothschild and Sons banking empire in London. It was a multigenerational conflict. The sons and heirs to their fortunes, however, had a few things in common. Both Jack Morgan and Charles Rothschild were sons dutifully sent into the family banking business, in spite of other loves—Jack’s was medicine and science; Charles’s was entomology, and he compiled an incredible collection still carried in museums today. Both sons seemed to lack the vigor and ruthless ambition of their fathers. And both men would find themselves horribly touched by sleeping sickness. Jack lost his beloved wife in 1925, and Rothschild developed sleeping sickness after surviving a case of flu during the influenza pandemic. To his wife and children, Rothschild seemed depressed and frustrated by the encephalitis, but not a danger. It was a terrible surprise then when Charles Rothschild locked himself in the bathroom of their home in Ashton Wold and cut his own throat. It was ruled a “suicide during temporary insanity.”

Jack Morgan grew depressed after the loss of his wife. He spent several million dollars to buy up adjoining properties along the Gold Coast, as well as a boathouse, to build a memorial park to his wife. Friends later remarked, after visiting East Island, that the house had the eerie sense that Jessie was still there—Morgan was refusing to let her go. He kept her bedroom exactly the same and tended to her garden. Just that spring, Jessie’s tulips had won first prize in a local contest. Morgan wanted to be sure her garden would come up the following spring, in spite of the fact that she would not be there to see it.

It would have taken a brave person, or at the very least an ambitious one, to approach Jack Morgan in that state. But Tilney did. He asked if Morgan might make a donation to the Neurological Institute in his wife’s name in order to support research for this disease. Morgan donated $200,000 to the institute, practically funding an entire floor of research for the mysterious disease that had taken the life of his wife.

CHAPTER 13

1925

I
n most cases, history can hold up a magnifying glass to an epidemic and look at the medicine, society, politics, philosophies, and religion of the time period. Encephalitis lethargica was just the reverse. The 1920s and 1930s became the great lens through which it was possible to see a decade-long epidemic, the victims, the survivors, the medical investigators who fought it, and ultimately, its vanishing from memory.

To understand how a disease like epidemic encephalitis could gain so much attention from neuropsychiatry, medical research, and the city health department so quickly and so efficiently, it is important to understand the era in which it happened. It is equally important to understand how this disease escaped the notice of almost everyone else. Epidemic encephalitis managed to fade behind the brightness of one decade and the darkness of the next. Unlike other major epidemics, this one was diffuse, borderless, hard to trace, impossible to define.