Asleep: The Forgotten Epidemic That Remains One of Medicine's Greatest Mysteries (10 page)

He also testified in the era’s most gruesome serial killer trial, against Brooklyn’s Albert Fish, who kidnapped, assaulted, and cannibalized a number of children in the area.

Jelliffe is most famous, however, for his medical writing and editing. He wrote for a number of journals and served as an associate editor for the
New York Medical Journal.
Eventually, jelliffe found his calling in neuropsychiatry, becoming editor of
the Journal of Nervous and Mental
Disease and remaining in that position for forty-two years. There were a large number of neurological studies coming out of Europe just before World War I, but all were in need of translation. Jelliffe was able to translate and publish the most recent and groundbreaking studies from the labs in Germany, Austria, and France. Jelliffe also helped found the
Psychoanalytic Review,
which first appeared in 1913. It was through the
Psychoanalytic Review
that Jelliffe first became acquainted with Sigmund Freud.

Jelliffe’s journey in becoming a Freudian was not a quick one. When first introduced to Carl Jung’s work, and later Freud’s, just after the turn of the century, Jelliffe quipped, “This whole Freud business is done to death. The lamp posts of Vienna will cast forth sexual rays pretty soon.” Children’s fairy tales, Jelliffe lamented, would be unsafe material, saturated with sexual symbolism and innuendo. Psychoanalysis as a profession had been launched in the late nineteenth century in Europe, primarily Vienna. Although Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, both of whom Jelliffe would later meet and correspond with, had gained worldwide popularity and recognition, they had not yet received much respect in the United States. In large part, this may have been due to the more puritanical values of America and the blatantly sexual focus of psychotherapy.

O
ver the course of several years and long walks through Central Park with a friend and psychoanalyst, Jelliffe came around to the idea. It is not surprising given jelliffe’s intellectual makeup and the strong influence of European medicine on him. He had always been an innovative, open-minded student in search of greater connections in life. He likened psychoanalysis to a surgery of the mind—minor in some cases, deep cuts in others. Like fellow neurologist Fred Tilney, jelliffe believed that very little of the mind had been explored up to that point. “When one seriously gives himself to the reflection that the human organism ... has been a billion years in the making, no one but a consummate ass could believe himself capable of understanding but the most insignificant part of this whole evolutionary product,” wrote Jelliffe.

Both Tilney and Jelliffe worked at the Neurological Institute during the war teaching medical officers. And, for a time, jelliffe was also a visiting physician for the institute, working in the outpatient clinic. Eventually, he was asked by a friend to drop out for the sake of harmony at the institute. Apparently Jelliffe’s ideas, especially the ones focusing on psychoanalysis, were not always warmly received. At that time, the practice of psychoanalysis was still being “violently attacked” by a number of New York neurologists.

In a sense, Tilney and Jelliffe represented what was happening on a larger scale to the practice of neuropsychiatry. Without seeming to choose sides, Tilney became heavily involved with the Neurological Institute. Jelliffe, on the other hand, saw brain study as more integrated with psychiatry and migrated toward psychoanalysis.

One writer would later capture what seems to encapsulate Jelliffe and separate him from other physicians: “There are those who prefer to gaze backward into the past to ascertain what man has been and the path he has taken to reach his present stage of evolution. There are those who love to analyze the present to learn what man is, and there are others who attempt to penetrate the misty future to anticipate what he will become. Dr. Jelliffe was an amalgamation of all three.... He was truly a child of the mists, but practically, he lived for all life was worth and enjoyed it thoroughly.”

J
ust as Jelliffe was hitting his stride in psychoanalysis, he was knocked by the first of two severe blows in his life. In 1916, his wife and childhood love died of a cerebral hemorrhage. She had been his wife and companion, but also a fellow science writer and a translator of many of the articles Jelliffe published. In a book dedicated to her, jelliffe recognized her “lofty purpose, ideal striving . . . a constant stimulus to progressive endeavor.”

Jelliffe was remarried in 1917, to a nurse, but they never had any of their own children. His second wife, like his first, was professionally minded and drawn toward a literary career.

During those years at the height of his career, Jelliffe was a relentless worker. He put in twelve hours a day without lunch. Jelliffe had a remarkable memory and an ever-expanding library of roughly twelve thousand books. He moved his office and home to a brownstone on West Fifty-sixth Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Every room in the home was lined with books, and his office, beneath bright window light, held a microscope and glass jars in a neat row. In his office, his shelves were stuffed full of medical journals. He saw several patients a day, worked on his medical journals, wrote textbooks, then went upstairs to change into a tailcoat, a white wing-collared shirt, and a top hat to spend an evening out at the theater or at dinner with his wife.

On nights that he stayed home, Jelliffe chose the meal—he considered the chemistry of food to be a science. Family dinners were like rituals. They would sit around the dinner table and converse in different languages; one week it would be French, the next week German. There was a small matchbox in the center of the table, and every time someone made a mistake or spoke English, a coin was deposited. His children spoke seven different languages by the time they were adults. And for Jelliffe’s children, learning was active, not passive. When he wanted to teach one of his daughters about the Indians native to North America, he took her west to the reservations and taught her to speak some of the tribal languages. Another daughter loved acting, so he helped her produce plays at their summer home, perching in a tree to pull the curtain open and closed. Later, he arranged to have her as an extra in a few Broadway plays with John and Lionel Barrymore. All five of his children were talented and interested in different pastimes, whether acting, boating, swimming, fishing, or gardening.

The Jelliffe household was usually filled with people—family, patients, or the occasional boarder. Whenever possible, Jelliffe escaped to his summer home on Lake George. There, too, the den held books from the floor to its vaulted beam ceiling. The den also held large glass cases filled with stuffed birds, and along the lake, the Jelliffes had an orchard and beehives for honey. The home had been converted from a boathouse, and it was a sanctuary for Jelliffe. Despite the intellectual atmosphere surrounding his homes, Jelliffe’s role as a father was anything but austere. He was known to have a sweet tooth, often hiding candy in his office drawers that his children could find. And at Christmastime, he would climb to the rooftop, hanging on to brick blocks and smoke pipes, pretending to be Santa and calling down the chimney to answer questions from the children. One daughter later commented that she never once heard her father raise his voice in anger.

A
s Jelliffe grew older, his appearance evolved into that of a tall, portly figure with skin as smooth as modeling clay. Several people remarked on his intelligent eyes. Another person described him as something of a Roman Catholic priest, saying, “He was commanding, quizzical, sure of himself, and not to be moved.” For his patients, his self-assured presence must have been a comfort, and he had an impressive client list that included Greenwich Village muse Mabel Dodge; several members of the Algonquin Round Table; Betty Compton, Mayor James J. Walker’s mistress; and playwright Eugene O’Neill; as well as famous friends like John Barrymore. In fact, when Barrymore played in a controversial, Freudian version of
Hamlet
(making full use of the Oedipal complex), Jelliffe was the consultant.

Other patients, however, were not among the celebrity set or wealthy socialites. True to Jelliffe’s nature, but not necessarily mainstream for psychoanalysts, Jelliffe became especially interested in treating psychosis. He embraced the challenge and thought of it as a chess game of sorts. He would sit, patiently and thoughtfully, to watch a mute catatonic for an hour. There was nothing hurried or impatient about his practice, and it drew a large and popular audience. That fall, a boy was brought to see Jelliffe. He had been diagnosed as a hopeless schizophrenic destined to be institutionalized for the rest of his life. His name was Adam.

CHAPTER 10

The Alienist

I
t was the end of October in 1924 when Adam first visited Jelliffe, and a brilliant autumn was under way in New York City. The air, heavy with steam and auto exhaust, had cooled and was cut by the scent of fire smoke and roasted corn from the handcarts. The early light coming through the oaks turned the air gold. Flame-colored leaves littered the weed-choked grounds of Central Park, colorful fragments among the trash, dead trees, and underbrush that had overtaken the park in the last few years. Benches were turned over with tall wisps of grass growing between the slats. Large patches of dirt spotted the park where grass had died in the summer heat or where the sheep had overgrazed. Thousands of rats had colonized in the park. In spite of its condition, Central Park was one of the last natural refuges in a city blossoming with steel bridges, skyscrapers, trains, and subways.

Jelliffe was a thinking man, who liked long walks alone with his thoughts. On nice days like that autumn morning, he often walked from the Neurological Institute through the park to his townhouse and office. Entering the threshold of the gate was like literally stepping into the countryside. Jelliffe would have smelled sweet hay and horses as he crossed one of the many bridle paths, usually busy with the riders who kept their horses stalled in the park for convenience. He would have seen tufts of white sheep on the Green, which was now appropriately called Sheep Meadow. It was not just the rats, horses, and sheep that called the park home; the run-down menagerie on the east side of the park held all types of exotic animals, including those that traveled with a circus. Jelliffe would have passed the Casino, the elm-lined Mall, and the Dairy before stepping back out onto busy Sixth Avenue. There, he would enter the urban world once again with the el roaring overhead, a sea of black, glossy cars, and the smell of petrol, frankfurter stands, snuff shops, and fresh roasting coffee. On some days, Jelliffe ducked into one of the tea-rooms or cafeterias lining the streets during this Prohibition age, when so many restaurants had gone out of business. On other days, the pushcarts offered quick treats: soft drinks, Clark Bars, Baby Ruth candy bars, Yoo-hoos, Eskimo Pies, and Popsicles.

In spite of Prohibition, it was a short walk out of Central Park to the midtown speaks, which now greatly outnumbered the bars that had been scattered through the city prior to Prohibition. It is not known if Jelliffe himself visited speakeasies, but given the fact that he brewed his own beer and produced makeshift wine and scotch, he was clearly not one of those to strictly adhere to the Eighteenth Amendment. He was also on a panel of physicians who spoke at the New York Academy of Medicine in 1919 on the subject, and as the
New York Times
reported, “While admitting to the evils of alcohol, Dr. Jelliffe said that it had been of great social benefit, and that moderate drinking was particularly useful in counteracting the tendency of the struggle for existence to harden men.... ” Jelliffe also noted the number of illnesses, or even deaths, occurring from poorly made bathtub gin and other homemade liquors.

New York’s health commissioner, Royal Copeland, had even argued that Prohibition would increase an already growing drug problem: cocaine. Cocaine was still being used for medicinal purposes, such as treating melancholy, fatigue, or seasickness, so it was widely available. “In one month,” Copeland complained, “one drug store sold 500 ounces of cocaine, enough to send 2,500 people to hell.” What enraged him even more were those physicians who were bribed into writing one hundred to two hundred prescriptions of cocaine per day. Copeland opined that they should be “boiled in oil.” Cocaine had even been a problem for New York during the war. Some eight thousand men in the city intentionally took cocaine as a way of dodging the draft and were rejected as drug addicts.

A
s Jelliffe crossed the city blocks from the park toward his townhouse on Fifty-sixth, the rattling of progress could be heard on every street as automobiles sputtered and sprayed mud or gravel. When the century began, automobiles were a novelty for the rich. By the 1920s, there were over 17 million of them in the United States. In a photograph from 1900, Fifth Avenue is seen covered in horse-drawn carriages, with only one automobile in the entire photo. By the 1920s, that scenario was reversed, like a photographic negative of progress itself. The smell of manure was replaced by the strong scent of petrol, and horsehair clinging to a woolen coat was a sign of the past. Concrete roads had been built to accommodate those autos, the vast majority of them black Model Ts. This endless procession of black cars was abruptly broken by splashes of yellow and checkered cabs. And the roads themselves had been lined with sidewalks to protect pedestrians and those modern tree trunks known as telegraph poles. As New York adapted to this influx of autos, the city landscape changed suddenly and dramatically. Cobblestones were paved over. Soon, nearly all boulevards would have their trees cut down and pavement laid to widen the roadways. Gas stations appeared on street corners. Sprawling houses were torn down and parking lots built.