Sybil Exposed (11 page)

After making her predictions for each patient, Dr. Wilbur led them to the shock room. She injected each with Metrazol, and their bodies crashed and writhed. After they came to, she decided she had been right: the people she thought would get better did get better, and the ones she
had little hope for stayed just as sick. She wrote up her findings without specifying how many of her guinea pigs had fractured bones during their Metrazol convulsions. Dr. Wilbur sent her work to the prestigious journal
Diseases of the Nervous System.
She signed it “C.B. Wilbur,” making it impossible to tell she was a woman. Her article was accepted for publication.
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In late 1942, Dr. Wilbur got a job at a leading research institute in Omaha. She moved there just before Christmas and hit the ground running—not just by injecting people or shocking them. Now she was also drilling holes in their skulls and turning their brains into pulp.

The pioneer of American lobotomies was neurologist Walter Freeman, whose first patient, in 1936, was a woman suffering from depression, sleeplessness, and obsessive thoughts. Freeman drilled holes into her skull and extracted cores of brain tissue. He thought that she emerged much calmer, and during the next few years he operated on hundreds more patients. Freeman boasted of good results but talked very little about complications. Patients often permanently lost the ability to control their bladders and bowels, and many gained up to one hundred pounds. Worst of all, as one psychiatrist observed, they became “dull, apathetic, listless, without drive or initiative, flat, lethargic, placid and unconcerned, childlike, docile, needing pushing, passive, lacking in spontaneity, without aim or purpose.”
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In Omaha, Dr. Wilbur’s new boss was Dr. Abram Bennett, head of the neuropsychiatry department at Clarkson Memorial Hospital. Bennett had recently become famous for figuring out how to keep mental patients from breaking bones during Metrazol therapy.
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He had been approached by lobotomist Walter Freeman, who happened to know an American adventurer who had befriended indigenous tribes in the Amazon jungle.
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The Indians hunted with darts dipped in a paste made of curare, a plant which paralyzes animals when it enters their blood. The recipe for the paste was a secret until the adventurer convinced some Indians he was a witch doctor. In 1938 he brought several pounds of the product to the United States.

He gave the curare to Bennett, who injected his Omaha patients with it before he gave them Metrazol. They went into convulsions, but the curare paralyzed their muscles, preventing the arching and snapping that broke spines, limbs, and jaws.
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Soon Clarkson hospital was renowned for its dramatic interventions into the brains of the mentally ill. Bennett usually worked with Paul Cash, a young colleague from Iowa. But Cash went into the military during World War II, leaving Bennett shorthanded. He hired Connie to take up the slack. A sort of Rosie the Riveter for mental illness, she helped him do some of the first few hundred lobotomies performed in America. As a result, for the first time since her miracle soap days, Connie was back in the national press as a science pioneer.
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And she gained fame for other work which was as groundbreaking as lobotomies—and almost as dicey.

To treat hysterics, she began using new a technique that at first looked miraculous. It involved injecting patients with a fat hypodermic syringe loaded with barbiturates such as sodium Pentothal. Connie had gotten this idea not just from her earlier work at the troubled mental hospital in Michigan, but also from brand new developments in military medicine. By 1944, with World War II in full swing, “twilight-sleep”-inducing barbiturates were central to the treatment of hundreds of thousands of soldiers who were leaving the battlefronts mentally ill. Many had symptoms—uncontrollable shaking, paralysis, crying, and an inability to speak or walk—that in previous decades were noticed mainly in “hysterical” women. Now, large numbers of men had these debilitating problems, and they seemed to be caused by traumatic experiences on the battlefield. Earlier experiments on civilians had shown that an injection of barbiturates could get almost anyone tranced out and talking about painful memories. Now, military psychiatrists embraced the technique and called it “narcosynthesis.”
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But what if soldiers’ traumatic memories weren’t literally true? What if they were fantasies—or lies? Quietly, many military psychiatrists recognized that some soldiers were imagining events, just as Freud’s “abreacting” woman patients had once imagined Satanic sex rituals that couldn’t possibly have occurred.

Sometimes it was clear that the memory was false. But it might also sound perfectly believable, though it was later disproved by checking the soldier’s combat record. It was obvious, the doctors warned, that narcosyn-thesis did not always produce a true account of events. Further, patients
should receive Pentothal injections only once or twice. If they got more than that, they risked becoming addicted to barbiturates.

These sobering revelations were not discussed publicly until years after World War II. In the meantime, most psychiatrists compared the mind to a movie camera. Memory was like a strip of film, they said. After it recorded an event, the film could be rewound with a dose of chemicals. Memories would return with cinematic precision, even if what was being recalled had happened many years earlier.
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In Omaha, Dr. Cornelia B. Wilbur knew very little about the potential problems of narcosynthesis. She was interested in using barbiturates and abreactions to help civilian hysterics. She began injecting her patients with Pentothal, and she did her work with such aplomb that in 1944, her boss, Dr. Bennett, had her filmed so that other psychiatrists could learn her techniques. The black-and-white movie can still be viewed in the archives of the federal government’s National Library of Medicine, in Bethesda, Maryland.
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In the film, the young Dr. Wilbur plays to the camera as though she’s in a blockbuster out of Hollywood instead of a grainy instructional film from Nebraska. Her hair is swept loosely back, then rolled and pinned in a coil. She wears a dark suit with a form-fitting jacket, and a ruffled jabot. She exudes an elegant mannishness, à la Katharine Hepburn. You half expect to peer over her shoulder and spot a winking Spencer Tracy.

Instead, Dr. Wilbur’s co-stars are harried, real-life psychiatric nurses and their charges: people who are glassy-eyed and stony, or crawling and quaking with madness. A thin, balding man with big lips jerks uncontrollably. A young woman lies in bed with eyes closed and her hair cut off, as though she hacked it in a fit before lapsing into waxy immobility. Another woman moves but can’t stand, and her hospital gown hangs half on her and half off, in lunatic immodesty. A fourth patient, an eleven-year-old girl, wears a cute pinafore dress. A normal child in these clothes would be ready to skip off to school. But this one is far from normal. As the camera follows, she jackknifes her body, straightens up, and hobbles next to a wall. She suffers from astasia abasia, a subtitle printed across the screen explains: She cannot walk, though there is nothing wrong with her legs. She is a child hysteric.

Dr. Wilbur handles these patients with supreme calmness and ease.
“You don’t have to shake,” she tells the trembling man. She pats the catatonic woman’s head. She starts to pick up the little girl, but the patient resists, twisting her hands into claw shapes, contorting her face, crashing to the floor.

Dr. Wilbur is unfazed. She smiles for the camera as she overpowers the struggling child, preparing to push a thick needle into her forearm, full of Pentothal. In the next scene the girl swoons, her head and body lolling like a rag doll’s. Smiling, Dr. Wilbur shakes her, tickles her stomach, and tries to keep her from falling. The girl’s lips move. She is abreacting. Her dissociated secrets are beginning to emerge.

Across the silent screen a subtitle flashes: “My father says my mother hates me.” A second subtitle announces more abreaction: the girl remembers how her father “beat her and said she was going to die.”

Then, a happy resolution: The final scenes show the child cheerfully playing hopscotch as Dr. Wilbur looks on. Her patient has been cured. End of movie, though several questions remain unasked and unanswered. What happened to the child after she finished therapy? Was she returned to a mother who hated her, and to an abusive father? Did the mental hospital report her barbiturate-induced statements to child welfare authorities? If so, what did investigators find? Were the little girl’s stories of mistreatment true?

The movie was sent to medical schools. Its star, Dr. Cornelia B. Wilbur, was a scientist, making miracles through chemistry. And because of her connection with Dr. Bennett at the hospital, she got to teach at the medical school of the University of Nebraska. She had staff privileges at the university hospital and at the county charity hospital.
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She even had her own small, private practice on the sixth floor of the Medical Arts Building, an art-deco structure downtown that was Omaha’s tallest piece of architecture. She was a doctor and she was going places. Finally, being a woman didn’t matter.

Until it mattered again. After World War II ended, the soldiers came home and displaced the working women. Dr. Bennett wanted Dr. Paul Cash back, and that meant Dr. Wilbur would have to go. Without her tie to Bennett, she would lose everything: the hospital affiliations, the secretarial help, the office downtown, the private practice—even her prestigious position as president of the Omaha branch of the American Women’s
Medical Association. Once again she was furious, this time at Bennett’s lack of appreciation for all the innovative research she’d done for him. Once again, she had no idea what to do with her life.

Her husband offered a suggestion. Henry Wilbur had spent the war teaching dentistry at the University of Nebraska’s medical school. Now, he had a job offer from the University of Louisville, in Kentucky. Connie could go with him and be a dentist’s wife. They could start a family—after all, she was already thirty-seven years old. Time was running out to begin.

Yet Connie knew that being a mother would be impossible. It’s uncertain when she found this out, since she only told people many years later. But at some point when she was of childbearing age, she learned she was infertile. There would be no babies; the only thing she would have in Louisville would be the life of a childless woman in a small city south of the Mason-Dixon line—a woman with too much time on her hands and a spouse whose life’s work was drilling molars. She did not know what to do. Between the job she was losing and the empty future she faced with her husband, she felt sad, anxious, and enraged. During the summer of 1945, still at the hospital in Omaha, her stormy moods had even the secretaries noticing and gossiping.

While Connie mulled things over, she continued treating hysterics and was immensely proud of her cures of young women. Two patients had come to her because they’d lost the ability to talk. With Dr. Wilbur’s help, one realized she was conflicted about a love affair she’d had with her uncle. The other, a new mother, unearthed and acknowledged negative feelings toward her baby. Both quickly recovered their voices while working with Dr. Wilbur. A third patient, a soldier’s wife, came to the office unable to walk. After a few sessions on the couch and some injections of Pentothal, she was dancing.
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In late July, Dr. Wilbur’s secretary took a call from yet another hysteric requesting treatment, a young woman currently living in Omaha but originally from rural Minnesota. An appointment was made, and on the first day of August the patient walked in to Dr. Wilbur’s office.

Her name was Shirley Mason.

S
CHIRLEY WAS NEATLY DRESSED, POLITE,
and well-spoken at her first therapy session in Connie’s office. She was also a basket case. Eight years had gone by since she’d closed herself in her room with a hairbrush. Since then, she had received many assessments of her behavior. Mattie called her a girl with “the blues.” Her father, Walter, said she was “funny” and “nervous.” The town doctor sometimes thought she was anemic, and other times merely lonely. No one knew what to make of her numbness, twitching, and compulsive hand inspections, not to mention the masturbatory acts she’d performed in front of her four dozen baby dolls.

For a while she’d shown some improvement. As Shirley advanced through her final months of high school, Walter picked up construction work and recovered somewhat from the Great Crash. One of his new jobs was building Dodge Center’s first movie theater, in 1940, and he’d paid Shirley to act as his assistant. She’d ordered all the building materials, “down to the seats,” as she recalled years later.
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She kept track of expenditures with the bookkeeping skills she’d learned in school. She collected the workers’ time cards, added up their hours, and climbed the scaffolding every Friday to give out their paychecks.

Shirley had also begun private painting and drawing classes; her parents had accepted that the only thing that made her happy was art, whether the abstractions in her style were acceptable to Adventists or not. Her instructor was Wylene Frederickson, a young woman who had just arrived in town to teach at the public school. Frederickson gave private lessons,
and she came to the Masons’ with paints, chalks, and pencils. She soon announced that her new student had talent, and Shirley basked in the praise. She thought she might like to be an artist.
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She still felt angry with her mother, and shut off from her classmates. She continued to spin scenes in her head, knitting real events with fantasy. In the summer before senior year started, John Greenwald, a junior-high-school-aged boy, was accidentally shot to death while playing in a barn with a loaded .22 rifle. The barn was not in Dodge Center; it was a few miles away, in another small town, and the witnesses were some other boys who were playing with him when the accident occurred.
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Nonetheless, Shirley imagined watching the shooting, cringing at the sight of John’s blood, and trying desperately to save his life.