Ashton H Le Bourgeois

God, Sin, and Sanity Ashton H Le Bourgeois

Susan Elizabeth Blow and James Jackson Putnam were an unlikely pair. She grew up in Hegelian St. Louis and he in Emersonian Boston. She was a bit older and a spinster and he firmly married with five children. He was robust and an outdoorsman; she was bookish and had no appetite for exercise. Even so, they had keen interests in common: religion, philosophy, science, the nature of man, how the mind works and the presence of God. They met when Susan Blow fell victim to Graves' disease, an immune system disorder related to the overproduction of thyroid hormones that can cause anxiety, irritability, and tremors as well as make a person's eyes bulge. Whether stress was a cause or an effect of the disease, Blow suffered a lot. Born in 1843, she was in her early twenties when her parents rejected the suitor she loved. Three of her siblings died as children. After establishing the first successful public kindergarten in St. Louis, for which she received a gold medal at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, she was forced out of the job. When her parents died in 1875, she took on responsibility for her three younger sisters: Nelly who had married an impecunious Russian diplomat, Lutie who married her cousin and childhood sweetheart, and Martha who married a rich New York landowner. When Nelly and Lutie died young, Susan and Martha, who had no children, became stand-in mothers for Nelly's daughter Nelka and Lutie's daughter Lucretia. Ill from Graves' disease and chronic depression, Susan Blow found her way to Dr. Putnam in the early 1880s. James Putnam went to Harvard and then Europe to study medicine. On his return, he established the first clinic in neurology at Harvard's medical school. An excellent physician, he diagnosed Blow's illnesses and set about abating their symptoms. In the course of treatment, they discovered one another's interests and strengths. Blow became well enough to give lectures in New York on the kindergarten movement, women's issues, literature (Dante and Shakespeare) and philosophy (Hegel and Froebel). At the same time Putnam immersed himself in the new field of psycho-analysis and the work of Sigmund Freud. Blow wrote 53 of the letters and Putnam 4 that make up this book of sympathetic correspondence. They are housed in the library at the Harvard Medical School and form an important part of George Prochnik's fine biography of his great-grandfather James Jackson Putnam. Their correspondence is also essential to the full biography of Susan Elizabeth Blow - which someone will write some day.