The Girk Who Lived On Air Read online

  What developed was a belief in something called ‘sympathy’ whereby a network of nerve systems related to the vital organs, and of course, to the uterus, hence the word ‘hysteria’ – from the Greek hystera, meaning womb. Many Georgian doctors thought that the pains of hysteria could be related to the alimentary canal and to various gynaecological ailments. But one aspect of the hysteria exhibited at Edinburgh was the supposed sequence of corporal events in its trajectory. Stage one was the ‘clavus hystericus’ which was an intolerable head pain; then there would be stomach pains and rumblings, followed by what was called the ‘globus’ – the sensation of a ball rising up into the oesophagus and throat; finally the person would arch the body and move, as one writer put it, like ‘the creeping of an animal upon its hind legs.’

  Treatment at Edinburgh consisted of blistering, applying antispasmodic drugs, cold baths and forced physical activity. In the thirty years 1770-1800, of the patients admitted to Edinburgh, the average age was just over 23 years, and it was noted that 81% of these women suffered from menstrual irregularities. ‘Hysteria’ offered a convenient label for all kinds of complaints. As G.B. Risse summarises: ‘It seems clear that the eighteenth century construction of hysteria covered a wide range of symptoms and ailments. The sometimes baffling symptomatology of hysteria, from headaches to fainting spells, stomach upsets to asphyxiating globus… was neatly accounted for through “sympathy”.’

  The question of interest to Sarah’s case is why none of the medical men who saw her and who commented on her condition, up to the examination by Dr Pearson Hughes in December, 1869, mention hysteria. Hughes had no doubt. He wrote to the Western Mail that he had heard ‘gurgling over the stomach’ and knew of the ‘fits’ so he concluded: ‘The above symptoms, together with the general character of the case, the ease with which she goes into fits, the sobbings, her inability to do things which she easily does… point to the case being that of HYSTERIA.’ In other words, he had found a diagnosis which was easy to see and that would please anyone with a smattering of knowledge of the word.

  There is no reason to doubt that Sarah’s situation before her illness became a tourist attraction and a national sensation that her family and immediate community sincerely felt that her terrible condition was genuine. The fact that a doctor put it down to hysteria would have been something familiar to most people; after all, it had been a word circulating in popular medical books for several decades. Evan Jacob was particularly sensitive to his daughter’s ‘fits’ and in fact he it was who used the word, to visitors. By comparison with the reports from the Edinburgh cases, Sarah’s responses to offered food were not fits in the sense of a frightening globus ascending to her throat and seemingly choking her. Her reactions were no more than a nervous and irrational response, much as we feel ready to vomit when food is presented to us when we are already nauseous.

  One answer to the question of why the fast intensified into something tenable, an evidently miraculous event to some, is that bodily ills and medicine in the rural communities of Carmarthen were not a simple case of a patient and a GP. We have to ask how illness was perceived. It was seen as one piece in a complex network of folk belief, superstition and blind faith. Certainties were, on the surface of religious life, grounded in the eternal verities preached from the pulpit on Sundays, but there were many elements to the state of being unwell which were unavailable for understanding, being in the realm of mystery. The Medieval notion of the ‘humours’ was not so far away from the apparently ‘scientific’ context of modernity. In a society in which so little was known as immoveable truth, knowledge and belief also shift with the tides of a transient influence.

  In the framework of a still numinous world, something super- or contra-natural would be seen as confirmation that there were other ‘laws’ of nature, away from textbooks and surgeries. Part of the mindset was based on the notion that, in spite of the dominance of the Bible as a key to all belief, there was another microcosm inside the fabric of human existence: one to which there was no single index to understanding. Inescapable to many was the fact that the fragility of human life was clear for all to see, surrounded by countless wayward influences on the person, in both mind and body.

  The numinous world was still there in mid-Victorian Britain, clearly more prominent in the more rural areas, where geography had prevented the reach of industrial technology and the more tangible expression of modernity. But, as the case of William Dove shows, in 1857, a ‘cunning man’ in an urban centre of industrial change (Leeds) could influence the young Dove to such an extent that he poisoned his wife, in the belief that he was doing ‘right.’ We have to observe here that, only forty miles away from Llanfihangelar-Arth was Cwrt-y-Cadno, and Pant-coy, the home of the Harries dynasty of medical men and dynion hysbys – ‘wise’ men who mixed spiritual and folk medicine with the more orthodox kind.

  As Lisa Tallis’s research of 2009 shows, the Harries family were well-known throughout Wales, and their patients often lived much further away than the Jacob family. John Harries and his two sons carried on their business over the years c.1800-1870, and Tallis has shown that in the library of these men, who were properly qualified in various branches of medicine as such qualifications were understood and rated at the time, there were standard medical works alongside such tomes as A General History of Apparations and The Straggling Astrologer.

  In trying to understand the mindset of the ordinary people around Sarah as she lay for months in her increasingly ritualistic bed, we are faced with what Keith Miller has called ‘the mute strangeness of things and the unfathomability of lives past,’ yet some reflections may be made on a world in which one of the Harries medical men could invoke spirits in a desolate wood on one day and then on another day prescribe something called ‘Gutts antipas’ for the sick child of a Swansea man.

  The answer to that apparent paradox lies in the nature and diversity of ‘doctors’ at the time. In 1858, the Medical Register was established to monitor and regulate the accreditation of qualified practitioners. But other kinds of professionals still existed, so there was a split between the regulated people and the mass of other healers who offered anything from herbal treatments to what we now know as ‘fringe medicine.’ The fact that people from all areas of Wales consulted the Harries family, and that at times the doctors travelled to patients to attend them, is significant. It is not that one has to search for evidence that such people were consulted: what matters is that the milieu was such that when there was illness, there was no immediate assumption on the part of poorer people such as the Jacobs that a registered doctor was the only professional who should count for anything. In fact, most folk with limited resources when illness struck simply prayed and waited for improvement. The painter, Benjamin Haydon, when his son fell victim to a mysterious ‘attack on the lungs’ in 1828, simply noted in his diary that it was a terrible thing, prayed, and never mentioned a medical man. Haydon was strapped for cash, and had in fact, just come out of debtors’ prison.

  The healers such as the Harries family did play a part in the network of medicine and treatment of disease amongst the lower classes; it would be very likely that the Jacobs and their churchgoing community would have talked of such people, and would have known of the Harries’ work at Pant-coy.

  In the period of fasting and illness before Sarah’s case became a national sensation, this was the situation in which her condition was seen and monitored: to most it was on the cusp between mystery and horrendous malady; to a few it was potentially miraculous and of course to some it would also begin to appear to be questionable – merely a scam like the case of Moore in Tutbury all those years before.

  By the late 1860s the railways had reached Carmarthenshire: the Central Wales Railway went north-west, up to the spa towns of Llandrindod and Builth, covering also Llandeilo and Llandovery. By 1865 the Great Western Railway had first and second class accommodation on all trains, which went to Carmarthen junction, and travellers could board at Paddington for
the long journey to this area of South Wales. There was also the Carmarthen and Cardigan-shire Railway, which included Llandysul on its itinerary, and after years of having a wearisome journey that included conveyances between stations and hotels en route, in 1866 a direct link was established. The various small companies were to be absorbed by the London North Western Railway in 1889, but in 1869, when Sarah’s story hit the national headlines, the tracks leading from London to Pencader were there. The sensation of what became ‘The Welsh Fasting Girl’ could not only be read and chatted about: people could travel from London and actually stand in her bedroom.

  As with so many aspects of Victorian work and leisure in the middle years of the great Queen’s reign, the railway injected the haste of modernity into the bloodstream of Britain’s economy. But matters went much further than this. Travel and accessibility also had the potential to take away privacy and individual choice. Commerce was beginning to rule all walks of life when Sarah’s flower-bedecked bed became a shrine.

  The little girl had become linked to the idea of fasting in the popular imagination. The basic paradox for believers at the time was that Sarah’s fast was public. Thirty years earlier, in the surge of influence of the Oxford Movement, the famous Tracts for the Times had aired the subject of fasting in their printed essays on religion and the practice of worship. The Tract for 1838, for instance, made much of the nature of fasting as a private matter, integral to a withdrawal from the busy life of work and commerce: ‘But further, since fasting is to be accompanied by retirement, all that the world need know is that we do fast; the degree of self-denial need be, for the most part, known only to God or to those only in one’s domestic circle.’ The same writer adds: ‘I should think it best for anyone who would observe the church’s fasts, to abstain from all society except from that of his own circle…’.

  Yet there was another version of fasting, and this appears to be behind the flower-strewn bed at Lletherneuadd: this was the fast before Ascension, lasting for three days. The Tract authors explain that ‘This fast appears to have been a sort of extended vigil, preparatory to the day when the Bridegroom was taken away, teaching us that, laying aside our worldly appetites, we should in heart and mind thither ascend and with Him continually dwell.’ These are the Rogation Days.

  Holy women in the Medieval church had fasted as part of their overall lifestyle and regimen of asceticism. Yet even in that earlier period, writers were aware that people knew the difference between holy life denial and eating disorders. There were accounts of frauds well back in the centuries before the Tudor period, when some cases became clearly seen as attempts by individuals to win some kind of esteem and status by refusing food and by enhancing their fast by ritualistic trimmings. In itself, fasting was clearly something to be encouraged and admired, but in Sarah’s case, the involvement of the first doctor to write about her, H.H. Davies, entailed something of a confrontation with the medical establishment as represented by The Lancet. This august journal of the profession had been established in 1823 and then later, in the hands of Thomas Wakley, it had been the periodical that took on issues in medicine like nepotism and the concomitant low profile operations which often ended in an autopsy. The writers for The Lancet began to be prominent in patrolling medical education and practice, so that by around 1828-1830 there was a general feeling that medical qualifications should be standardised and regulated. It therefore commanded huge respect, and when H.H. Davies referred to medicine as ‘the most uncertain and immature of all sciences’, he stirred the editor of The Lancet into action, and so began a long and sometimes incensed confrontation of science and popular belief, with little Sarah Jacob in the middle.

  All branches of medicine were set against one over-riding and comprehensive aspect of the official terminology of various illnesses (known technically as the nosology of the condition) when it came to female illness: the new scientific frame of mind had to cope with the applications of folk belief and prejudice. For instance, there had been a growing cluster of terms applied to any female weakness and fragility, obviously mostly related to puberty and also to the menses. A term such as the ‘green-sickness’ provides an example: a dictionary of 1884 notes that this is ‘a disease in which the person has a sickly paleness, with a green tinge of the complexion, chiefly confined to unmarried females.’ Nosology is concerned with the naming and classification of illnesses and diseases, and therein lay the problem in 1868. By that time, the predominant medical study of doctors, surgeons and apothecaries had been in physiology; diseases emanating from problems with organs or bones were straightforward when it came to applying a label. But what about mental ailments? When various would-be assassins had tried to murder Queen Victoria, they had been deemed to be insane, and confined to asylums rather than hanged; yet the nature and definition of ‘insanity’ was a floating, uncertain science in comparison to the confident diagnosis of the surgeon and the anatomist.

  It was well known, at the time of Sarah’s long fast, that medical experts in court, called to the box for their specialist testimony, often differed in their opinions, and this pointed to deep-seated problems when it came to claiming that medicine was a key element in the new sciences. A few years before Sarah’s illness, the British Medical Journal for May 2, 1863 devoted some column space to the forensic contradictions of doctors: ‘Medical evidence delivered in our courts of law has of late become a public scandal. The Bar delights to sneer and ridicule at it… What is the public to think when… they see three doctors on one side swearing… that the plaintiff is not suffering from any injury at all, and three on the other side swearing that he is… seriously damaged and probably for life?’

  In spite of these difficulties, the medical profession wanted to assert the reliability of medical science in an age of Positivism, the spirit of defining, understanding and analysing everything from the laws of the physical and natural world. Consequently, the editor of The Lancet, responding to Dr Davies in May, 1869, was bound to write that ‘The existence of a human being, performing the acts ascribed to this girl for that time without food is so contradictory of an immense body of facts of various kinds, that in order to establish its truthfulness we should require to set about our observations with all the rigour and exactitude employed in a scientific investigation, in order to exclude all sources of error, and there are a great many of these in the present instance.’

  Many writers at the time claimed great things for medical science, being quite clear that there had been a revolution in the scientific attitude behind medical practice and theory. For instance in 1877 Rudolf Virchow wrote: ‘It is no longer necessary to write that scientific medicine is also the best foundation for medical practice. It is sufficient to point out how completely even the external character of medical practice has changed in the last thirty years. Scientific methods have been everywhere introduced …the diagnosis and prognosis of the physician are based on the pathological anatomist and physiologist…’. Yes, perhaps so, we might respond, but what about the diseases of the mind?

  What developed was a species of doctor with a special interest in neurological illness; it would be tempting to go along with Shakespeare’s doctor when faced with the mental illness of Lady Macbeth, and say with Macbeth,

  Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased

  Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,

  Raze out the written troubles of the brain,

  And with some sweet oblivious antidote

  Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff

  Which weighs upon the heart? (IV. iii. 40)

  When Sigmund Freud observed Charcot and his ‘hysterics’ in Paris in 1885, he knew that he was looking at patterns of behaviour (such as the ones already noted at Edinburgh) and he began to suspect that there were mental illnesses just as intense and horrendous as many physical ones. But he was still imbued with the spirit of scientific analysis. That is, he was convinced that, with the right kind of directed thinking, there was no reason why the mind shou
ld not have a landscape, a pattern, which could be as observable as a physiological symptom. Whatever our views of Freud might be now, he was at least open to experiment, and to creative thought at odds with his time.

  Not only was there the kernel of a confrontation of science and popular belief in print: Dr Pearson Hughes of Llandovery, as mentioned in the last chapter, went to see the girl for himself, on 11 March, 1869, and the result of that visit and examination is surely one of the most significant aspects of the case of little Sarah. Dr Hughes’s visit offers some important clues as to the intricate and passionate inter-relationships in the Jacob house, and perhaps also to the mystery of whether or not Sarah actually fasted for so long.

  Dr Hughes arrived at Lletherneuadd and was given permission to inspect Sarah. Unfortunately, he was too determined to sort it all out and apply the common sense of the physician to what he saw as a parlous state of affairs in which indulgent parents were beginning to become servants to a spiralling narrative of an invalid who was potentially an object of worship. He asked about bed sores, and when he learned that Sarah’s mother had not seen her daughter’s back for two years, it was too much. When he put his hand on her back, it was obviously cold and startling, and the report from the parents later was that he had caused the girl to ‘groan and rise up in her bed.’ Now, that wording matches perfectly the observations of hysterics at Edinburgh: the incipient ‘fit’ and the rising and arching of the back.