“Ask who what?” Estelle came into the room and Ruth started.
“I was just tellin’ Ruth about your cousin. You should invite her to visit.”
“Mathilda? Oh, sure, I guess so.” She shrugged.
Ruth walked to Estelle and gave her a strong embrace. “I’m so happy to see you today, Estelle. I’m going to call you again later this week to say hello and check in with you, does that sound good?”
“Awww, do you really have to go already?” Estelle looked like she might cry.
“I’m afraid that I do. But, I promise, I’ll see you again soon. You have a lovely home and such beautiful children. I am just overjoyed for you!”
Ruth drove for three blocks before she pulled to the side and began to sob. It was a disaster. A horrible failure. Their life’s work, hers and Robert’s, hadn’t helped. It had destroyed lives. She had championed lobotomy, promoted and encouraged it, and to what end? Even Estelle, one of the supposedly great triumphs of the procedure, wasn’t actually a success at all. What kind of life was it to need constant supervision because you might harm yourself, or your children? How was that better than before?
She had truly believed she was helping patients, but now, how could she possibly justify what they had done? What they were still doing?
When she had cried herself out, she began to drive in a frenzy. She needed to get home. She had to find a way to fix things. To help Estelle and the many others who might be quietly suffering. She had to put a stop to this failed “cure,” and she needed Robert’s help to make it happen.
Chapter Forty
Ruth paced in the dining room, shifting the silverware and napkins on the formally set table to assuage her anxiety. When had she and Robert fallen out of the habit of eating together? It hadn’t happened all at once, but lately, when he wasn’t traveling, he spent his evenings writing articles touting the benefits of lobotomy for any medical journal willing to publish them. In the past, she had seen this as his dedication and the critics as uninformed doubters. How could she have been so blind? When Dr. Nolan Lewis, at a psychiatric society symposium in ’49, warned that lobotomy was being performed indiscriminately and would “dement too large a segment of the population” or when Jay Hoffman, the head of the Veterans Administration’s Neuropsychiatric Services, suggested that the success of lobotomy, in general, shouldn’t be measured by whether patients improved over their presurgical condition but by the longer-term outcomes, which were not ideal, she had believed that these men were jealous and conservative members of the old guard. Even recently, when the Times reported that members of the World Federation of Mental Health had denounced the procedure as a cruel “violation of the principles of humanity,” based on the Russian decision to stop using the procedure, she gave lobotomy the benefit of the doubt. At least Robert’s lobotomy.
Now she saw it differently. Perhaps, in extreme cases, lobotomy was still a reasonable treatment for the most severe mental illnesses, as they had believed in the beginning. But she could finally see clearly that lobotomy was not the revolution she had believed it to be. And now, innovators were beginning to look elsewhere for solutions. Why, just a few months ago, she learned of a new type of medication that might have the same benefits. The era of lobotomy needed to come to an end.
“You’re in the dining room already? I expected to find you in the library.”
Ruth jumped, startled by Robert’s sudden arrival. “Yes, well, I was only puttering in here. Not sure why really.” She blushed, feeling caught somehow. “Would you like to go have a cocktail before we sit?” Ruth didn’t want to drink too much—she needed to keep her wits about her—but she could use something to calm her nerves.
“Whatever suits you, my dear. We can just sit since we’re already here.” He slid the Chippendale chair out from the large mahogany table. They rarely ate in the dining room. Ruth didn’t really like the formality, but tonight, she thought it would help keep her focused.