Sarah Canary by Karen Joy Fowler Read Free Book Online Page B

now. I don’t think you should stay around.’
     
    ‘I’m going,’ said Chin. He caught the bundle of his belongings that the sheriff threw at him. Everything was tied up in his blanket now, white-man style. He kept his eyes on the ground so that he could pretend no one was looking at him. He watched the toes of his heavy boots alternately striding into view, now the right, now the left. He took big steps. The ground before him was wet and still retained the impressions of earlier shoes. Behind him he left his own tracks. His heels dug into the mud, making a trail of holes, each one looking like a small, open, angry mouth. Chin knew this. But he would not turn around to see.
     
    ~ * ~
     
    ii
     
     
     
     
    In 1873, Georg Cantor developed set theory, based on several practical suggestions for proofs made to him by God (the proofs have held); Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, master of the ghost story, died from an overdose of laudanum taken to ward off his nightly dreams of being buried alive; Cornell’s President White refused to allow Cornell to face Michigan on the football fields with the words, ‘I will not permit thirty men to travel four hundred miles to agitate a bag of wind.’ Is there a madman here? Which one is he?
     
    Sanity is a delicate concept, lunacy only slightly less so. Over the last few centuries, more and more of those phenomena once believed to belong to God have been assigned to the authority of the psychoanalyst instead. Some of the saints can be diagnosed in retrospect as epileptics. St Theresa was almost certainly an hysteric. St Ida of Lorraine seems to have suffered from perceptional insanity. She only thought that her body was amplified to monstrous proportions in her desire to be acceptable to God; we doubt this swelling actually took place, in spite of the testimony of the astonished and crowded nun who shared her bed. The prognosis for such cases in our own age is excellent; saintliness can often be completely cured.
     
    We owe these advances, at least in part, to experimental alienist physicians such as the doctor who worked at the Steilacoom Territorial Asylum in 1873. The same year Freud entered medical school in Vienna, Dr James Carr was duplicating the experiments of William Hammond, cutting the heads off coupling frogs to isolate the physical location of instinct in the frog’s body. Hammond claimed to have kept the headless male frog alive for up to ten days, and in all that time the male never released his purposeful grip on the female. The seat of instinct, Hammond concluded, was in the spine. Dr Carr had great difficulty getting his frogs to couple at all, and then they lost all interest in sex when they lost their minds. They were, perhaps, less instinctual to begin with, more cerebral, more effete, these western species of frog. He had experimented with Red-legged Frogs, identifiable by their short hind legs and warty skins; Tailed Frogs, smoother, olive green, and named for their tail-like copulatory organ; and the smaller Cascades Frogs. He had switched to East Coast varieties now.
     
    His patients were not expected to couple at all, were, in fact, segregated by sex, at least in their sleeping quarters, to prevent this very thing. Dr Carr had little to say about their care. The asylum was run according to the contract system, and the authority of the physician was secondary to the authority of the contractor and his profits. Dr Carr made the original diagnosis. He chose what medications were to be tried and in what dosages. Beyond that there was little he was permitted to do. His recommendations that particular patients be discharged were often opposed by the contractor, one Arnold Greene, who was paid ninety-one cents a day by the Territory for each patient and saw, therefore, in each cure the loss of revenue. When the doctor and contractor differed, the superintendents for the asylum invariably ignored the doctor. Research might have been a great comfort to Carr if he