The Caregiver and the Medium

Protection vs Victimization of the Vulnerable

      After 40 years of reading and researching 19th century advertising and literature to understand popular perceptions about the quality of life, I can tell you that society’s focus, then as now, was on physical health. Despite the unsettling “before” stories of the hucksters, people usually recovered from most sicknesses: fevered brows cooled down, guts stopped puking, and wounds healed. The sincere and insincere often praised the product or healer that cured them and life went on.

     In contrast, mental health issues were unpopular topics in the public discourse; squeamish Victorians tried to hide the subject in the dark cellar of public embarrassment, alongside discussions of venereal disease, while whispering about probable links between the two. Capitalizing on the public's discomfort, unabashed nostrum vendors weren't shy to claim their nerve tonics or brain restoratives cured nervousness, melancholy, hysteria, and insanity. As ridiculous as such promises sound now, at the onset of mental decline, they were popular options to avoid the devastating alternative. When erratic behaviors were identified by family, medical professionals, government officials, or a combination of all three, those stricken were often isolated from society in almshouses or institutionalized in facilities that the century frequently referred to as the “lunatic asylum” or the “madhouse.” Unfortunate souls suffering from any type of mental illness or decline were often institutionalized like pariahs, forbidden to return to the society of former friends or fitting back into the family circle. And to be clear, confinement was not limited to such severe issues as bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and psychotic disorders, but also to those suffering the cognitive decline, behavioral changes, and motor function losses that often accompany aging, like those that manifest as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases.

      I have a particularly tender spot in my heart for this issue because my dear wife of almost 49 years has been enduring a decline from Parkinson’s Disease for 16 months now. I have recently added a letter, dated 1881, to my collection that describes the efforts of the author, Hannah, to be a caregiver to her mother and I feel a shared bond with her experience, being in many respects like my own. It touches my heart to have a private glimpse of this woman’s courageous efforts to care for her mother; I feel her worries and her hope. It has been a privilege that Hannah shared her story with me and I hope to honor her efforts by sharing them with you.

      Hannah shared several experiences that, intentionally or not, demonstrate two very different outlooks on the treatment of the mentally and/or emotionally vulnerable public in that year: the compassionate care she gave to her declining mother and the victimization of the emotionally vulnerable she witnessed by a spiritualist medium that brushed through her world.

     

Hannah, the Caregiver

      Hannah’s letter reads like a play without a program. We don’t know the last name of her family or how many unnamed members there were in the cast; we’re only sure of Hannah, the letter writer; her sisters Lyde & Mollie to whom she jointly addressed the letter; Harry, who seemed to have the role of her husband; and then there were Mother and also Father, who was only referenced in terms that implied he was recently deceased, his loss perhaps being the primary reason for Mother’s decline. The only other well-described character in Hannah’s letter was the archvillain of this story, Mrs. Bliss, who we will meet later.

      The vast majority of the story is set in Hannah’s house; from the scant evidence provided by the letter, Mother was living with Hannah and Harry at their home, which was apparently in London, Ohio, roughly 25 miles west of Columbus. The location of the house where Hannah's parents had been living is not clear, but Lyde and Mollie were apparently living nearby, watching after it in Mother’s absence.

Portion of the first page of an 8-page letter from Hannah to Lyde and Mollie. Folded letter, missing envelope. Dateline: London, Apr 1st 81 [1 APR 1881]. Rapoza collection.

      Hannah’s primary purpose in writing the letter to both sisters was to get them caught up on how Mother was doing. Hannah had received a letter from each of her two sisters over the previous 24 hours and her response may be a reflection of the concerns they had expressed about their mother’s well-being. Some of the subtext in Hannah’s response hinted that Father had recently passed away and Mother was unwilling and perhaps unable to stay in their home alone and hoped to never see it again, “she said she did not care a snap for the home [and] wished it would burn down.” Mother’s personality had become an unpredictably emotional forecast of gloomy fog with sudden downpours, occasional thunder, and intermittent rays of sunshine. “And so it goes,” Hannah wrote philosophically. Mother was a mess and her daughters were very worried.

      Hannah noted Mother had broken down in tears and carried on in a flood of emotions while reading Lyde’s letter (Hannah regretted that she had not gotten to read it before Mother). It was Harry’s intervention that got Mother under control; he “talked strong and to the point til she braced up.” It was the remedy for the moment, but there were many more moments. She had her “gloomy spells and her bright ones.” The news that daughter Lyde was planning to move out of Mother’s house “upset her entirely” to the point that “she could not move.” Today this is called a “freeze” response, where the nervous system shuts down due to overwhelming stress or trauma; in 1881, Hannah could only muster, “[it] was her worst day.” But a letter from Mollie that Mother next read

… just brightened her up like magic, and after [a] while, she went to her room and came out with her new cap on, and says she, Hannah, I am going to wear my new cap and look on the bright side like the rest.

      Despite all of Hannah’s good works and intentions, the responsibility to care for her aging, infirm, dependent mother was a heavy weight and was taking its toll on Hannah; she wrote,

I feel better to have her here than there [at Mother’s old house], for I have had more sad hours thinking about her [when absent from her] than I have when I can see her even in her most despondent moods.

      Hannah realized that those who had known Mother before she started her mental decline would see the difference; maybe Hannah had already heard some of the snickers and sneers. Fairweather friends would be judgmental about the changed woman they had once known, but a loving and protective daughter would have none of it; through all of her mother’s changes, Hannah saw the angel inside:

… the world wags on in its own way. … False impressions will arise among outsiders and all that, but we must do what is right and let people outside form opinions to suit themselves. If the inner life is correct it matters little what the outer is. And right here Mother’s inner life is far better and lovelier than her outer indicates. She is so honest, so artless and a child of nature. There is much to admire and emulate in her.

      As a caregiver to my spouse, I read Hannah’s description of her mother, “so honest so artless [without guile] and a child of nature [innocent; child-like],” as signs of her mother having cognitive decline – dementia; I would describe my dear wife the same way.  

      It was obvious to Hannah and Harry that they had to care for Mother with love, tenderness, and understanding. Each one of Mother’s difficult moments needed a proportionate response, customized to the situation. It was a constant challenge since Hannah and Harry were not doctors or psychiatrists, but just a daughter and son-in-law; they were compassionate caregivers, however, which was exactly what Mother needed. One evening she “asked in all sadness” how she could visit her old neighbors without seeing her old house. Once again it was Harry who brought her out of her funk: “‘Why Mother, you can walk backwards.’ She just laughed in her tears at his ridiculous answer, said in his yankee way.” Hannah reassured his sisters, “Mother is doing well here. … It is well for her that she is here.”

      The day would come, Hannah realized, when Mother would need to go back to her own house, but Hannah was committed to ensuring her mother would continue to be safe and thrive, even when that day eventually came:

I do not intend to let her dig [a] ditch for herself … I [in]tend to keep her just as long as I can for I know I am the one to control [be responsible for] her. … I am coming home with her when she goes [back home]. … [Do] not flatter yourselves that she will be contented [back home, but] that has to be tried. We are all doing as daughters the best we can and that is all we can do. [emphasis added]

     

Mrs. Bliss, the Medium

      Hannah’s letter to her sisters made only one detour from the subject of homecare for their mother, but it was a dramatic, unexpected detour; sort of like blurting out she had witnessed an aerialist walk across a tightrope over Main Street or a neighbor’s cow had given birth to a two-headed calf. To Hannah, the diversion was equally startling and disturbing: a spiritualist medium was holding séances in town.

      Hannah performed her caregiving service for her mother quietly, in the privacy of her home, without fanfare, spectacle, or the slightest thought of compensation; it was exactly why she would have made a terrible medium. As the 19th century rolled on, spiritualism had cleaved apart the population into devoted believers and harsh critics and the reputation of mediums split down the same divide of amazing and devious. When Mrs. Bliss appeared in London, Ohio, she already had a tarnished reputation, except among the most devoted, gullible disciples of spiritualism; in fact, it wasn’t even believed that she could legitimately be called “Mrs. Bliss.” An 1877 Philadelphia newspaper claimed that when the real Mrs. Bliss had been sick back in Boston, “her husband … transferred his affections to his wife’s nurse, and when he subsequently came to Philadelphia (starting in the spirit business in 1874), that woman followed him and was known as Mrs. Bliss.” The Bliss family historian struggled and stumbled over just how much to write about the sordid affair.

8186: James Albert Bliss, extremely well-known materialization medium, along with his equally well-known partner in illusion, Christiana Baptista Bliss. John Homer Bliss, Genealogy of the Bliss family in America, from about the year 1550-1880 (Boston: 1881), p.603. Courtesy of Internet Archive.

 

       Like most Victorian genealogies, the Bliss Family volume elegantly laid out the family tree, proudly tracing its generations from ancient roots in Great Britain to the glorious fruit of its American progeny. The exhaustive book of begats meticulously detailed every person in America with even a smidgeon of Bliss – at least until it stumbled upon descendant 8186, James Albert Bliss. His is the only name and family group in the online version of this 820-page tome that jars the reader with all kinds of post-published markup, looking less like another refined specimen of purebred Bliss on its pedigreed promenade through the centuries and more like a bug-splattered windshield after a long road trip. The entry described him as a machinist but he was more infamously known as a spiritualist – a “notorious goblin manufacturer” – and an exposed fraud at that. Further sullying the Bliss family name, the author thinly disguised his suspicion that 8186 had a bigamously begotten brood by some wanton woman haltingly identified as “Christiana”; but she was, in fact, as well-known as he was, his partner in nefarious seances and other spirit swindles. The genealogist had reluctantly confessed the facts about number 8186; the tainted fruit in the Bliss harvest was an embarrassment that unfortunately had not quietly fallen out of the family tree.

      This newly revealed female medium was a performing oddity shrouded in mystery. Born in Cuba, she was Christina Baptista Suaz D'Alverda Norton, the daughter of a French-Canadian sea captain who married a widow from Cuba. A newspaper stated she had a deep brown, shiny complexion, “flashing black eyes and straight, raven, Indian-like hair.” Her Spanish accent was apparently seldom heard at that time in London, Ohio; Hannah incorrectly thought it was Dutch. She was often described as being stoutly built (one newspaper wrote, “broad enough to be called dumpty”); Hannah told her sisters, “Her landlady told me she was a big eater and ate like a wash woman.”

      Hannah had met Mrs. Bliss face-to-face at her boarding house (purposely or by chance was not explained) and while newspapers focused on the medium’s superficial features, Hannah’s observations were far more insightful:

She is a travel-wise woman, clever and broad, but that she practices deception on the people is in harmony with her make up and intelligence that she has gathered from observation. … she is a good-looking clever Dutch woman with a great deal of magnetism and no doubt makes the audience see anything they want to see.

      And her audiences got to see plenty. Hannah told her sisters that Mrs. Bliss was one of those mediums who held materialization séances. One such performance by Mrs. Bliss in Kansas City, Missouri, just days before Hannah wrote her letter, was attended by a reporter from The Kansas City Evening Star, and he was quite flustered by what he had witnessed. He was one of a dozen people brought into a small, dimly lit room with a “neatly painted” pinewood enclosure within it with a curtain drawn across the front. It was commonly referred to as a cabinet, but in his article about the event, which he titled, “GHOSTLY VISITANTS,” he referred to it as “the mysterious and awful ABODE OF THE SPIRITS … something never to be forgotten”:

With the first notes of the national anthem, a startling thing occurred which it must be confessed, chilled the journalistic blood. The curtains were thrust aside, and in full view stood the manly form of a United States army officer in full uniform. He was announced as Captain Davis. … the ghastly visitor in glittering uniform standing in the door in full view, surrounded with all the mystery of that other world from which no traveler is supposed to return, made a scene only to be borne by nerves of the stoutest, well-fortified by moral strength and immense willpower.

The level-headed investigative reporter was clearly becoming unraveled by the supernatural events he had never expected to see.

… the awful apparition … appeared again and again … Imagination could hardly conceive a more blood-curdling sight, and yet there was a reality about it all which quieted the nerves, which would otherwise have been entirely unstrung. Language simply fails to describe it, and reason is impotent to explain. 

      The next materialization was of Valentine, the deceased son of Mr. and Mrs. Clary, two of the attendees. The Clary couple were described as “agitated” (meaning quite shaken by the experience) to see their long-lost son and then even getting to shake his hand before he had to leave behind the curtain. It was the ultimate hope of ardent spiritualists – to communicate with deceased loved ones. The grief over lost family members, especially children who had suffered untimely deaths, and the fervent desire to be even briefly able to see them again, made many vulnerable to the theatrical chicanery of sly materializing mediums.  Later in the evening, the Clary’s dead teenage daughter, Jessie, also appeared. She showed her parents “a ring of peculiar pattern which they had given her a year or more ago in Philadelphia.” The Clarys were understandably described as “agitated” once again.

      Several more apparitions appeared in turn, including a humorous boot black, “a bashful little French girl,” “Blue Flower,” a Ute Indian squaw who regularly materialized for Mrs. Bliss, an old Black woman “dressed in the regulation kitchen costume” of a cook, who performed a brisk dance, and the actress, Lucille Western, whom the reporter had personally known in life, but had now been deceased four years.

      Mrs. Bliss had directed a theatrical spirit extravaganza, complete with actors, costumes, roles, and a trap door behind the stage curtain, but in the dimly lit room with a well-paying and anxious audience of often grieving, fragile, hopeful believers, it was an answer to prayers. Most newspaper articles pooh-poohed spirit mediums and said their followers were “credulous old lunatics who would believe that the moon was made of green cheese if they were so informed in a darkened parlor by a spirit form with a beery breath”; this time, however, the Clary’s believed they had communed with their dead children and the investigative reporter was himself too “agitated” to casually dismiss what he had witnessed that evening.

      Hannah knew that James and Christiana Bliss were fakes; she had probably read about both of them in the newspapers along with much of the country in late 1877. Their appearance in court had exposed his abandonment of his first wife and children and his bigamous cohabitation with Christina Baptista Norton and their fraudulent performances in spirit materialization; there was nowhere for them to hide from their sordid activities, yet they still held on to a following of true believers like those in Kansas City, bilking them every chance they could get. Hannah wrote, “Mrs. Bliss is a fraud of course to all but those that would see like Jack Bridgman and Dr Jones, &c &c.” Mrs. Bliss had victimized the vulnerable right in Hannah’s backyard: Jack Bridgman was a 49-year-old auctioneer in London, Ohio, and Dr. Jones was a 61-year-old physician there, but as Hannah put it, Mrs. Bliss’s séance participants “heard the voices of friends and saw them as plain as you can see your family in a dim lighted room, very dim though. … You folks had better lay low next June,” Hannah warned her sisters, “for Bliss may give you a call or make it hot weather ….”

      That was enough about Mrs. Bliss for Hannah. She couldn’t imagine living the medium’s lifestyle of deception for the love of money any more than the medium could adopt Hannah’s lifestyle, selflessly doing so much for the love of Mother.

      Hannah closed her letter with some final reflections on Mother: Hanna had spent the day pasting interesting bits from newspapers into her scrapbook and reading them aloud while Mother was knitting a second sock; she had knit the first one since arriving at Hannah’s. “She is doing first rate,” Hannah reassured her sisters, “never has missed a meal and some nights sleeps all night. She thinks next week she will have to go home but I am going to keep her just as long as I can and see she is not fretting to[o] much.” After all, it was her mom.

     

 

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