Lives Like Loaded Guns_ Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds - Lyndall Gordon [62]
Dr Jackson gave Emily a prescription which was filled at a drugstore in Tremont Row (now Center Plaza, across from Boston’s City Hall), near to where Dr Jackson lived on Hamilton Place. She delivered the prescription to her father and took the mixture with confidence. ‘I have tried Dr Jackson’s prescription and find myself better for it,’ she wrote to Austin (then teaching in Boston) on 7 October, in the month following the consultation. ‘I have used it all up now, and wish you would get me some more . . . I should like to have you get three or four times the quantity contained in the Recipe, as . . . I think it benefits me much.’
This bit of paper, which survives, is a crucial clue to Dr Jackson’s diagnosis. What he prescribed was half an ounce of glycerine diluted with two and a half ounces of water. Glycerine has many uses, but one of the medical uses in those days was for epilepsy. In a nineteenth-century listing of ‘Medicinal Uses of Glycerine’ in Amherst’s Jones Library, there is a recommendation for epilepsy: dissolve half an ounce of chloral (a sedative) and twenty-five drops of peppermint essence (for flavour) in four ounces of glycerine. This use of glycerine in the treatment of epilepsy (as distinct from its use for TB) has gone unnoticed. In treating both diseases the substance would have been futile, though it had a placebo effect on Emily Dickinson, a consequence of her trust in Jackson together with an urgency to be cured. She used the prescription until 1853 with diminishing confidence. The editors of her letters thought that her prescription was a hand lotion, but she would hardly have troubled an eminent physician for something so trivial. Then, too, her dosage, as discussed by Dr Norbert Hirschhorn in the New England Quarterly, was too small for external use. It had to be a dose taken internally: a teaspoon a day.
Dr Hirschhorn asks an extremely pertinent question: why did Dickinson persist in asking Austin to send her this medication from Boston even though there was an adequate drugstore at home in Amherst? This practice was sanctioned by her father, who carried the prescription to Boston on at least one occasion. Dr Hirschhorn admits that if TB were the case (an idea he generally favours) her action is puzzling, since no stigma attached to TB. It was all too rife in distinguished families: Emerson’s brothers and first wife, the Adams family in Quincy and indeed Emily’s well-off Norcross relations. The question of secrecy about her medication is therefore still open. The undeniable stigma of epilepsy could be the answer, given its shaming associations at that time with ‘hysteria’, masturbation, syphilis and impairment of the intellect leading to ‘epileptic insanity’.14 This would explain why she wished this prescription to be filled in Boston, away from the small-town tattle of Amherst.
The main regimen recommended by authorities was what they called hygiene, and central to this was cleanliness. In On Epilepsy, the London authority Sir Edward Sieveking is almost obsessive in his warnings against what’s unclean, including ‘unsanitary’ theatres, concerts, balls and parties. Other people are unclean; places where other people congregate are unclean - in contrast to the spotless Homestead. A simple and entirely unromantic reason for Emily Dickinson to wear white could be sanitary, the same reason why white would be worn by doctors and nurses: to show the presence of dirt in situations where it presents a threat to health.
In a case of incurable sickness, Jackson advised, ‘it affords much consolation to have one to watch over them’. This is a consolation Emily Dickinson experienced from ‘Sister’ in the late 1850s. Susan Dickinson, as a member of family, must have been in the know, to judge from her central role in the earliest poem ‘Sister’ wrote on the subject. ‘Dying! Dying in the night!’ (c. 1860) is a humanist take on God’s absence