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On 15 October 1884, when she began a second long-term spell of sickness, lasting until January 1885, Dr Fish prescribed two drugs then in use for epilepsy: hyoscyamus (an anti-spasmodic recommended since 1858 by London authority Sir Edward Sieveking in his treatise On Epilepsy) and ‘extract ustilago’, a compound of ergotine and bromide (used also for headaches). A Dictionary of Medicine published in 1883 (Dr Bigelow owned a copy) recommends three to six grains of ‘ergotine’ for epilepsy in an article by a respected French neurologist, C. E. Brown-Séquard. One of the Amherst doctors prescribed glycerine once more on 23 January 1885.

Other prescriptions given in this period also correspond to drugs then used for epilepsy, though these were common medicines used for a variety of ills. The extracts were crude; treatments look dangerously hit and miss, especially the use of poisons, and we might well wonder what effect these poisons had on Dickinson’s premature death.

Arsenic (used also in tonics) is recommended for epilepsy in the Dictionary of Medicine: ‘arsenic alone can do much against any form of epilepsy’. Dickinson was prescribed ‘Fowler’s arsenical solution’ on 9 October 1883 when she collapsed after Gib’s death.

The same applied to strychnine (recommended in On Epilepsy, though used also in tonics). Strychnine is an ingredient in Nux vomica (from an ulcerated nut). Dickinson was given ‘Nux vomica’ on 12 October 1883, three days after the arsenic. This prescription was for ‘L Dickinson’, obviously Lavinia, who would have obtained medicine on her sister’s behalf. Strychnine was prescribed on two other occasions in this period: 9 January 1883, when the first scenes of the family feud broke out, confirming Dickinson’s apprehensions; and 17 August 1885, when she was shocked by news of Helen Hunt Jackson’s unexpected death.

Digitalis was prescribed on 30 January 1885. Digitalis is usually prescribed for the heart and also for kidney failure, which Dr Bigelow isolated as the cause of death.

24

The final prescription, from Dr Bigelow, was ‘chloroform olive oil’ [Leyda, ii, 470] two days before Dickinson’s death, when she was breathing in a way that horrified her family. Chloroform, according to Bigelow’s Dictionary of Medicine, might serve to rectify the jagged, partially asphyxiated breathing that warns of an oncoming fit.

25

Founded in 1815 in order to stage oratorios and other works in America.

26

Hamlet is ‘Sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought’.

27

1891 is the date given by R. W. Franklin in his 1967 pamphlet on editing ED. He assumed that the mutilation was done by Austin because, he argued, Mabel Todd had too much respect for manuscripts to do so. This view (current in 1967, when Mabel’s daughter was still alive and amassing scholarly support for her mother) underplays Mabel Todd’s initiatives. Her persistent project was to replace Susan as the poet’s intimate. It would be out of character for Austin to do this of his own accord; he was generally cautious about documents, as with his will.

28

Mabel Loomis Todd’s papers show that she planned to publish the love letters as though she were editing them at the request of the anonymous lovers.

29

Visitors to The Evergreens can see it there today.

30

His name and Boston gentility prefigure the threatened sobrieties of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, Aunt Helen and Cousin Nancy in T. S. Eliot’s early poems.

31

Revived at the Savoy in London from July 1896.

32

This amount, it will be recalled, represented two-thirds of Lavinia’s royalties on the first two volumes of ED’s poems. By the time that the case came to court, Mabel Todd mistakenly believed that Lavinia had received as much as $2000 and that half of it was her due. In fact, royalty statements from December 1894 to June 1898 show falling sales after the first thousand copies of the two-volume selection of ED’s letters. Lavinia was debited $604 for the electroplates. Mabel also mistakenly came to believe that the recent (fourth)