attendants. The staff was congenial. Although Tuttle held himself somewhat aloof in his formal residence, the doctors and various service chiefs enjoyed their meals together at two large tables in the ground-floor dining room of the administration building, where many of them lived. But professionally, Bond realized that he had settled into a medical backwater. He was interested in psychiatry, partly because his sister-in-law had overcome a mental illness and partly because he had enjoyed a two-month-long elective tour of McLean while in medical school. But not one of his Harvard Medical School classmates went into the field, and even within psychiatry, jobs at mental hospitals were not highly prized. When positions opened up at McLean at the turn of the century, few qualified applicants expressed interest in them. One research job was filled by a “highly recommended chemist who had come from Germany” and who liked to entertain fellow staffers while piloting his sailboat around Boston Harbor. He turned out to have sailed extensively in the Halifax and Portland, Maine, harbors as well. “Shortly before World War I broke out, he ‘happened’ to go back to Germany,” Bond reported, “and we wondered rather late in the day if he had been a spy.”
The patients hailed primarily from the upper strata of Boston society; they were men and women whom poet Robert Lowell would later brand “the thoroughbred mental cases.” Bond treated a man who fantasized that he sailed his yacht along the streets of Boston; another young patient had landed in Belmont after forging checks at his Ivy League college. “This was doubly unwise,” Bond wrote, “because his father was president of a bank.” “A man with one of the most honored names in Boston was admitted to my service,” Bond recalled, “because his family found that he had lost his memory”:
He had been made guardian for many widows and orphans. It turned out that he had lost all the properties entrusted to him. A reconstruction of events brought out what must have happened. He would open a deposit box, take out the stocks and bonds, stuff them into his pockets and go to his office. There he would find his pockets uncomfortably full and empty them into the waste basket and the maid would put them in the trash can.
One can envision the coupon-clipping Brahmins frog-marching this hapless custodian up the hill to McLean, and double-quick!
By just one year, Bond missed treating one of the most extraordinary patients ever to enter the hospital: Stanley McCormick, the son of Cyrus McCormick, inventor of the combine harvester and one of the richest men in turn-of-the-century America. Stanley was both typical and atypical of the kind of patient checking into McLean in 1906: atypical in that he was far wealthier than even the carriage-trade clientele then finding its way to Belmont. He was so wealthy that his family would eventually hire away his McLean doctor and caretakers and relocate them to a private estate in Santa Barbara, California. But in other ways, Stanley was all too typical, because in the end he could not be helped.
Cyrus McCormick had three sons and two daughters. Of the three boys, Stanley was the youngest, the “sensitive” one. His mother, Nettie, a devotee of patent medicines and religious revivals, shuttled him among private schools in Chicago and generally smothered him with maternal care—and with strictures; when her children misbehaved, Nettie locked them in a dark closet. When Stanley was still a teenager, his sister Mary Virginia suffered a psychotic breakdown and never appeared in society again. He attended Princeton, played tennis marvelously, and studied art.
Stanley talked about becoming an artist and even attended an art school in Paris after his college graduation. But family pressure directed him to the McCormick Harvest Machine Company (later International Harvester), where he sat on the board of directors and occupied various executive
The patients hailed primarily from the upper strata of Boston society; they were men and women whom poet Robert Lowell would later brand “the thoroughbred mental cases.” Bond treated a man who fantasized that he sailed his yacht along the streets of Boston; another young patient had landed in Belmont after forging checks at his Ivy League college. “This was doubly unwise,” Bond wrote, “because his father was president of a bank.” “A man with one of the most honored names in Boston was admitted to my service,” Bond recalled, “because his family found that he had lost his memory”:
He had been made guardian for many widows and orphans. It turned out that he had lost all the properties entrusted to him. A reconstruction of events brought out what must have happened. He would open a deposit box, take out the stocks and bonds, stuff them into his pockets and go to his office. There he would find his pockets uncomfortably full and empty them into the waste basket and the maid would put them in the trash can.
One can envision the coupon-clipping Brahmins frog-marching this hapless custodian up the hill to McLean, and double-quick!
By just one year, Bond missed treating one of the most extraordinary patients ever to enter the hospital: Stanley McCormick, the son of Cyrus McCormick, inventor of the combine harvester and one of the richest men in turn-of-the-century America. Stanley was both typical and atypical of the kind of patient checking into McLean in 1906: atypical in that he was far wealthier than even the carriage-trade clientele then finding its way to Belmont. He was so wealthy that his family would eventually hire away his McLean doctor and caretakers and relocate them to a private estate in Santa Barbara, California. But in other ways, Stanley was all too typical, because in the end he could not be helped.
Cyrus McCormick had three sons and two daughters. Of the three boys, Stanley was the youngest, the “sensitive” one. His mother, Nettie, a devotee of patent medicines and religious revivals, shuttled him among private schools in Chicago and generally smothered him with maternal care—and with strictures; when her children misbehaved, Nettie locked them in a dark closet. When Stanley was still a teenager, his sister Mary Virginia suffered a psychotic breakdown and never appeared in society again. He attended Princeton, played tennis marvelously, and studied art.
Stanley talked about becoming an artist and even attended an art school in Paris after his college graduation. But family pressure directed him to the McCormick Harvest Machine Company (later International Harvester), where he sat on the board of directors and occupied various executive
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