He Wanted the Moon (24 page)

“Your father, he couldn’t help himself. You know, Mimi, he wanted the moon.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

As I continued to study the letters and medical records, another startling facet of my father’s story revealed itself. Not only was he suffering from manic depression. He had been studying it, too.

In 1933, while my father was establishing his dermatology practice in Boston, Dr. Cannon wrote to inform him that space in his laboratory at Massachusetts General had become available. Dr. Cannon was now able to offer my father a minor appointment as a graduate assistant in research. My father didn’t hesitate to accept. Despite the interruption of his breakdown, his article on Addison’s disease had been accepted for publication in the
American Journal of Physiology
and he was buoyed up by its success. Together with Dr. Albright, he had proven that patients with Addison’s disease were deficient in cortin, a natural hormone secreted by the body’s adrenal glands. This discovery would later contribute to the development of the steroid cortisone.

It was time for him to find a new research subject, and he knew exactly where his interests lay. Only a few months earlier, he had experienced his first stay in a mental institution, in Philadelphia. Here he had been held in straight jackets and subjected to a week and a half of narcosis “sleep therapy.” He felt certain there had to be a more sophisticated approach to the treatment of manic depression. Could there be a connection between the adrenal glands and his illness, just as there had been a link between Addison’s disease and the adrenal hormones? Dr. Cannon thought my father’s ideas had sufficient enough merit to approve the research.

True to his training with Albright and Cannon, my father was looking for a physiological basis to his illness. He was seeking a biochemical explanation for his intense and terrifying moods.

I pictured him in his white coat, absorbed in his work at his laboratory. By then he knew the physiology of the adrenal glands very well. The glands sit at the top of the kidneys. Together, they weigh only a fraction of an ounce, but they can have a tremendous effect on a person’s well-being. They are responsible for releasing hormones into the bloodstream in response to fear, stress, anger, or other excitement—the same hormones that cause the heart to race and the blood pressure to rise when we feel under threat. During his manic episodes, my father had experienced near ecstatic surges of excitement. He felt certain this could be connected to those glands, specifically the adrenal cortex—that part of the gland that mediates the rush of adrenaline, keeping it within normal range. My father reasoned that it was possible the adrenal cortex was malfunctioning in patients who were manic, causing uncontrolled and abnormal rushes of energy.

The first step, my father knew, was to ascertain whether the blood of acutely manic patients differed from that of healthy patients. For his experiments, he obtained blood from mental patients staying at the nearby McLean Hospital, keeping the vials of blood refrigerated at the laboratory, hopeful that if he could just unlock the secrets of their contents he might find some way of helping not only himself, but the many thousands of patients across the country suffering with manic depression.

Dr. Cannon had pioneered the study of the adrenal gland using laboratory cats. My father followed his lead. He had twenty cats in all, allowing him to divide them into two groups, ten for his test group and ten for the control group. First he sedated the two groups, removing their adrenal glands with a surgeon’s quick precision. After the gland was removed, the cats’ lives would be reduced to a span of no more than a few days. The cats in the control group were then injected with regular blood, while the cats in the test group were injected with blood from manic patients. My father’s plan was “to determine whether or not these injections might lengthen the life of the animals.” Early results proved promising: the cats injected with manic blood survived 40 percent longer than those injected with blood from nonmanic patients.

This breakthrough in his research arrived late in 1934. At this juncture, however, he was forced to put his investigations on hold. In November of that year, he experienced a second manic episode. He was admitted to McLean psychiatric hospital, the same hospital where he had obtained blood for his experiments.

McLean Hospital, 1934

On November 3, 1934, the patient suddenly became over-active, euphoric, and excited. His hyperactivity became extreme restlessness and sleeplessness. He had developed an idea for making a million dollars through a suit against the Westinghouse Electric Company who had apparently given him a defective machine. He worked terribly hard. He was advised by his doctors to go to McLean Hospital. He arrived at McLean on November 11, 1934.

He remained in a wildly maniacal state for ten days. When no physician was around he seemed to lose all control. He became aggressive, combative and very destructive. He smashed light fixtures, windowpanes, furniture, some of which he attempted to use as weapons. He broke a transom with his hand, after which he had to be restrained. After a brief period of quiet, apologetic, cooperative behavior, the patient, about twenty days after admission, had become mildly depressed. In early December, he again was quite active, mildly exuberant and enthusiastic. The patient felt that he and his wife were not very happy together. Two nights before admission he had a long talk with his wife, at the end of which she had stated that she hated him. He was discharged from McLean after twenty-nine days at the hospital, on December 10, 1934, as improved.

After his release, Dr. Cannon was gravely concerned. He felt my father should hold off on laboratory work for the foreseeable future. “Everybody has a critical stress which he can stand and that varies greatly with individuals,” Dr. Cannon wrote in a letter immediately after my father’s release. “The prudent person is one who learns by careful observation where that stress lies and manages his life so that he lives within the limits. Of course, research is exacting because animals have to be attended to, and it is very likely to be exciting if results prove favorable. Both these conditions are to be avoided, I believe, at present.”

My father took Dr. Cannon’s advice to heart. Beginning in 1935, his medical records confirm, he set aside his research and threw his energies into his private practice in Boston. Three years later, I was born. Although the letters make clear that my father was proud of his new family, conscientious in his work as a dermatologist, and stimulated by the interactions with his patients, he clearly missed his laboratory work. “It is sort of starvation to stay out of academic circles and deny one’s self the privilege of doing scientific research,” he wrote to Cannon. In the waning months of 1939, he wrote again to his mentor expressing his strong desire to resume his research on manic depression.

Dr. Cannon replied with increased caution. “I do not like to discourage anyone’s enthusiasm,” he wrote, “but in this present situation I should say that it would be wise to weigh carefully all the considerations before taking a step which may involve you in the expenditure of a large amount of money.”

On December 19, 1940, my father again wrote to Dr. Cannon: “I have decided in my own heart that I am going to find a way of continuing these experiments—even if I have to build a laboratory in my home and use my own blood with Gretta’s as a control. My mood to continue these experiments is recent and comes as a relief from these six years of meditating upon those unfinished experiments and of regretting the absence of time and courage to continue them.”

Dr. Cannon was persuaded—in the next letter, he agreed to support the work. My father continued his laboratory research, intent on establishing a connection between his illness and the body’s biochemistry. Again, blood he obtained from McLean was injected into cats with their adrenal glands removed. This time, my father observed that the manic cats lived five times longer than the control group.

In the early spring of 1942, my father completed a first draft of his article “Biochemical Component of the Manic-Depressive Psychosis.”

“These experiments have provided biological evidence that the blood of manic patients may differ from the blood of healthy subjects,” he wrote. He made clear that his findings were preliminary in nature, and that he had proven only that animals injected with manic blood behaved differently than animals injected with regular blood. His hope, however, was that his approach might create a significant shift in the study of manic depression.

“Perhaps this report will stimulate added interest in the manic psychosis as a physiological and general medical problem rather than as a purely psychological one. It may be hoped that other investigators will continue these studies.”

Dr. Cannon responded with a very detailed letter with a long list of amendments. A reply to Cannon’s suggestions came not from my father, but from my mother this time. It was May of 1942, and my father was unable to write. He was being held at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, in the throes of another manic break. He stayed there for nine days.

On his release, my father continued to rework his article. He wrote to Dr. Means expressing the hope that his manuscript might soon be published. He described his recent confinement as “those ten days of dark psychiatry,” and added, “I shall be willing to make whatever sacrifices are necessary to speed the progress of these experiments.” The following year, he fell ill again, being readmitted to Boston Psychopathic Hospital before being transferred to Westborough for a stay of a month.

Toward the end of 1943, my father learned that his article “Biochemical Component of the Manic-Depressive Psychosis” had finally been accepted for publication in the
Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease.
It was published in the spring of 1944, while he was being held again at Westborough.

My father had run out of time—the race to cure himself was lost. While he was locked away in hospital writing his manuscript, the Massachusetts medical board removed his license to practice medicine. From the confines of his cell, he could do nothing to promote his article. Many of his peers were away overseas in the war, so there was no one left to champion his discoveries. My father’s research was quickly overlooked and, soon enough, forgotten.

CHAPTER TWENTY

My father had been convinced that there was a biochemical cause for his illness. Psychiatrists and other doctors caring for the mentally ill in 1944 were a long way from reaching a similar conclusion.

While my father was at Westborough—subjected to straight-jackets, cold packs, and solitary confinement—a Portuguese neurobiologist, Egas Moniz, was becoming famous for a new and radical brain surgery that he claimed could effectively treat mental illness. The surgery was called the lobotomy. Moniz and his followers believed that if the frontal lobes of the brain could be severed, then the patient’s emotions could effectively be cut away. In the United States, the lobotomy’s greatest proponent was the neurologist Dr. Walter Freeman, who helped popularize the procedure by traveling to state mental hospitals across the country, demonstrating the technique on patients while doctors and staff looked on.

My father would eventually receive his lobotomy in 1949, soon after Freeman visited the hospital where he was being held. Dr. Freeman’s particular technique involved inserting an instrument shaped like an ice pick through the inner corners of the eye sockets, before moving the pick back and forth within the brain, as if scrambling eggs. After the surgery, it was observed that patients were less agitated, and therefore Freeman and his converts considered the operation successful. The vast majority of patients who received lobotomies, however, were permanently brain damaged and unable to function normally. Stripped of character, mobility, and energy, they were unrecognizable when compared to their former selves.

In 1949, the same year my father was lobotomized, Dr. Moniz won the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Over the next three years, somewhere in the region of fifty thousand Americans were subjected to the lobotomy “cure.” With hindsight, it can be difficult to comprehend how so many respected medical professionals subscribed to such a brutal “solution.” But doctors and families were desperate for hope. Nothing else was working. At that time, psychiatric patients occupied 55 percent of all hospital beds in America, and over half of those patients had been residents for over five years.

My father was no exception. In the years after he escaped from Westborough, his mental health only continued to worsen, and he bounced from hospital to hospital. After eight months at his parents’ home in Dallas, he returned to Boston in early March 1945. A few days after his arrival—medical records confirm—my father paid us a late-night visit at our home. I must have slept through events as he broke our garage window, climbed inside, and drove away in the car he had once owned. Later in the night—my mother having reported the car as stolen—he was apprehended in Boston and turned over to the Newton police, who delivered him to Westborough once more. Soon after, he was transferred to the Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.