Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [225]
118 ‘The Maddest . . .’: ‘It struck me—every Day—’ (c. 1863). J362/Fr636.
118 ‘Fog’: ‘There is a Languor of the Life’ (c. summer 1863). J396/Fr552.
118 ‘Languor’: Ibid.
118 ‘the Hour of Lead’: ‘After great pain’ (c. autumn 1862). J341/Fr372. Also ‘Boots of Lead’ creak over the Soul in the brain’s funeral. Fr340.
118 understanding of epilepsy: Temkin, The Falling Sickness (1945, rev. 1971), ix: ‘There is no unanimity about the range of the concept of epilepsy, and the nature of the disease is still obscure.’ Sieveking, On Epilepsy (1858), notes that the nineteenth-century advances in physiology were not matched by understanding of the nervous system.
118 Dr Holmes on epilepsy: Medical Essays (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1891), 192.
118 Julius Caesar: I:ii.
118 ‘epilepsy’ in Othello: IV:i.
118 ‘the throe of Othello’: (20 June 1877). L506.
119 ‘reticent’: ‘The reticent volcano’ (transcribed by MLT). J1748/ Fr1776.
119 ‘when upon a pain Titanic . . .’: ‘I have never seen “Volcanoes”—’ (c. 1860). J175/Fr165.
119 ‘gunshot’; ‘spasmodic throes’ etc: Sieveking at the time in On Epilepsy, 4, 74, 108-9.
119 Jackson not to be consulted for anything trivial: To her brother ED mentioned a trouble she and her sister shared. I agree with Dr Norbert Hirschhorn (‘Was It Tuberculosis?’, New England Quarterly, 1999) that this was a blind. Lavinia was physically robust. Habegger, 262, suggests it was LD alone who (according to her diary) ‘called at Dr Jackson’s’ but it’s more likely that she accompanied her frailer sister.
119 Letters to a Young Physician: See 60-7, 85, 211, 229.
120 advice not to remove: Jackson, Another Letter, 116.
120 ‘idiot medications’: Oliver Wendell Holmes, student notes from Jackson’s medical lectures (1833).
120 ‘liability to the epileptic paroxysm’: Jackson, Another Letter, 48-9.
120 ‘dreadful’: Ibid., 49.
120 tastes should be indulged: Ibid., 83.
120 Patients ready to be brave: James Jackson Putnam, Memoirs of James Jackson (1905).
121 Dr Jackson and ED’s way of life: This suggestion came from Siamon Gordon. Henry James imagines something similar, the lift the truth (that she’s incurable) gives to Milly Theale, whose wise doctor opens up to her certain possibilities for living in The Wings of the Dove.
121 delivered the prescription to her father: (7 Oct 1851). L55. ‘Father has the recipe.’
121 ‘I have tried . . .’: Ibid.
121 prescription survives: pinned to L148, to WAD (27 Dec 1853). Reproduced in Home, 332. Editors Johnson and Ward add note about ‘a simple skin lotion, prescribed even today for rough or chapped hands’.
121 glycerine as treatment for epilepsy: ‘Medicinal Uses of Glycerine in the 19th Century’, TS in Health and Medicine folder, Jones Library, derived from Health at Home or Hall’s Family Doctor by William Whitty Hall (Hartford, CT: James Betts and Company, 1874).
122 Hirschhorn on prescription for glycerine: ‘Was It Tuberculosis?’, New England Quarterly, 72/1 (1999), 110-11.
122 ‘unsanitary’: Sieveking, 245.
123 ‘consolation . . .’: Jackson, Another Letter, 92.
123 ‘Somebody . . .’: (c. spring 1861). J158 / Fr222.
123 epilepsy often misdiagnosed: The Spiral Staircase, Karen Armstrong’s autobiography, reveals that the nuns in her convent blame her for exhibitionism since doctors find nothing the matter.
124 ‘Struck, was I . . .’: (c. early 1864). J925/Fr841.
124 ‘I like a look of Agony’: (c. summer 1862). J241/Fr339.
124 ‘Torrid Noons’: ‘The fartherst Thunder’ (c. 1884). J1581/Fr1665. The ‘Missiles’ of ‘torrid Noons’ were sent to SHD in L914.
125 ‘It dont sound so terrible . . .’: (c. autumn 1862). J426/Fr384. Miller, ED: A Poet’s Grammar, 78-82, offers a sensitive analysis of poems that absent any reference for ‘it’. Miller picks out ‘It was not Death, for I stood up’ as a poem which attempts to ‘mark the boundaries’ of ‘an unnamed, powerful event’ and ‘circles its central theme, the identity of “it”’.
125 ‘I fit for them—I seek the Dark . . .’: (c. 1866). J1109/Fr1129. Apart from her,