The Accident, Part 2

The Fasting Girl: A True Victorian Medical Mystery
by Michelle Stacey

(Page 2 of 3)

The psychologist Rollo May argued at mid-twentieth century that the roots of the modern "age of anxiety" (as W. H. Auden christened it in his 1947 Pulitzer Prize-winning poem) were planted one hundred years before, in the world that Mollie Fancher knew. "In the nineteenth century," May wrote in The Meaning of Anxiety, "we can observe on a broad scale the occurrence of fissures in the unity of modern culture which underlie much of our contemporary anxiety....The rapidly increasing mastery over physical nature was accompanied by widespread and profound changes in the structure of human society." Those overarching structural shifts were accompanied by rapid-fire transformations in the routines of daily life, especially for people living in cities-transformations that accelerated throughout the second half of the nineteenth century.

Consider just a short list of earth-shattering Victorian innovations, beginning with the patenting of the electric telegraph by Samuel Morse in 1837 (the Western Union company would complete a transcontinental telegraph line in 1861, putting the eastern and western coasts of the United States in instant communication for the first time). Chief among the intellectual challenges that followed was the publication of On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin in 1859; the work struck at the foundations of human belief in an all-powerful and benevolent deity who single-handedly created the world in the not-too-distant past, replacing that comforting vision with an unforgiving picture of brutal interspecies conflict and a godless, near-random universe. (To Victorians, the most insulting idea contained therein, of course, was the notion that noble man had actually descended from the ape.) In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone, and three years later Thomas Edison brought forth the lightbulb-both auguring monumental shifts in the way people spoke, read, lived. A few years earlier, in 1869, the American transcontinental railroad was completed, transforming an arduous, months-long journey into a jaunt of seven days, coast to coast. Even travel within a single building changed, with the installation of the first passenger elevator in a New York store in 1852. How could one help being nervous in this mind-expanding universe, in which the emerging world threatened to change unrecognizably in the course of a generation? How could one avoid ambient fear of all the noise and speed and light and steam? Humans had never been exposed to such phenomena; they had not yet learned to tolerate them.

In Nothing Like It in the World, his study of the building of the transcontinental railroad, the historian Stephen Ambrose points out that a person born before 1829 came into a world in which President Andrew Jackson traveled no faster than had Julius Caesar, "a world in which no thought or information could be transmitted any faster than in Alexander the Great's time." Ambrose argues that of any people in history, before or since, the Americans who lived through the second half of the nineteenth century experienced the greatest, most fundamental changes: electricity, telephone, telegraph, railroad. "The locomotive was the first great triumph over time and space," he writes. Those two properties are the central means for how humans experience reality; to conquer them was almost inconceivable.

Today, we understand that change inevitably brings stress. In the mid-nineteenth century, all that people knew was that they sometimes distrusted and feared these new gifts, which were also sometimes monstrosities. And while inventions like the telephone and electric light were challenging and exciting to the mind, innovations like the railroad and even the elevator demanded an actual physical involvement, a tangible demonstration of trust. When that trust was betrayed, the mind sometimes rebelled. Some nineteenth-century physicians diagnosed a new condition, "elevator sickness," believed to be caused by the effects of high speed on internal organs. Another commonly diagnosed illness, "railway neurosis," was a broader concept based on the same basic premise: the collapse of the human body-and with it the mind-when it confronted the physical reality of technology.

Freud diagnosed railway neurosis in himself in the 1890s as an anxiety or fear experienced simply from proximity to trains (self-attributed in his case, in classic Freudian fashion, to a childhood incident in which he thought he saw his mother naked while on an overnight train trip). Already for a decade or two before his description, railway neurosis had been a common medical and social phenomenon. Often it was triggered by a shock or trauma experienced on a train, and law books of the 1880s are full of suits brought against railroad companies for all manner of alleged injuries that led to fear and disability. Chief among the complaints were "railway spine" and "railway brain," in which neurological defects would appear; lawyers wrangled over whether the symptoms were genuine or faked.

In 1890 a young Kentucky woman named Mary Minogue sued Louisville Southern Rail Road, claiming that an accident on its line had caused a case of railway spine. Her lawyer argued that the impact of the collision had thrown Miss Minogue from her seat to the floor of the railway car, and that she had sustained external bruises and a great shock to her nervous system. None of her bones was broken, but after the accident she had been troubled with partial paralysis, or an insensibility in one leg from the knee down. Doctors who testified agreed that the railroad should pay Minogue damages, "since this was clearly a case of the railway spine."

Lawsuits were not limited to trains alone, or even to physical injury alone: horsecars and emotional trauma were considered equally potent. In Rochester, New York, Anne Mitchell brought suit against Rochester Railway for an incident in which she was preparing to alight from a train. As she stepped down, a horsecar was coming down the street. The team of horses rushing toward her turned at the last moment, and by the time they could be stopped, she stood right between the horses' heads. Mitchell testified that fear caused by the galloping horses made her faint and resulted in a miscarriage and subsequent illness.

It's easy to imagine that the very speed that railroad trains could reach might induce fear and anxiety in a species that had never traveled faster than a horse could run or trot; to see the landscape shooting by must have seemed like going to the moon. When one added to that the symbolism trains conveyed-the increased speed of everyday life, the personal demands of keeping pace with other denizens in a fast-growing city-even horsecars, loaded with that new breed, commuters, became threatening. Accidents were not uncommon; news stories about passengers thrown from cars or run over by them abounded. The Brooklyn Daily Times described in harrowing detail an 1866 incident in which a Greenwood horsecar was hit by a passenger car on the Jamaica Rail Road.

"The horse-car was badly crushed, and forced down the street at a fearful rate," wrote the reporter. "It was perfectly unmanageable, and intense excitement was created among the hundreds of people on that street. The passengers were terribly frightened." The story goes on, in cinematic style, with information supplied by a man who had been on the car that was rammed: "When the small car reached the corner of Fifth and Flatbush avenues, several persons, including two or three ladies, with a child, a poodle dog, two canaries in cages, two big carpet bags, and a man, got in; and several gentlemen subsequently took passage. At the Henry Street crossing someone called out, 'For God's sake look out for yourselves!' At the same time there were great shouting and screaming, both in and out of the car, and the harsh rumbling of a heavy car. On turning to see what was the difficulty, the passengers in the small car saw one of the large and heavy Jamaica passenger cars within a few feet, coming down with frightful velocity. The next instant it struck the small car, crushing in the rear platform, iron-work, brake, and top; smashing the wood into splinters, and glass into small pieces, and tearing the iron into fragments. Some of the passengers were thrown on the floor of the car, and the concussion hurled nearly all of them backwards." Although no one was killed, many were bruised, and several of the women on board fainted.

Copyright © March 2002, J.P. Tarcher, a member of Penguin Putnam, Inc., used by permission.

About the Author

Michelle Stacey, the author of Consumed: Why Americans Love, Hate, and Fear Food, is a journalist who writes extensively for publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Allure.