Providentia

Singing The Body Electric (Part 2)

Continued from Part 1

The dean of 18th century electrotherapy was undoubtedly Dr. James Graham.  Also known as an early pioneer of sexology, he received medical training in Edinburgh but left before completing his degree.  After studying electricity in Philadelphia, he left America before the American Revolution to return to England.  A determined self-promoter, Graham advertised his electrotherapy services to cure a vast range of diseases and quickly attracted numerous celebrity patients.  While conventional physicians dismissed him as a quack, Graham opened a clinic in one of the most exclusive London neighbourhoods which he dubbed the "Temple of Health".  Patients to Graham's clinic were often awed by the elaborate electrical equipment on display, not to mention the various "trophies" of former patients.  This included the various walking-sticks, crutches, spectacles and ear-trumpets prominently displayed on clinic walls.  Graham proudly claimed that grateful patients had left them behind after he cured them of their ailments.

Graham's electrical devices included an enormous Leyden jar (for display only) and a vast prime conductor nearly three meters high.  Not only was there a large throne where as many eight patients could sit at a time for their treatment sessions but also a metal shelf for the various medicines that Graham "electrified".  He made these potions in his own laboratory and testified to the purity of the ingredients that he used.  Once electrified, the medicines were used to "enter patients and work medical miracles".  There were other prime conductors throughout the clinic as well as discreet alcoves where Graham and his assistants could meet with patients privately.  James Graham also maintained a free clinic where poor patients could be treated (usually in full view of more well-to-do visitors and prospective patients).  Graham was definitely a showman.

The most well known feature of Graham's clinic was his "Great Apollo Apartment".  A large domed chamber, stunningly decorated, the dominant themes were fertility and bliss. Patients sat on magnetic seats with their bare feet resting on sulfur while music played in the background.  Graham himself said of the Apartment that, "words can convey no adequate idea of the astonishment and awful sublimity which seizes the mind of every spectator".  The truly multi-sensory experience that patients received guaranteed return visits and Graham declared that, "there is no fever, rheumatism, cramp, spasm, or convulsion” that would not yield to this treatment, often in less than a minute".   For infertile couples who could afford his fee, he also offered a "Celestial Bed" which was, basically, a canopied bed where couples could “bask in a genial, invigorating tide of the celestial fire, ” where, he insisted, they could not fail to produce “strong, healthful, and most beautiful offspring".

As you may have gathered, the conventional medical establishment wasn't happy with James Graham and the feeling was mutual.  He often condemned conventional medicine and maintained that most treatments advocated by physicians were "fundamentally and in their nature wrong".  He accused these doctors as being corrupt as well as incompetent.  Considering the often brutal treatment methods that 18th century physicians were capable of inflicting on patients, Graham's criticisms won him even more praise, except for the fact that his own treatments didn't really work (suggestion can only get you so far).  By the time of his death in 1797, James Graham was largely discredited and deeply in debt.  Even the electrical apparatus at his beloved Temple of Health had long since been sold off.

While traditional physicians may have breathed a sigh of relief at Graham's passing, electrotherapists were still practicing their trade (if not as flamboyantly as Graham).  In addition to pain treatment, they offered relief for a variety of "women's problems" including hysteria, depression, menstruation problems and, possibly, even induced abortions (for obvious reasons, this particular service was never advertised).  It wasn't all quackery though since the value of electrotherapy in resuscitating some heart attack and drowning victims made it a standard tool for medicine (the actual work of resuscitation was usually left to "medical assistants"-possibly the earliest version of paramedics).   Specialized electrical devices were developed for use in cases of "suspended animation" which eventually evolved into our modern heart defibrillators - with considerable trial and error along the way. 

Despite the growing legitimacy of electrotherapy, the quacks still practiced their trade  (just not as flamboyantly as James Graham).  As electrical technology improved, electrical devices became more portable and affordable.  While devices such as my Davis & Kidder machine were usually harmless, they were often marketed in ways that were anything but harmless.  One famous 19th century vendor of patented electrical devices was "Professor" Isaac Lewis Pulvermacher who sold products under the slogan, "Electricity is Life".  Pulvermacher's most memorable invention  was the "Electro-Galvanic Chain" - basically adjustable belts which supplied "mild, continuous currents" for eight to twelve hours a day while the patient wore them.  When not in use, the belts were immersed in a weak vinegar solution to generate a current.  At a cost of twenty dollars U.S. apiece, the belts were hardly cheap but still more affordable than most medicines at the time.  Better yet, Pulvermacher's products were sold as "self-applicable for the cure of chronic disease without medicine".  Pulvermacher's methods spawned numerous imitators and his ads sternly warned customers to  "accept no substitutes".

Which brings us to the dawn of the 20th century...

Continue to Part 3

Sexual Harassment Among Male and Female Police Officers

An article published in the October 2009 issue of the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology examines the impact of sexual harassment on mental and physical health of both men and women, and to explore the possible moderating effects of gender on the relation between sexual harassment and health. Often defined as "“unwanted sex-related behavior at work that is appraised by the recipient as offensive, exceeding her resources or threatening well-being”, sexual harassment occurs frequently in many organizations. This is especially true in police forces where research has shown that 77% of policewomen from 35 countries have reported harassment from colleagues. Not only does sexual harassment impact psychological well-being, but it has been linked to health problems relating to emotional distress. The present study used a representative sample of 3,001 policemen and 1,295 policewomen in the Dutch police force who were asked to fill out an Internet questionnaire. Based on research results, it appeared that women were more often bothered by sexual harassment than men, but gender did not moderate the relation between sexual harassment and mental and physical health. In addition, victims who felt bothered by the harassing behaviors reported more mental and physical health problems than victims who did not feel bothered. The distinction between bothered and nonbothered victims is important because appraisal is an essential aspect in evaluating the impact of sexual harassment on victims.  The authors conclude that sexual harassment policies need to address male and female victims and also addresses the need to take sexual harassment seriously, even when the victims don't seem bothered by it.

For more information.

Guilty Plea in Drowning Fetish Case

An 47-year old Uniontown, Ohio man has pleaded guilty to attempting to solicit two young girls to satisfy a bizarre drowning fetish. Jeffrey Doland, a former public school employee, was arrested after traveling to Miami in 2007 to meet a woman he had chatted with on the Internet. The woman, actually an undercover Secret Service agent, had purportedly met Doland to allow him to "dunk both of her preteen daughters underwater until the bubbles stop rising". During Doland's trial, jurors had been shown transcripts of his Internet chat conversations in which he stated that, "I love long hair floating underwater. Cannot wait to see them drowning". The transcripts of Doland's online sessions at the Yahoo chat room fetishes14 also described his intention of wearing "skimpy trunks" while drowning the girls and even of handcuffing them to the bottom of a pool.

According to prosecutors, Doland made arrangements to travel to Miami after telling his wife that he was going diving with a friend. On meeting with the agent in Miami, he slipped her money and suggested buying Velcro straps as he had left his in Ohio due to fear of them being confiscated. While his defense attorneys described him as a "good man who simply went off the deep end" and that he had no intention of carrying out his plans, Doland issued a guilty plea to avoid the potential 90-year sentence that he would have been given if convicted. He agreed to a 20-year prison term with ten years of probation.

 

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The Shunnamites

The Abbe Claude Henri de Fusee de Voisenon was legendary for his dramatic writings, his numerous love affairs, his hard living, and his attempts at reforming his life by becoming a cleric. In the years leading up to his death in 1775, he took a rather unusual step to try to rejuvenate himself.  According to at least one biographer, the Abbe took a young woman known only as "Mademoiselle Huchon" into his home.  Described as a "file de grande beaute", Mademoiselle Huchon became his constant companion and always slept by his side at night.  And no, it wasn't for the reason that you were thinking. The Abbe's writing were quite emphatic that "elle dormait toujors a cote de lui, et il laissa toujours vierge" (she slept always at his side and left always virgin). While unusual, the practice of elderly men taking virgin girls into their households (and their beds) to rejuvenate themselves by the girl's very presence has a very old history.

In the first book of Kings, King David is described as "old and stricken in years" who "got no heat" despite being thoroughly covered.   The passage continues: "Therefore his servants said unto him, "Let there be sought for my lord the king a young virgin; and let her stand before the king, and let her comfort him, and let her lie in thy bosom, that my lord the king may get heat. So they sought for a fair damsel throughout all the region of Israel, and found Abishag, a Shunammite, and brought her to the king. And the damsel was very fair, and cherished the king and ministered to him; but the king knew her not." The woman, Abishag, was known as a Shunamite since she came from the village of Shunem and it was in her honour that women recruited for rejuvenation purposes became known as Shunammites (also spelled sunamites).

It's hard to be certain just how common Shunnamitism actually was although the practice wasn't exclusively limited to young girls. In his classic work, The Mystery of Sex, Charles Waldemar wrote that early Jewish doctors often prescribed the body warmth of girls, boys, and even small animals to help elderly patients. Medical explanations for the therapeutic value of Shunnamitism usually dealt with the life-giving properties of the Shunnamite's breath or warmth on the patient's health.  The notion that maturing virgins had a "divine innocence" that could rejuvenate elderly men seemed to occur in many cultures and led to the popularity of practices such as child marriages and harems.   Various medical authorities throughout the Renaissance wrote in support of Shunnamitism including Marsilio Ficino and Francis Bacon.  As Bacon himself wrote, "The spirits of young people can, when they enter an older body, restore life to it, or at least keep it in good health for a long time thereafter".

According to one noted French writer,; some procurers kept entire stables of French virgins to be hired out as Shunnamites during the 18th and 19th century. One of the biggest of these was a certain "Madame Janus" who was legendary for combing the suburbs of Paris and nearby cities every spring for new girls. Each of her girls was described as having "fresh pink cheeks and attractive figures". The girls, usually forty at a time, were ordered to exercise daily and given a wholesome diet as well as special training.  The elderly clients were charged one louis d'or (about 20 francs) for each night of Shunnamite treatment.  The girls (who always worked in pairs) got six francs each for their services, Madame Janus kept the rest.  She also took great care that her clients were safely "muzzled" to protect the girls from being molested at night.

Madame Janus' clients were mostly aristocrats and wealthy businessmen who could afford to pay her hefty rates.  There also seemed to be a careful methodology at work with the Shunnamites being paired by hair colour (blonde-brunette pairs seemed to work best due to their opposing "radiations"). Each girl only spent eight nights with one client before being sent for a two-week rest to be "replenished". The average working lifetime of a Shunnamite was three years which was why Madame Janus was continually searching for new workers.

In addition to Shunnamitism, similar practices were also advocated including the use of "wet nurses" in elderly patients to help maintain longevity.  Cornelius Agrippa wrote that "nature has given women such potent milk that not only children may be fed and cured by drinking it, but the health of all adults may be restored". Although Shunnamitism eventually went out of style (as medical fads do), the notion that virgins have a mysterious healing power hasn't entirely gone away. The incidence of child rape in Third World countries seem to stem from a persistent belief that sex will a virgin will cure various sexually transmitted diseases, including AIDS. Certainly child marriage remains popular despite the medical risks involved.

Virginity still carries a price tag in many cultures.

Dealing with a Priest's Betrayal

"John Doe" wanted to be a priest when he was a young boy in Mexico.

After his family came to the United States and settled in Yuma, Arizona, the eight-year old boy's admiration for priests made him a natural choice to be an altar boy at his local parish. It was only after his pastor Juan Guilen molested him that his dream of priesthood ended. The molesting continued into John's high school years and his role as a trusted family friend ensured his victim's silence. John's parents even allowed Father Guilen to take their son on month-long vacations to Mexico where he could be molested freely. Although his trust was shattered by what Father Guilen had done, John remained silent even after his family moved to Salinas, California in 1989 and he became part of another parish. Whatever hope he had of forming a new trusting relationship when "Father John" Velez became part of that parish in 1991 ended after the second priest molested him as well.

It remains unclear exactly who evaluated Father Velez' credentials when he asked to become part of Christ the King Parish. He had left his previous parish in El Paso, Texas under a cloud of suspicion and another parish in Sacramento had refused to hire him after checking his El Paso references. When the allegations of abuse became known, John Velez reportedly admitted to the offenses and stated that he had been trying to "teach the boy to become a man".

In the extensive court documents which have been made public, the failure of the Church to launch a criminal investigation led to additional abuse of John Doe and his younger brother by Juan Guilen. Now 29, John Doe has received a $1.2 million dollar settlement with the Diocese of Monterey for the abuse that he had received from Father Velez. The deposition that John provided detailed the trauma, betrayal, and shame that his years of abuse had caused. Still plagued by nightmares, he keeps a baseball bat under his bed when he sleeps and still feels guilt over his brother's abuse.

 Although Juan Guilen is now serving a ten-year sentence based on John's testimony, Father John Velez was quickly moved out of his parish and is now believed to be in Colombia. He has not been formally defrocked.

Although the Catholic Church has since enacted stricter guidelines for priests including background checks, suspension of priests under investgigation, and mandatory reporting rules, these changes are far too late to help John Doe and the others like him.

For more information.

No Charges Laid in Bizarre Craigslist Scam

A Central Florida woman has been told by police that there is nothing they can do in a bizarre case involving a man who hired her through Craigslist.  Janet Schulte said that she answered a Craigslist advertisement seeking someone to care for an adult with severe disabilities.  The man placing the ad described the patient as his "brother with diminished mental capacity".  Although she never met the brother who placed the ad, she carried out all caregiving duties (including bottle-feeding and changing diapers) on her charge and was paid 600 dollars a month.  Despite speaking to the "brother" on the phone, he avoided any direct meeting. 

It was only after three months that Schulte, who had become suspicious due to behavioural changes in her patient and delinquent payments, discovered that she had been the victim of a scam.  The man for whom she had been caring was actually feigning mental impairments and had placed the ad himself.  According to Schulte, the man never "broke character" and played his role well.  Despite going to police, Schulte and her husband have been told that no laws have been broken since she was paid for her services. 

For more information.

The Captain

The arrest of the dashing Captain Leslie Barker on February 28, 1929 seemed routine enough. After the war veteran failed to appear at a bankruptcy hearing in the previous December, a warrant for his arrest was issued for contempt of court. Despite his reputation as a sportsman, boxer, and womanizer, Captain Barker surrendered to police without  incident.The big surprise came later when he was remanded to Brixton Prison to await his trial date. It's easy to imagine the prison doctor's astonishment when he gave Barker a routine medical examination and made a rather unexpected discovery.

Captain Leslie Ivor Victor Gauntlett Slight Barker was a woman.

Despite early attempts at hiding the news of Barker's true gender, the information was quickly leaked to the press. Although Barker's friends were astonished enough, the revelation was even more of a shock to his wife Elfrida. In a news interview which she gave shortly after her husband's arrest, she stated that she was "dazed, stunned! In our six years of married life I never once suspected that dear Victor was a woman too!" As she would later state, their lack of normal sexual relations had been explained away as being due to her "husband's" war wounds. Her family, who had been charmed by the gallant officer's courting of their daughter, also expressed their amazement at the revelation.

As police began interviewing Captain Barker (who had been hastily transferred to a women's prison), the full story gradually emerged. Born Lilias Irma Valerie Barker in 1895, available information on her early life suggests that her upbringing was fairly unremarkable. Her father was a wealthy proprietor on the Isle of Jersey and Lilias had been raised as a proper young woman of her generation. After serving in World War I as a Red Cross Nurse, ambulance driver, and horse trainer, she married Lieutenant Harold Arkell-Smith in 1918. This marriage ended in divorce after just a few months and she went on to have two children from another relationship that ended as well. It's hard to say when her fascination with cross-dressing began but, by 1923, she was already well established as "Colonel" Leslie Barker when she courted and married Elfrida Emma Howard.

Along with her two children, Leslie and Elfrida settled down to a somewhat unsettled family life while Barker drifted from job to job. Under the stage name of "Ivor Gauntlett", she pursued a career as an actor before drifting to jobs as a boxing club manager, furniture dealer, dog kennel manager, dairy worker, and farmhand. By 1928, Elfrida decided she had enough and returned home to her father in 1929 although she and Leslie remained married until his arrest.

Leslie Barker became involved in the British Organization of Fascists and quickly distinguished herself* during the 1926 British General Strike by participating in various "Raids on Reds" (breaking up Communist mass meetings in London's Hyde Park). She also ran a boxing program for the Fascists and eventually found a job as a desk clerk in the Regent Palace Hotel (she had since demoted herself from being a Colonel to being a retired Captain). Unfortunately, financial problems led to the bankruptcy charge and her eventually being exposed as a woman.

For obvious reasons, details of trial at the Old Bailey was eagerly followed by the people of London (many of who had never heard the word "transvestite" before). Shortly after being outed as a woman, she sold her story to London's Daily Mail. Titled "My Own Story", it gave "Captain Leslie Barker" as the byline and presented some of the backstory to her strange life.  Excepts from this story include: "I was reared as a boy and always thought a boy had a jolly good time" and "The first tragedy of my life was when the man I loved and should have married was made a prisoner early in the War. Now I am fond of nobody and have no feelings—I only adore my son."

The prosecutors were left floundering as to the exact nature of the charges that were laid against Lilias/Leslie in addition to the original bankruptcy charge.; Although same-sex marriage was illegal in the U.K. (and still is), prosecutors declined to charge her under the U.K.'s Sexual Offenses Act. Instead, they decided to charge her with perjury due to her posing as "Colonel Leslie Barker" when she married Elfrida. As Barker had also posed as an officer when she was charged with possessing a forged firearms certificate two years previously, a second perjury charge was added as well. She was eventually sentenced to nine months in Holloway Prison.

The time spent in a women's prison did nothing to change Ilias' cross-dressing habits and she quickly went back to being Victor Barker after her release. After drifting between different short-term jobs, she eventually became a sideshow attraction under the name of Colonel Barker by 1937. Using the name of Jeffrey Norton, she entered into a common-law relationship with a woman that apparently lasted for the rest of Ilias' life. During WWII, she worked at a switchboard operator in a London hospital while also serving in the Home Guard. After the war, she and her wife Eva moved to Suffolk where they lived until Ilias/Victor Barker died of Parkinson's Disease in 1960. Her death certificate gave her name as Geoffrey Norton and she is buried on the grounds of St. Edmund's church.

While not as well known as James Barry or the Chevalier d'Eon, Ilias Barker's case remains one of the most fascinating examples of its kind.  There's no medical evidence to suggest that Ilias Barker was intersexual or suffering from a gender disorder (the diagnosis of which continues to be controversial even today). In 2002, author Rose Collis released a book titled Colonel Barker's Monstrous Regiment: A Tale of Female Husbandry, it ensures that Ilias Barker's amazing story will be remembered.

For more information.

When Men Harass

A study in the March 2009 issue of Journal of Applied Psychology demonstrated relations between men's perceptions of organizational justice and increased inclination towards sexual harassment. The researchers used a sample of 110 male employees of different companies in Switzerland. They were assessed with a battery of measures examining attitudes towards women, organizational policies, and personality traits. Respondents reported higher likelihood to sexually harass under conditions of low interactional justice, suggesting that sexual harassment likelihood may increase as a response to perceived injustice. The relation between justice and sexual harassment tendencies was especially marked for men low in agreeableness and high in hostile sexism. This finding is consistent with an interactionist perspective, suggesting that individual differences in hostility in general and toward women in particular affect how a person reacts to perceived unfairness. The authors discuss their results in terms of the study's limitations and the need for additional research into harassment.

For more information.

From Bad to Mad

I just got into Edinburgh and I'm still getting settled into the conference while fighting off jet lag. So far, I've listened to a fascinating presentation on a topic that I've been meaning to write about for a while. Beginning in 1991 when Kansas became the first U.S. state to allow indefinite confinement of sex offenders, civil commitment legislation has been increasingly used to force convicted sex offenders into psychiatric facilities following the end of their prison terms. Although classifying sex offenders as mentally ill has an old history, psychiatric hospitals have been left scrambling to deal with influx of sex offenders for which they were poorly prepared. States that have adopted Sexually Violent Predator (SVP) laws include Illinois, Arizona, California, Minnesota, Washington, Texas, New York, Virginia, and many others.

Typically, SVP laws tend to have three components: conviction for a sexually violent offense, presence of a mental disorder, and substantial likelihood that the offender will engage in sexual violence in future. Offenses that have led to SVP status include sexual assault (involving a child or adult) or other types of violent crime with a sexual component. Mental disorders (defined as a "congenital or acquired condition affecting capacity that predisposes a person to engage in acts of sexual violence") can include diagnoses such as pedophilia, personality disorder, or Sexual Sadism. Persons held under SVP acts are substantially different from the patients usually found in mental health settings. While the clinicians giving the presentation assured me that there was little real conflict between the civilly committed sex offenders and the conventional psychiatric patients, I'm finding that hard to believe (and many jurisdictions are starting to segregate the two populations).

The commitment process seems pretty much the same for all jurisdictions with a pre-screening phase in which convicted sex offenders are reviewed for SVP eligibility. Eligible sex offenders are then given a psychological assessment including clinical interview, psychometric testing, and actuarial measures of re offense risk. Once the psychologist makes the recommendation for SVP status, the Attorney General then files a petition with the civil court for probable cause. If the probable cause hearing is successful, a new hearing is conducted with state and defense evaluators providing opinions regarding SVP criteria. After a court determines that an offender is an SVP, they are indefinitely committed with their status being reevaluated on a regular basis (usually once a year). In all reevaluation hearings, the burden of proof is very much on the offender to demonstrate that they are a manageable risk in the community.

While all SVP treatment programs are considered voluntary, treatment participation is one of the factors that are taken into consideration during reevaluation hearings and SVPs who don't participate are rarely released. Treatment usually consists of group and individual sessions focusing on relapse prevention and cognitive behavioural therapy.  Many committed sex offenders are also placed on medication to lower their sex drive (usually leuprolide acetate). Offenders with special needs (i.e. learning disorders or psychiatric issues) receive addi tonal treatment resources. 

Constitutional challenges to SVP legislation have been largely unsuccessful despite concerns about double jeopardy and ex post facto law. A 1997 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the use of preventative long-term confinement of "mentally disordered" persons. Despite some victories by psychiatric organizations opposing civil commitment as well as the imposing of lengthier prison sentences for sex offenders, the use of psychiatric hospitals to hold SVPs after the end of their sentence is likely to continue.

Sex, Women, Children and the Media

The sexualization of underage girls in the popular media has become a major concern both due to the media representation of children as sexually aware as well as the "trickle up" phenomenon where adult women are presented as childlike. A study published in a recent issue of Journal of Media Psychology tested the hypothesis that viewing images of women posed as sexy young girls can lead to greater acceptance of child sexual abuse myths. Sixty-five participants were randomly assigned to three groups: the control group who viewed “Nature” ads, the “Sexy Adult” group who viewed ads of adult women, and the “Sexy Child” group who viewed advertisements of women posed as sexy young girls. It was predicted that participants who viewed advertisements of women posed as sexy young girls would score higher on the Child Sexual Abuse Myth Scale (CSAM; Collings, 1997) than participants in the two other groups. The hypothesis was not supported; however participants who saw ads portraying women of any age in sexual terms scored significantly higher on the CSAM Scale than those who viewed nature ads. The researchers conclude that images of objectified women can lead to greater acceptance of child sexual abuse myths. While it was recognized that this research was preliminary in nature, the researchers concluded that further research was definitely justified.

For more information.