Providentia

Raising Gua

Is it possible to teach a chimpanzee how to communicate with humans?

With stories  of "feral children" being reported in India and the popularity of books such as Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book and Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes, the prospect of teaching language skills to chimpanzees or orangutans didn't seem so far-fetched during the 1920s and 1930s.   While early research by such pioneers as Russian primatologist Nadiya Ladygina-Kohts  and American psychologist Lightmer Witmer helped demonstrate the innate problem-solving skills of chimpanzees, they also raised intriguing speculations about whether true communication between humans and non-humans might be possible. 

In 1912, it had been Witmer who  publicly suggested  that "within a few years chimpanzees will be taken early in life and subjected for purposes of scientific investigation to a course or procedure more closely resembling that which is accorded the human child."   But could raising a young chimpanzee in the same way that human children were raised lead to their developing actual language skills?   This was the question that Winthrop and Luella Kellogg would test in a very personal way.

Inspired by stories about Kamala and Amala, the two "wolf-girls" who had been reported in India not long before, Winthrop Kellogg, a newly-hired as a psychology professor at Indiana University, approached Yale primatologist Robert Yerkes with a unique research proposal in 1930.   By placing an infant ape (whether chimpanzee or orangutan)  in a human home and raising that ape alongside a human child of the same age, Kellogg argued that the ape could be socialized like a human and develop  language skills. 

To make their experiment as realistic as possible, the Kelloggs convinced Yerkes to allow them to conduct their research at the Yale Anthropoid Research Station in Orange Park, Florida.  Established in 1930 and operated by Yale University, the station was one of the main primate research facilities in the United States and had an international reputation for groundbreaking research.  Later rechristened the Yerkes National Primate Center and relocated to Emory University in Georgia, the station was ideal for what the Kelloggs were planning since it had all the facilities they would need.    To fund their research project, the Kelloggs took a leave of absence from Indiana University and arranged for a grant from the Social Science Research Council during their stay in Orange Park.

The first research subject  in the Kelloggs' study happened to be their infant son Donald who  was born on August 31, 1930.   All that remained was to get a suitable infant chimpanzee.  In mid-1931, the Kelloggs received their other research subject.  Gua, an infant chimpanzee, was born in Cuba's Abreu Colony on November 15, 1930 and subsequently shipped to the Yale Station to become part of their permanent collection.   For the course of the planned study, which was intended to cover the first few years of their lives, Donald and Gua would be raised together as siblings so the Kelloggs could monitor how they both developed. 

What followed was what Winthrop Kellogg would later describe as one of the most difficult research projects he and his wife had ever attempted.  "Had we at that time any knowledge of the personal deprivation to be demanded by the undertaking, it is doubtful if we would have persisted further in the endeavor to bring it about,"  he wrote, ruefully.    Not only were they first-time parents, but their experience in raising a chimpanzee was largely theoretical at that point.

"Let us suppose," the Kelloggs wrote,  in their later book describing their experiment, "that by some queer accident a human infant, the child of civilized parents, were abandoned in the woods or jungle where it has had as companions only wild animals. [The comparison to the fictional Tarzan is evident.] Suppose, further, that by some miraculous combination of circumstances it did not die, but survived babyhood and early childhood, and grew up in these surroundings. What would be the nature of the resulting individual who had matured under such unusual conditions, without clothing, without human language, and without association with others of its kind? That this is not so fanciful a conception as to lie altogether outside the realm of possibility is attested by the fact that about a dozen instances of "wild" foundlings of this sort are known to history. To be sure the reports about them are in many cases so garbled and distorted that the true facts are hard to shift out. In some, however, the accuracy of the accounts is well established."

In providing Gua with the kind of social development human children normally received, the Kelloggs hoped to disprove many of the genetic theories of human behaviour that were already being used to justify the appalling eugenic policies being advocated across the United States.  Instead,  Winthrop Kellogg had a more optimistic view about human nature which he discussed in his book:

"It would be quite possible according to the latter view to take the child of criminal delinquents, provided he was normal at birth, and by giving him the proper training, to make him a great religious or moral leader. Conversely it would be possible to take the child of gifted and upright parents and by placing him in a suitable environment, to produce a criminal of the lowest order. Heredity, in this view, assumes a secondary role and education or training becomes the important item."

Much like John B. Watson and other behaviourists, the Kelloggs insisted that upbringing played an essential role in shaping human development.  While they knew there were limits to how far Gua could progress even if raised like a human child, they did hope to prove that an infant chimpanzee could acquire language skills if the training began early enough.  

Being practical experimenters, the Kelloggs began by taking measurements for both Donald and Gua -  height, weight, blood pressure, etc.   Gua was rated as having the bone structure of a human child twice her age with sixteen of her "baby teeth" at the time she was separated from her mother.    In many ways, she was far in advance of Donald who was a typical human baby with limited motor development.   They then placed both their infants on a daily schedule including waking up at 7 AM,  getting their breakfast, sitting in identical high chairs while the adults were having breakfast, then regular play sessions and naps  (Donald needed more nap time than Gua).   

Both infants received an identical diet including warm milk, cereal, orange juice, and fruit.   There were still a few differences in their diets considering Gua's fondness for eating insects as well as flowers and the leaves of some plants (Donald was a little more particular about what he ate).   Though the Kelloggs noted other differences between Donald and Gua which became more evident over time, they did their best to provide both infants with the same learning opportunities.   They even had a special walker made for Gua which matched the walker used by Donald though Gua never used it for walking the way Donald did.  

In the months that followed, the Kellloggs would carefully record everything they learned about their two subjects.   While Gua never mastered language the way they had hoped, what the Kelloggs  eventually discovered would help rewrite everything psychologists thought they knew about how humans and non-humans developed

Raising an infant chimpanzee the human way is not an easy thing to do.

Aside from Gua's fondness for insects, flowers, and whatever else she could stick in her mouth, she was also much more active than her "brother" Donald.  Being constantly thirsty, she became a frequent user of water faucets after learning how a water tap worked.    She also enjoyed baths, except for her tendency to eat the soap, and enjoyed sleeping in a regular bed.   Once, when the bed was removed for cleaning, Gua cried until it was returned.   As for how they behaved while sleeping, the Kelloggs reported that both Donald and Gua looked and acted much the same when sleeping at night including having the same posture and acting the same way on awakening.

But there were still important differences between Donald and Gua.  When it came to picking up a piece of food, for example, Gua often used her mouth since she was incapable of grasping with her hand the way Donald could.   Even when the Kelloggs tried to teach her to grasp objects with her hands, she was often clumsy due to lacking an opposable thumb.  Gua also had trouble with building blocks since she didn't have the motor precision of a human child

In terms of learning to walk, there were other important differences.  Donald took to using his walker to get around and was often "reckless" in trying to walk without it.  As for Gua, she never learned to use the walker though she enjoyed being pushed around by someone else.   She continued to use the walker as a toy even after learning to walk but there were still marked differences in the walking styles they adopted, however.

By the age of eight months, Gua was responding to her reflection in a mirror and she also noticed changes in her environment much faster than Donald did.   At the age of fourteen and a half months, both Donald and Gua were shown a child's alphabet book.   Though Gua was faster at attending to visual content, Donald learned to point to a picture that an adult had just indicated.   Gua, on the other hand, tried to lift pictures from the page suggesting well-developed depth perception. 

Gua's hearing was also much more acute that Donald's (or his human parents) and she often responded to sounds like the newspaper being delivered much sooner than anyone else.  When it came to localizing sounds, Donald and Gua showed no real difference that the Kelloggs could determine.   Another problem was that Donald could signal that he disliked something he tasted by his facial expressions, something they were never able to achieve with Gua.  Not only was Gua's sense of smell much more acute than Donald's, but she also depended on smell to identify people much more than Donald did.  Whenever meeting someone for the first time, Gua would smell them first and rely on her sense of smell to recognize everybody she met.

Gua had a number of overwhelming fears during her time with the Kelloggs.   She was terrified of being left alone and was often anxious whenever her human parents exited the house.  She was also terrified by far-off noises such as planes passing overhead.   Other fears came from learned experiences.  After a small dog snapped at her when she cornered it, Gua became afraid of small animals.   She was also terrified of toadstools after being unintentionally poisoned by one when she ate it.   There were also frequent tantrums, especially when Donald received treatment she didn't get.  

But she was good at learning to be as human as possible.  It took a while but the Kelloggs got her used to being dressed in human clothes and to allowing her nails and teeth to be cleaned.   She also picked up toilet training, how to use a light switch, how to eat with a spoon, and how to drink from a glass.  Donald and Gua were regularly tested using standard test batteries intended for infants.   Though Gua was more advanced than Donald at first, he quickly overtook her.  Since the tests were never designed for infant chimpanzees, it is hard to make any firm conclusions about problem-solving or memory.   Still, Gua's cognitive development was steadily increasing as a result of her enriched upbringing.  

It was trying to teach Gua to speak that generated the most interest from outside observers.   Up until that time, the prevailing scientific consensus was that only humans were capable of true speech (as opposed to mimicry seen in parrots and other birds).  Since the 19th century, brain researchers had known that the human capacity for language was linked to specific regions of the brain that were largely absent in chimpanzees and other non-human primates.   Given their belief in behaviourist theories of language development, the Kelloggs reasoned that Gua could be taught language skills in much the same way that human children were.   And this is where the experiment went sour. 

Through the course of the Kellogg study, Gua learned to use facial expressions and developed her own hand gestures to express what she wanted.  As Winthrop Kellogg later wrote, "Almost from the beginning of her human training, Gua seemed to possess a rudimentary, nonvocal form of communication by means of which her impending actions could be predicted by those who knew her well. "  While Robert Yerkes had actually proposed teaching chimpanzees sign language, the Kelloggs focused on actual spoken language in their experiment.   

What they found was that Gua was capable of a wide range of articulations and grunts.   However, teaching her even simple words like "pa-pa" seemed just about impossible despite repeated efforts.    Though not dismissing the possibility of chimpanzee speech completely, they concluded that Gua would never be capable of speaking more than a handful of words.  As for whether Gua was successful in learning to understand human language, this is something the Kelloggs simply failed to follow up on. This inability to speak was deeply disappointing to the Kelloggs and may have coloured their impression of the other things that Gua had been successfully taught to do.  But it when they saw the effect that all of this was having on Donald that things became, ahem, somewhat hairy.

Though the Kelloggs had originally planned for a five-year study,  the research project came to an abrupt end when they realized that Donald was being adversely affected by being raised along with Gua  Not only did he begin giving guttural food barks similar to Gua when asking for food, but he also developed the alarming habit of grunting at his parents the way that his "sister" did.  It was at this point, just nine months after their research began, that the Kelloggs decided that the experiment needed to be terminated.   

As Winthrop Kellogg later wrote:

The situation in which the two lived together as playmates and associates was much like that of the two-child family in which Gua, because of her greater maturity and agility, played the part of the older child. With the added stimulation thus afforded, the younger child in such situations usually learns more rapidly than would otherwise be the case. It was Gua, in fact, who was almost always the aggressor or leader in finding new toys to play with and new methods of play; while the human was inclined to take up the role of the imitator and follower.

Still, by the time the Kelloggs terminated their experiment, Gua had made amazing progress.   She had learned to walk upright and respond to over twenty different commands, including "Shake hands" and "Open the door"  (Donald had only learned three by this point).  Despite her progress however, Winthrop and Luella Kellogg had grave doubts about what  was Gua was actually learning.   As they later commented:

"Let us consider finally the ability of the subjects [apes] in the comprehension of language. We are here faced, as in many earlier instances, with the problem of inner mental processes, for we cannot tell in a strict usage of the term whether the subjects introspectively comprehend what is said about them or not. All we can do is to observe whether they are able to react distinctively and individually to separate words and phrases. This, then, must serve as our criterion of 'comprehension.'

Still, while Donald was outperforming Gua in many other ways, including the spontaneous use of language, Gua's progress could not be doubted.   What she learned while raised as a human would shatter many of the assumptions previously made about the differences between humans and non-humans.

Which still raised the question of how successful Gua could be in becoming readjusted to life among other research chimpanzees after living most of her life separated from other of her own kind.   The Kelloggs did their best  to prepare Gua for her return to living with other chimpanzees at the primate centre in Florida.  However, the transition was likely traumatic considering they were the only real parents Gua ever knew.  I haven't been able to determine anything of Gua's life at the primate centre except that Robert and Ada Yerkes continued to use Gua in their own chimpanzee research.   For whatever reason, Gua didn't live long after the Kelloggs returned to Indiana.  She died of pneumonia on December 21, 1933, less than a year after being separated from her "brother" and the  loving care she received with the Kelloggs.   Her death so soon afterward represents a tragic (and little-mentioned) footnote in what is otherwise hailed as a classic study in human-ape communication.

As for Winthrop and Luella Kellogg, their 1933 book, The Ape and the Child,  became an instant classic.  One reviewer described it as a "well-written, mature, and scholarly piece of psychological literature."   The reviewer went on to say that it should be "required reading in all courses where the problem of heredity and environment is discussed."   Not surprisingly, the Kellogg study generated enormous publicity with stories about Donald and Gua being written in the New York Times and other popular newspapers.   Video clips from their life together are still available online.

It's hard to say how much of an impact the Kellogg study actually had on the eugenics movement (which was already dying out in the United States due to revelations over what was happening in Nazi Germany) as well as the entire heredity vs. environment debate.  Still, what Winthrop and Luella attempted to do inspired other researchers to try similar studies.  During the 1950s, psychologists Keith and Catherine Hayes launched their own experiment in raising a chimpanzee named Viki as a human child.  They even managed to train Viki to speak four English words after extensive speech therapy though the barrier to full human speech seems impassable.

Of course, the most well-known experiment of its kind was Allen and Beatrix Gardner's work during the 1960s and 1970s teaching American Sign Language (ASL) to a chimpanzee named Washoe.    Not only did Washoe manage to learn hundred of ASL words, she even taught some ASL to her own son, Louis.  Though this work is still controversial, the Gardners' success with Washoe and other chimpanzees helped revive interest in animal communication as well as  the biological roots of language.    Similar work with a gorilla named Koko has reportedly led to her learning as many as one thousand words in a modified version of ASL.  Again, the research results evaluating Koko's progress continues to spark controversy.

As for Winthrop Kellogg, he went on to become one of the pioneers in animal research for much of his long career as a psychologist.  Having moved to Florida State University in 1950, he was instrumental in reshaping the psychology program there and also became part of Florida State's marine research laboratory.   Though his later research would never be as famous as what he had tried to do with Gua, he also became one of the first researchers to study how bottlenose dolphins use sonar to navigate as well as exploring  dolphin communication and problem-solving ability.     This involved inventing a special dolphin pool for use in research as well as becoming a scuba diver himself to explore the research environment from the point of view of the dolphin.    He would later attempt to apply what he had learned about echolocation in dolphins to help blind humans navigate.

Even in retirement, Winthrop Kellogg stayed active in research including directing graduate students looking at cognitive ability in sea lions.  He died in the summer of 1972, ten years after formally retiring from teaching.   His wife Luella died just a few months later and, tragically, their son Donald died in the following year.   

The Hitler Profile

Formed through an presidential order on June 13, 1942, the United States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Strategic_Services(OSS) was intended to replace the intelligence gathering operations run by different military and executive departments with a single, centralized operation to aid the American war effort. While It got off to a rocky start (the FBI and and different branches of the military disliked sharing information with the new agency, its new head, Colonel William "Wild Bill" Donovan, was quick to take advantage of all the resources that were available to him.

While the OSS was not actively involved in psychological warfare, Donovan saw another potential role that psychologists could play in the war effort.  To have a better understanding of Adolf Hitler and his role in the German war effort, Colonel Donovan (who would be promoted to Major General by the end of the war) called on William Leonard Langer, then head of the OSS Research and Analysis branch.  Langer, in turn, put together a unique team of psychoanalysts and psychologists led by his brother Walter Charles Langer.

Already a prominent psychoanalyst, Walter Langer had studied with Anna Freud while living in Austria during the 1930s. He also met with Sigmund Freud on a frequent basis and accompanied him to England when he was driven into exile in 1938. At the time that his brother recruited him, Walter Langer was a practicing psychoanalyst in Cambridge, Massachusetts and well respected in the psychoanalytic community. Other members of the team that he put together included Henry A. Murray of Harvard University, Ernest Kris of the New School for Social Research, and Bertram Lawin of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute.   Henry Murray had previously prepared a document for the OSS titled Analysis of the Personality of Hitler and many of his conclusions were later absorbed into the Langer report.

Since Adolf Hitler would not be directly available for analysis, psychological profiling proved to be a complex problem.Langer and his team gathered information by interviewing people who had personally known Hitler. These included Ernst Hanfstaengl (a former Hitler confidante who had defected to the Allies), Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe (a Nazi spy in U.S. custody), and Friedlinde Wagner (daughter of Richard Wagner and an anti-Nazi activist). The team also scoured various printed documents about Hitler and eventually put together 11,000 pages of quotations and condensed versions of longer documents into a "Hitler Source Book" which was appended to their actual study.

The final document, titled "A Psychological Profile of Adolf Hitler: His Life and Legend" was released in 1943. Due to pressure from Donovan and the OSS, Langer and his team only had a limited amount of time to finish the report.  After the report was released, it was quickly declared Top Secret and distributed to different branches of the Allied forces. In addition to the preface, the report was broken down into six sections:

• Hitler - As he believes himself to be
• Hitler - As the German people know him
• Hitler - As his associates know him
• Hitler - As he knows himself
• Psychological Analysis and Reconstruction
• Hitler's Probable Behavior in the Future

Although Langer arranged for three independent psychoanalysts to review the report and their conclusions, he frankly admitted that forming conclusions based on second-hand sources limited the report's usefulness. Despite his misgivings, the report concluded that Adolph Hitler was likely a "neurotic psychopath" whose hold on the German people seemed absolute. The report reviewed Hitler's unhappy childhood, his relationship with both of this parents, and his early psychosexual development.

The team drew heavily on Freudian concepts and made various assumptions about Hitler's sexuality and attitudes towards women in general based on the limited information provided in works such as Mein Kampf. The crux of the report was the final section, Hitler's Probable Behavior in the Future. which described the various possible scenarios of Hitler's response to Allied military advances. After weighing different outcomes, it was suggested that Adolph Hitler would become increasingly neurotic with each German defeat. The authors also concluded that Hitler would probably commit suicide if the Nazis lost the war. In a prophetic line at the end of the report, the authors concluded that "In any case, his mental condition will continue to deteriorate. He will fight as long as he can with any weapon or technique that can be conjured up to meet the emergency. The course he will follow will almost certainly be the one which seems to him to be the surest road to immortality and at the same time drag the world down in flames."

While it's still an open question on how much, if any, influence the Langer report had on the Allied leaders (probably very little given how late in the war it was released), it marked a radical shift in the role of psychology in military and political strategy.  As one of the first practical applications of psychological profiling (at least as applied to world leaders), the report would remain classified until 1972 when it was finally published and became a bestseller.

Despite critical gaps (many details about Adolph Hitler only became known long after the war ended), the Langer report was considered enough of a success for the OSS (later the CIA) to continue producing psychological profiles to assist political strategy. Psychological profiling would only be used on occasion during the 1950s and 1960s (including an influential report on Nikita Kruschev which was carefully studied by John F. Kennedy). The CIA eventually developed its own in-house psychological profiling section in the late 1960s although most of the reports produced remain classified.

The actual value of psychological profiles based on second-hand information remains controversial.  Older psychodynamic profiling approaches have been abandoned in favour of psycholinguistic and content analysis strategies designed to provide some insight into the thinking processes of foreign leaders and how they might react in stressful situations. Unfortunately, psychological profiles are usually only as good as the factual information that is available and even minor discrepancies in known facts about a leader could completely distort the resulting profile. Reports also tend to downplay situational factors that might play a stronger role in a leader's decisions than long-term personality. As a result, foreign policy experts and psychologists remain divided concerning the actual value of psychological profiles in shaping foreign policy.

As for Walter Langer, he remained convinced of the potential value of psychological profiling until his death in 1981.In the forward to his 1972 book on Adolph Hitler, he was quoted as saying "I may be naive in diplomatic matters, but I like to believe that if such a study of Hitler had been made years earlier, under less tension, and with more opportunity to gather first-hand information, there might not have been a Munich; a similar study of Stalin might have produced a different Yalta; one of Castro might have prevented the Cuban situation, and one of President Diem might have avoided our deep involvement in Vietnam.''

While profiling will certainly continue to be used, the controversy remains.

Memory Training in Old-Old Adults

A study recently published in  The American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry assessed gains related to working memory (WM) training, in the short and long term (9 months after the training), in abilities required in everyday life, and in cognitive measures in old-old adults (aged ≥ 75 years). Thirty-two community-dwelling older adults (aged 75–85 years) were randomly assigned to a training or an active control group. In addition to testing for any specific gains in a WM task similar to the one used in the training (criterion task),  the researchers sought transfer effects to: 1) abilities involved in everyday life using objective performance-based tasks (the Everyday Problem Test [EPT] and the Timed Instrumental Activities of Daily Living [TIADL] scale; 2) tasks demanding the comprehension and recall of spatial information and pairing names with faces; and 3) a measure of inhibitory control, that is, recall errors (intrusion errors). Results showed that only the trained group showed specific gains in the criterion task, and in the TIADL in the short term. At follow-up, the trained group maintained gains in the criterion task, and showed transfer effects to everyday problem-solving (in the EPT), and in constructing spatial representations of an environment. The trained group also improved in a cognitive inhibition measure (intrusion errors) at follow-up. No such improvements were seen in the active control group. Conclusion: WM training may be a valid way to help old-old adults preserve at least some abilities related to everyday functioning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)

For the abstract

Can Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy Help Treat PTSD?

Hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) refers to the medical use of oxygen at a much higher pressure than the 1,013.25 mbars  which represents the normal atmospheric pressure at sea level.   Since being first introduced in the 19th century, hyperbaric oxygen treatment usually involved placing a patient in a specially-constructed chamber that allows atmospheric pressure to be raised on a pre-set schedule (up to 1.5 to 3 times normal pressure).   Along with the higher atmospheric pressure,  patients can be administered a 100 percent oxygen mixture to increase the supply of oxygen to all parts of the body.

Though originally developed to treat decompression sickness and air embolisms, the use of HBOT has since been expanded to include treatment of a wide range of medical conditions.  This includes gas gangrene, arterial occlusions, necrotizing fasciitis, severe burns, and after major skin grafts, all of which are conditions for which the FDA has formally approved this type of therapy. 

Still, despite considerable research looking at the value of HBOT in treating other conditions including autism, Alzheimer's disease, and multiple sclerosis,  little empirical evidence has been found to date to indicate that it has any real treatment value.   Despite this lack of evidence, however, HBOT use for "off-label" purposes continues to rise.

But can it actually help patients suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) ?    Considering that many patients with traumatic brain injuries and PTSD show microscopic damage to the white matter of the brain (including axons).   Since conventional treatment of these conditions show relatively little benefit, researchers have been taking a closer look at whether HBOT can help patients recover normal cognitive and emotional functioning.

Since 2017, the Veterans Administration has been providing HBOT for veterans with PTSD at selected facilities in Oklahoma, California, Florida, and Texas.   While many patients have reported positive benefits from this treatment, actual research, as well as a 2015 report from the US Government Accountability Office,  suggest that it is no better than placebo-based treatment.  

Based on patient testimonials concerning the value of HBOT, two legislators have introduced a new bill requiring the VA to provide HBOT-treatment to any veteran diagnosed with PTSD or traumatic brain injury.    Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., and Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D have jointly introduced the The TBI and PTSD Treatment Act which has gained support with veterans groups across the country.

“This bill gives veterans an additional choice to treat these serious mental health issues,” Rep. Biggs said in a recent media statement. “[Hyperbaric oxygen therapy] has the potential to help the VA make progress in their mental health and suicide prevention efforts. This is an avenue where we have a lot of ground to gain.”

Presently, HBOT is administered by a VA physician and is only given to veterans who show no improvement with other, more evidence-based approaches.  The VA had previously delayed expanding HBOT use pending the results of research examining its effectiveness.   Under the new Act, however, HBOT would become a covered treatment under federal law and its use would be expanded across the entire United States.  

The Problem with Richard Ivens

On January 12, 1906, the body of an attractive woman was found lying face downward in a large yard located near Belden Avenue on the outskirts of Chicago.  Half covered by trash, it had been dumped onto a refuse heap.  The body was discovered by twenty-four-year-old Richard Ivens who had been caring for his father's horse in the barn nearby.  Police were called after Ivens immediately rushed home and told his father about the body and it didn't take long for the dead woman to be identified.

Elizabeth Martha Hollister was the thirty-year-old wife of a local printer who had lived just four blocks from where the body was discovered.  She had left to sing at a friend's funeral on the previous day and her family, alarmed when she failed to come home, organized a search for her before hearing that the body had been found.   Police investigating her death found no evidence of a scuffle at the crime scene though copper wire was wrapped around her neck.  While there were signs of bruising, the cause of death was strangulation.  Whoever had killed Elizabeth Hollister dumped the body and tried to conceal it with trash.  Though her hat was there at her feet. several rings were missing from her fingers.  Her purse, shopping bag, and her muff were also missing leading police to suspect that robbery was the motive for her murder.   Based on their reconstruction of the crime scene, the dead woman was had been killed at some point during the daytime before her body was dumped in the lot during the evening.

Facing intense pressure to solve the case, a large force of police detectives were assigned to find whoever was responsible and they managed to find a suspect almost immediately.    It's hard to say exactly what led the police to suspect Richard Ivens in the first place.  While he had been the one to discover the body, the fact that it been dumped so close to his father's business likely made police suspicious.  He had absolutely no criminal history or any history of violence whatsoever but Ivens had a reputation in the neighbourhood of being gullible and absent-minded.  His apparent nervousness and indications that he hadn't had  a good night's sleep was likely all that the police had to go on in naming him a suspect.  Or perhaps they simply needed somebody to interrogate to make it seem as if they were doing their jobs. 

After arresting and charging Richard Ivens with murder (to the astonishment of everybody who knew him), police then subjected him to the "third degree" that was common police procedure in those days.   This basically meant mercilessly interrogating Ivens for hours at a time, all the while telling him that he was guilty.   Whether due to nervousness or simply because he had been manipulated by the police interrogators, Ivens eventually broke down and confessed to the crime.  He also signed a somewhat lengthy confession stating that he had assaulted Elizabeth Hollister as she passed his father's shop on Belden Avenue.  When she resisted, he dragged her into the shop and killed her by typing wire around her neck.   After dumping the body, he went home to supper and stayed there all night before pretending to find the body on the following day. 

Within hours, newspapers across the country were reporting that Ivens was guilty of murder (even though he had not even been tried yet).   Despite being widely seen as an open-and-shut case however, there were troubling details about the confession.   While the confession stated that Ivens had been drunk at the time of the murder, his mother insisted that he had been sober when he came to supper(and he certainly had no history of alcoholism).  There were also people willing to swear that he had an alibi at the time of the killing.  But these objections were largely ignored as the newspapers and police declared the case solved.

At the coroner's inquest, which was held just days after the body was found, Richard Ivens described how he killed Elizabeth Hollister. Newspaper reporters were quick to describe how unconcerned Ivens seemed as he gave his testimony.  This so enraged the victim's brother-in-law that he attempted to shoot Ivens right in the courtroom (a police officer spotted the weapon and restrained the gunman).   During the cross-examination, Ivens basically repeated everything that had already gone into the signed confession.   This was essential for court cases of the time since, knowing the kind of interrogation tactics police used, having the defendant repeat the confession in open court eliminated any accusations of police intimidation. 

Newspapers had no problem denouncing Ivens and his crime.  One reporter wrote that the defendant was a "ruffian" whose confession "for moral depravity, has no parallel in police records."   He also added that Ivens was "big and brutal looking", something that apparently proved his guilt.   It hardly seemed to matter that Ivens had no previous criminal history or that there had been other recent attacks on women in Chicago, including several murders very similar to Elizabeth Hollister's.   Although there was no attempt to link Richard Ivens to the other crimes (he had a solid alibi), women were warned to be careful when walking in the streets and to avoid displaying money or jewelry. 

Given that Ivens made a full confession, his family had little hope of saving his life except by trying for an insanity defense and his father told reporters that his son had been acting "queerly" before the killing.  In the meantime, public outrage over Elizabeth Hollister's death meant the political pressure to get a conviction was intense.   Despite repeated grilling to get Ivens to name accomplices,  including rumours that he was part of a larger gang targeting women in Chicago, police eventually concluded that he had acted alone.

In the trial that began on March 5, Richard Ivens was defended by attorney I. W. Foltz, who also happened to be a friend of his family.  Considering the public outrage, and the presence of the victim's husband who police feared would try to kill Ivens, police protection was especially tight.    While Foltz provided testimony from one witness who swore that the defendant was at her home when the murder occurred, the prosecutor managed to discredit her testimony and the case shifted to the actual value of Ivens' confession.  

After failing to keep Iven's confession from being entered as evidence, Foltz then tried another, more unusual tactic.   He argued that Assistant Chief of Police Herman F. Schuetttler, who had gotten Ivens to confess in the first place, had used "hypnotic" techniques to make him believe that he was guilty.  Despite being all the rage in vaudeville acts, hypnosis was still a mysterious and often-misunderstood phenomenon with frequent news stories describing how hypnotists robbed victims of their free will.    Given Richard Ivens' low intelligence (his own attorney called him a "half-witted boy"), he was considered to be especially vulnerable to this kind of persuasion.

Once the full confession signed by Richard Ivens was presented to the jury,with all its damnable details, the prosecution basically rested.  To prove his client innocent, Foltz needed to convince the members of the jury that the confession was false.  But who would confess to a murder he didn't really commit?

Since the court overruled his objection that the confession had been obtained by the "sweat box" process so popular with police back then, the lawyer used family members to establish Ivens' whereabouts at the time of the murder.   Richard Ivens' father and other members of the family all testified that he had been at home when Elizabeth Hollister was murdered, and their testimony held up to grueling cross-examination as well.   This  defense was eventually quashed due to "lapses of memory" on the part of Richard's brother who was forced to contradict himself several times.  It likely didn't help that another potential witness turned over a letter that she received from Ivens asking that she perjure herself on the witness stand. 

So desperate was the family that they even consulted spiritualists hoping that they could get more information about the dead woman's final hours (presumably from the ghost herself).  This was quashed when the Assistant State Attorney firmly announced that no spiritualist evidence could be used in court. 

Finally, Foltz had to restate his accusation that Assistant Chief of Police Scheuttler had "hypnotized" his client into confessing.  He based this on Schuettler being a "student of hypnotism" and the fact that Ivens had only confessed when Schuettler had been left alone with him.   As for why Ivens would describe his murder in such detail, Foltz had an even more bizarre theory:  that his client had dreamed about the crime due to all the attacks on women that had occurred and, after finding Elizabeth Hollister's body and being interrogated by police, Schuettler's hypnosis made him think the dream was real.   To nobody's surprise, this argument didn't work particularly well either.

After the case was turned over to the jury on March 24, it only took them thirty minutes to bring in a guilty verdict.  The only real sticking point was that two members of the jury objected to the death penalty but, after eight ballots, the entire jury unanimously recommended that he be hanged.   Ivens took the news with a certain degree of stoicism but later insisted that he be granted a new trial given his alibi.   He added, "If a new trial is not granted, I suppose my father will appeal the case.  But, let me tell you, if I must die, then I will go to the gallows like a man."

Newspapers unanimously cheered the verdict and even ran pictures of Ivens with his head in a noose (another story referred to him as a "Chicago degenerate").  Many of the editorials on the verdict argued that Ivens' execution would send a strong message to other criminals targeting women.   Meanwhile, his attorney's application for a new trial was turned down since  all the friends and family members who tried to establish an alibi for Ivens were flatly accused of perjury.

The execution date was set for June 22, 1906 and a last minute request for a stay of execution was rejected.   The Illinois Board of Parole refused to hear the appeal and Ivens' execution was set to go ahead as scheduled.  Six days before he was to be hanged, Ivens stated that the confession had been entirely false and that he had been prompted to say he was guilty when a revolver was pointed at him. 

"I saw the flash of the steel in front of me," he reportedly said in a final statement.  "Then two men got before me.  I can remember no more than that about it.  From the time I was arrested I do not believe that I was myself for a moment.  Everything about that time was a blur, a blank to me".  But there was no question of delaying the execution by this point.

His parents visited with him on the eve of his execution though they were hoping to the last that the execution would be delayed somehow.   In keeping with tradition, Ivens was obliged to stay in his cell listening to the carpenters building the scaffold on which he was to be hanged.   A number of women, many of whom had never met the condemned man, asked to see him but jail officials refused.   Despite this, they remained right up to the time of execution.   His jailers also tried to get him to make a full confession one last time but Ivens flatly refused to discuss the case further.

Richard Ivens' stoic demeanor only cracked once he stood on the scaffold and the noose was placed around his neck.  He attempted to say a last prayer but was unable to speak and seemed on the verge of collapse.   Recognizing this, the sheriff rushed through the final legal details and the hanging was completed.

Most newspapers expressed their general satisfaction with the hanging (one typical headline read "Youthful pervert dies on gallows" while another read "One fiend less").  Virtually all of them stressed that Ivens had confessed to the murder which they took as absolute proof of his guilt.   In the months following Ivens' execution however, several prominent academics voiced their own reservations over whether Ivens had actually been guilty or not.

In a pamphlet on the Ivens case published in late 1906, Dr. J. Sanderson Christian returned to the hypnosis argument that I.W. Foltz had raised during the trial.   As Christian pointed out, Ivens had no history of violence prior to the murder and he was described as a "peaceable, kindly, temperate man, twenty-four years of age and a son of respectable parents with whom he had always lived."    Ivens only confessed to the murder after the police had "sweated" it out of him and later he even denied recalling that he had made a confession.    Intending his pamphlet as an indictment of the interrogation methods used by police, Christian suggested that Ivens had been induced to confess due to his being frightened and suggestible and that false confessions were far more common that most people cared to admit.

Another, far more influential critic of how Ivens was convicted was Harvard psychologist, Hugo Munsterberg.   Already one of the most well-known psychologists in the United States (second only to William James), Munsterberg was a pioneer in the use of psychological research in criminal cases.   In his own analysis of the Ivens case which was published in New York Times magazine in early 1907, Munsterberg concluded that Ivens had confessed "under the hypnosis of a third degree sweating by police."  

His article went on to say that: "Now the police began to press him, and more and more impressively to suggest his guilt.  Suddenly he began to confess, and he was quite willing to repeat himself over and over again.   Every time, it became richer in detail.  Upon this basis, he was condemned to death.  So the case stood when my opinion was asked.  I could not help becoming convinced that all the external signs spoke against the interpretation of the jury."  

Munsterberg would describe the Ivens case as a fascinating example of autosuggestion, or a form of self-hypnosis.   As he explained further in his classic 1908 book, On the Witness Stand, Richard Ivens entered a hypnotic state when police officers pointed a gun at him.  This state left him highly vulnerable to suggestion and led him to develop a false memory of the crime that was "suggested" to him by his interrogators. Though Munsterberg's reputation as a psychologist and researcher meant that his ideas about Ivens' guilt weren't dismissed out of hand, nothing more really came from his analysis of the case. 

While Ivens' name was invoked on occasion by critics of the police "sweatbox" method and its tendency to lead to false confession, the world as a whole quickly moved on to new concerns.   Aside from Ivens' family and friends, nobody else seemed to care much about whether he was innocent.  In the years since his death, Richard Ivens has been virtually forgotten and any questions about his guilt or how police were able to get a man with no criminal history to confess to a gruesome murder remain unanswered.   

The Pain of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

The publication of Richard Krafft-Ebbing's masterwork Psychopathia Sexualis in 1886 represented a landmark in thinking about human sexuality and the bizarre forms that it can take. In addition to describing different types of sexual expression that the author regarded as "perverse" (usually any form of sex that didn't lead to procreation), it quickly became one of the most influential books on human sexuality ever written and introduced numerous new terms into common usage.

One of these terms was  "masochism" which Krafft-Ebbing defined as "the opposite of sadism "(another term that he  coined). While sadism is defined the desire to cause pain and use force, masochism is defined as the wish to suffer pain and be subjected to force.    For all that he had given a name to a shadowy sexual practice  never before been described in the scientific literature, one person in particular who was less than pleased with the new term was the Austrian author, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Krafft-Ebbing justified naming this new sexual anomaly after the prominent author whom he described as "the poet of Masochism" due to his erotic writings and because of his own eccentric personal life (to which we now turn).

Born in 1836 in what is now the Ukraine (but then part of the Austrian empire), Leopold von Sacher-Masoch was part of a fairly upper-middle class family (his father was a police director).  He studied law, history and mathematics at Graz University and then returned to his home town to begin a quiet academic life.  Sacher-Masoch wrote fiction and non-fiction alike although it was his fiction, often concerning historical themes, that quickly won out. He gave up lecturing to become a full-time author and "man of letters".  While his short stories marked him as a brilliant author known for his humanist and utopian ideas, he largely supported himself as a journalist.

Although Sacher-Masoch was well-regarded in literary circles, it was the sexual themes in his later works that have made him so well-known. His plan for a grandiose short story cycle that he called The Legacy of Cain was never completed but the short stories and novels that he did finish revealed his fascination for being physically dominated and abused by women (especially ones that wore fur).   The short novel for which he is best known, Venus in Furs , was published in 1870, and has become an erotic classic in its own right. In this book, the hero Severin asks to be treated as a slave and to be abused by Wanda (the "Venus in furs" of the story). The fact that Sacher-Masoch often acted out these fantasies in real-life with his wives and mistresses was not so well-known since he preferred to keep his private life as private as he could.

Sacher-Masoch was, to put it mildly, displeased when Krafft-Ebbing made him an apostle of sexual perversion. He had gone to great lengths to maintain his public persona as a man of letters and he found this new fame humiliating. Doubly galling was the fact that the word "masochism" took on a life of its own and quickly became an established medical term. It may be a coincidence that his health went into a decline shortly after Psychopathia Sexualis came out but by March of 1895, he was delusional and violent.  After attempting to kill his then-wife Hulda, she arranged for him to be discreetly moved to an asylum in Lindheim, Hesse. Although his official obituary states that he died that year, there are claims that Sacher-Masoch lived on as an anonymous asylum inmate and actually died years later.

Despite his name being a byword for kinky sexuality, the full-extent of Sacher-Masoch's private life only became known in 1906 when his first wife, Aurora, published her memoirs (under the pseudonym of Wanda von Sacher-Masoch). The lurid details generated tremendous controversy and kept his books in the public eye. Despite moral outrage and attempts at censorship over the years, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch has attained a not-so-quiet immortality (but perhaps not the kind that he would have wanted).

What is Your Chronotype?

Evidence is accumulating for the possibility to distinguish more than two distinct chronotypes, i.e., people would be neither morning nor intermediate nor evening types. In a new study published in the journal, Personality and Individual Differences, researchers tried to establish four-type division into distinct chronotypes without implying any chronotypological questionnaire. A community-based online survey (n = 1305) included a visuo-verbal judgment task for evaluating how sleepy a survey participant thinks he/she would be at different randomly presented times.  They predicted that principal component (PC) analysis of 24-h sleepiness curves would yield more than one PC. Consequently, only two types based on PC score would be sleepy in the evening but not in the morning (morning type) and in the morning but not in the evening (evening type), while two other types would be sleepy both in the morning and in the evening and neither in the morning nor in the evening. Results of PC analysis yielded four PCs with the predicted loading patterns. Four distinct patterns of sleepiness curves were identified by dividing participants in accord with scores PC > 1, −1 < PC < 1, and PC < −1. Only 396 participants were of intermediate chronotype (−1 < PC1–PC4 < 1) with a similar to the sample-averaged sleepiness curve, while, like morning and evening types, two further types (named “afternoon” and “napper”) were not uncommon. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)

For the abstract

Can Community Mental Health Initiatives Help India's Mental Health Crisis?

Despite being the second most populous country in the world and having an estimated 150 million people in need of mental health care, the lack of available treatment has left India in crisis.   According to a report by the World Health Organization,  there are only 0.3 psychiatrists, 0.07 psychologists and 0.07 social workers are available per 100,000 population across the entire country with most services being available only in the larger cities.   

Along with people dealing with major mental illness who are going untreated, India also leads the world in cases of child sex abuse and exploitation.  A 2013 study published in the Indian Journal of Psychiatry found that half of all Indian children have faced some form of sexual abuse and one in five have experienced severe forms of abuse, something that has long been ignored or overlooked due to the traditional practice of victim-shaming.  As a result, abused children carry the emotional and physical scars of their abuse long into adulthood and may also perpetuate that cycle of violence with other children.  

To combat the stigma of abuse, as well as providing much-needed mental health care, a coalition of mental health professionals, social workers, and aid organizations are forming community mental health initiatives to identify people willing to work in their own communities and reach out to victims isolated by fear or language differences.  One of these organizations, the Mukthat Foundation (muktha means liberation in English), was formed to provide mental health services as well as crusade for abuse prevention.   Founded by mental health professional Ashwini N.V, , the foundation has launched a series of initiatives to combat abuse and to help victims overcome the mental health issues that stem from that abuse.   

One of the most ambitious of these initiatives is Bhaya Muktha (liberation from fear)  which was launched earlier this year.   In a recent interview, Ashwini talked about the new programme :  "We ran the first phase of programme for three months beginning from January 1 to March 31 this year. Bhaya Muktha covered all 26 states and three union territories of India. We conducted eight programmes each in the capitals of the states and in union territories with different stakeholders including doctors, police, parents, teachers, children and healthcare professionals. We equipped participants to identify symptoms of sexual abuse in children and trained healthcare professionals to use different approaches to counsel the survivors."

But Muktha is not focusing on child sexual abuse alone.   workshops are also being launched to tackle domestic violence, interpersonal violence, dating violence,bullying and cybercrime.   Along with those public workshops, Muktha is also developing certificate programs on interpersonal violence at some of the regional colleges and universities.   Ashwini and her colleagues are also engaged in a research programme called Muktha Abhivyaktha (expressions of liberation) for developing new therapy options for trauma survivors, including using art, theatre, dance, and music to help victims tell their story.

While the Mental Health Care Act recently passed in India formally recognizes the legal right of India's people to receive mental health  care, much more needs to be done.   That includes expanding available services as well as raising public awareness concerning mental health issues and the stigma that still prevents many people from seeking help.    Organizations such as the Muktha Foundation are only the beginning.

 

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The Brain of Eadweard Muybridge

On October 17, 1872,  Major Harry Larkyns received an unexpected visitor.  

A well-known bon vivant, drama critic, and traveler, Larkyns certainly had his share of friends (and enemies) dropping in on him without prior warning.   Still, given that he was visiting the Yellow Jacket mine in Napa Country, Nevada at the time (he had some financial interests there), there was no advance warning of what was about to descent on him.    On answering the door, Larkyns was confronted by a total stranger who simply stated, "Good evening, Major, my name is Muybridge and here's the answer to the letter you sent my wife."  He then shot Larkyns at point blank range. 

While the wound was serious, Larkyns was still able to retreat back into the house where he had been staying.  Muybridge followed him in and was prepared to shoot Larkyns again when several of the other people staying in the house intervened.   Larkyns died soon afterward.   As for the man who shot him, he surrendered to mine officials without any argument and allowed himself to be taken into police custody.   It was only after his arrest that he was identified as Eadweard Muybridge, a professional photographer who had already made a considerable name for himself with his magnificent photographs of Yosemite Valley.   At the time, he had been working for the Bradley and Rulofson photography studio in San Francisco though his most illustrious contributions to photography would occur later in his future.     

As for his motive in killing Larkyn, that apparently stemmed from Muybridge's  recent marriage to 21-year-old Flora Shalcross Stone.  Described by newspapers at the time as a "handsome woman of petite but plump figure",  her marriage to Muybridge likely surprised most people given the age difference (he was 47 at the time).    Despite doting on his new wife,  he was still enraged after discovering that she had been in a long-time relationship with Major Larkyns.   What made it even worse was that Larykns seemed determined to continue that relationship despite knowing about her new marriage.   

There was also the question of Flora's son, Floraldo, born soon after her marriage to Muybridge and whether or not he had been fathered by Larkyns rather than Muybridge as assumed.   Though Muybridge had already warned Larkyns off,  any chance at domestic harmony ended when he discoveredv several graphic love letters that Larkyns had been foolish enough to send Flora.  This precipitated an extremely emotional scene witnessed by his employer, William Herman Rulofson.   As the venerable photographer would later tell police, Muybridge showed him parts of the letters that left no doubt that Flora had been unfaithful.  He also appeared so distraught that Rulofson was afraid that he would kill either Flora or himself.   Instead, having learned of Larkyns' whereabouts somehow,  he immediately left San Francisco and traveled to Calistoga, Nevada and the nearby mine.  The murder happened just hours later.

While awaiting trial for murder, Eadweard Muybridge and his defense counsel already began preparing his defense.   Along with focusing on Flora's infidelity, the defense attorney, W.W. Prendergast had one more card left to play:   a possible insanity plea based on a serious head injury that his client had sustained in an August, 1860 stagecoach accident.   According to one newspaper description of the accident itself, "In his efforts to stop the horses, the driver drove out off the road, and they came in collision with a tree, literally smashing the coach in pieces, killing one man ... and injuringevery other person on the stage to a greater or less extent."   As for Muybridge, he was thrown from the coach and struck a rock or a tree stump.   Along with requiring months to recover, he was also left with a permanent gap in his memory relating to the accident and what happened afterward.  The accident also left him with permanent impairments in his senses of taste and smell.

Though the exact nature of the head injury can't be determined (no diagnostic imaging in those days), later medical historians have suggested that Muybridge sustained permanent damage to the orbitofrontal cortex of his brain's frontal lobe.   Along with the changes to his taste and smell,  he would also demonstrate many of the other signs of this kind of injury seen in similar patients.   This included increased aggression and impulsiveness as well as some of the other peculiar behaviour that he is recorded as displaying in the years that followed.  For example, he would change the spelling of his name repeatedly, beginning with "Edward Muggeridge",  then "Muggridge", "Muygridge" and eventually, "Muybridge"  (his tombstone would later read "Maybridge").  It was also around this time that he changed his name from Edward to Eadweard.  

Recognizing the affect that the accident had on him, Muybridge returned to England and arranged to see Dr. William Gull, prominent neurologist and Queen Victoria's personal physician.  It was Dr. Gull who, recognizing the changes in his patient, first suggested that Muybridge become a photographer (he had been a bookseller up to then).  Taking to this idea right away, he soon educated himself in the basics of photography, including the wet-collodion method that was the choice of most professionals in those days.   He then returned to America and pursued his new career as a nature photographer.  This included compiling spectacular footage of Yosemite and San Francisco which made him world-famous. 

Then came his marriage to Flora, Floredo's birth, and the murder of Harry Larkyns...

While Muybridge emphatically rejected the idea of an insanity plea (he insisted that the murder had been completely justified), Prendergast prepared his case by calling a number of witnesses to testify how his client had changed after the accident.   This included William Rulafson who told the court that he had seen Muybridge do "strange things ... during the period of his acquaintance with him. One thing was, that while Muybridge was a strictly honest man, he would make a bargain or contract with one at night and next morning go back on it in tote and make a new contract. " The witness said he could go on and " fill whole volumes with the peculiar things Muybridge had done . Among the strange freaks which Muybridge had committed was to have his picture taken on a rock at Yosemite valley, where a biscuit, if slightly tilted, would have fallen down 2,000 feet."  Another witness, fellow photographer Silas Selleck, reported that, prior to the accident,  Muybridge was "was active, energetic, strict in all his dealings, open and candid. When he came back he had changed entirely. He was eccentric, peculiar, and had the queerest of odd notions, so much so that he seemed like a different man."   Other witnesses gave similar accounts when they were called to testify.

Ironically though, this testimony hardly mattered in the end.   On February 6, 1875, the all-male jury flatly rejected any hint of insanity and ruled that the murder had been completely justifiable.  This decision was apparently based completely on the  "unwritten law" concerning a husband's right to avenge infidelity which had figured in numerous similar murder cases.  According to one newspaper story about the verdict, "The jury discarded entirely the theory of insanity, and meeting the case on the bare issue left, acquitted the defendant on the ground that he was justified in killing Larkyns for seducing his wife. This was directly contrary to the charge of the Judge, but the jury do not mince the matter, or attempt to excuse the verdict. They say that if their verdict was not in accord with the law of the books, it is with the law of human nature; that, in short, under similar circumstances they would have done as Muybridge did, and they could not conscientiously punish him for doing what they would have done themselves."   

Muybridge's reaction to the verdict was certainly memorable.   In the same news story, "Mr. Pendegast caught him in his arms and thus prevented his falling to the floor, but his body was limp as a wet cloth. His emotion became convulsive and frightful. His eyes were glassy, his jaws set and his face livid. The veins of his hands and forehead swelled out like whipcord. He moaned and wept convulsively, but uttered no word of pain or rejoicing. Such a display of overpowering emotion has seldom, if ever, been witnessed in a Court of justice.... He rocked to and fro in his chair. His face was absolutely horrifying in its contortions as convulsion succeeded convulsion.... Pendegast begged Muybridge to control himself and thank the jurymen for their verdict. He arose to his feet, and tried to speak, but sank back in another convulsion. He was carried out of the room by Pendegast and laid on a lounge in the latter’s office."

Still, despite being a free man, Eadweard Muybridge had to deal with the damage the murder and trial had done to his career.   Almost immediately after his acquittal, he went to Central America on another photography assignment leaving Flora and Floredo to  fend for themselves.   While Flora managed to get a divorce, the court was hardly favourable and, given the publicity surrounding her affair with Larkyns, had few prospects for the future.   Whether or not this contributed to her death soon afterward is impossible to determine at this late date (no cause of death was ever given).    In any event, Muybridge wasted little time in sending Floredo to a Catholic orphanage though, to be fair, he did pay for the child's upkeep.   In any event, he had no further contact with his one-time son.

Muybridge himself soon returned from Central America and went on to establish himself as one of the great pioneers of nature and action photography.   In fact, his work photographing horse gaits also made him one of the early pioneers in stop-motion animation as well.    He was even one of the first to show movie pictures to a paying audience at the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 which, along with his numerous books and lectures, helped cement his reputation.   He retired soon afterward and returned to England to live his final years until his death in 1904.  

As for Floredo, not much is known about him except that he worked most of his life as a ranch hand and gardener.   Ironically enough, the few surviving photographs of him as an adult show a rather strong resemblance to Muybridge which may, or  may not, have been coincidental.   He died in 1944 at the age of seventy and his own opinion about his paternity, and the circumstances surrounding his being placed in an orphanage, are pretty much a mystery.

Did that long-ago accident play a role in Eadweard Muybridge's later life, including the murder of Harry Larkyns?   Despite the evidence raised at his murder trial, it's hard to judge what changes resulted from his head injury based on what little medical data is available.     Though a 2015 article in the journal Neurosurgical Focus raises some intriguing speculations, including exploring the possibility that his amazing artistic ability may have been due to atrophy in the orbitofrontal cortex.   Other patients showing this kind of atrophy have developed new artistic abilities due to their reduced inhibition in expressing emotion through art.  Neurological changes might also explain Muybridge's frequent risk-taking behaviour, including seeking out dangerous assignments and his willingness to take nude photographs of men and women (a scandalous practice in those more conservative times).    Frontal lobe damage might also help explain his obsessive perfectionism which guided his photographic career.  

Speculations aside, there is no disputing that Eadweard Muybridge's contributions revolutionized photography and paved the way for later developments in animation and cinematography.   Whether or not it was a  head injury helped transform an ordinary bookseller into an innovative (not to mention murderous) genius remains a mystery.

Sacrificing Edith

On May 1, 1879, Charles F. Freeman plunged a knife into his five-year-old daughter, Edith,  apparently believing that it was God's will.  As his wife would later testify, he then walked the room with her dead body as he prayed and wept   Afterward, he  took the body to bed with him and kept it with him all night.   On the following morning, Freeman then gathered his fellow worshippers together and proclaimed that God would raise her up on the third day.  

He didn't.

Charles Freeman was a farmer who lived with his wife and two children in the tiny village of Pocasset, Massachusetts (now part of the township of Bourne).   Having converted to  Second Adventistism a year before, Freeman had become a leader among the local believers and was well-known for his fiery sermons.  The Second Adventism movement was a radical offshoot of the Adventist church founded by Willliam Miller in 1844.   After the Great Disappointment, when Miller's apocalyptic predictions failed to materialize, the sect which Charles Freeman joined continued to preach the imminent coming of Christ.   Along with their message of salvation, the Second Adventists also fanatically proclaimed that God would send signs to announce Christ's Second Coming.

As for Charles Freeman, he became convinced that God had a special purpose for him, both as a missionary to the unbelieving and to rally those believers whose faith was lagging.   Believing that he needed to make a great sacrifice to prove God's power, Freeman became inspired by the story of Abraham being called on to sacrifice his son Isaac.   He would later report that, two weeks before Edith's murder, he had heard God commanding him to sacrifice a member of his family.   After discussing this command with his wife (whom he ordered not to "stand in the Lord's way"), the only question remaining was who was to be sacrificed.   As Freeman would later report, though he prayed that he would be the one chosen, he was told in a dream that his daughter, Edith, was the one who had to be killed.   Edith was the youngest in the family and the favourite child which presumably made her the ultimate test of her father's faith.

While his wife Harriet objected to Edith's death,  she gave in eventually when Freeman insisted that God would either reconsider at the last moment (as in the story of Abraham and Isaac), or else Edith would be resurrected on the third day.   After the older daughter, Bessie, was taken out of the room by her mother,  Freeman then carried out his murder plan.

On the following day, Charles Freeman called together all of his fellow sect members and told them what he had done.   While he had described his plan for a great sacrifice, nobody had any idea that he would kill his daughter.   Amazingly enough, the fellow-worshippers declared that Freeman had been right to carry out such an act of faith and praised him for it.   They also agreed that God would raise Edith up on the third day as a sign for the unbelievers. 

What followed was a bizarre "wake" (in every sense of the word) as Freeman and his followers waited for Edith to be resurrected.    In an interview with a local newspaper, Edith's grandmother asked the reporter not to say anything to the surviving child about her sister's death.   The rationale appeared to be that Edith would be resurrected soon enough with no harm done.    When nothing happened on the third day (or afterward), the sect members were genuinely astonished.  Some even went so far as to accuse God of breaking His promise with Freeman by not raising Edith.  Not surprisingly, Charles Freeman had already been arrested for his daughter's murder.

The funeral for Edith Freeman was widely attended.   According to the newspaper description,  the Methodist church where the funeral was held was packed to capacity with hundreds more standing outside the building.   The Adventists were all in attendance, most keeping an eye on Edith's coffin hoping for a last-minute miracle, and the tension between the Adventists and the rest of the community was understandably high.   After the pastor lectured the Adventists on their false beliefs, the new Adventist leader (replacing Freeman who was in jail), Alden P. Davis, was prevented from making a speech under threat of arrest. 

Not deterred, Davis managed to make his speech in the churchyard after the service.   The speech, which contained a stirring endorsement of Charles Freeman and his sacrifice, stirred up the crowd even further, including threats of forming a lynch mob.   While no violence broke out, it was likely a near thing.    Even other evangelists expressed their horror at the murder.  An editorial in the New York Evangelist published shortly afterward stated that,

"We hope that this murderer would be treated as all murderers should be, and that it will not be admitted that religious fanaticism is to justify human sacrifices. The law expressly holds that crime committed while a man is intoxicated as if the man was sober; and so Mormons, Adventists, and Spiritualists should be held responsible for offences against law, notwithstanding their pretended revelations of a higher law. There is no safety in society if any other principle prevails.

Though Harriet Freeman was regarded as a willing participant in Edith's  death, she was later released and Charles Freeman was indicted for murder.  

At a special session of the Supreme Court on January 1880, a sanity hearing was held and several medical experts argued that Freeman was fit to stand trial.  John Davis Long, who was governor of Massachusetts at the time, then ordered Freeman sent to the nearby Danvers Lunatic Hospital where he would be held for the next three years.   In a new sanity hearing held in 1883, Freeman insisted that he fully recognized killing his daughter in a  fit of madness.  Stating that his stay in Danvers taught him enough about mental illness to recognize it in himself, he pointed out in his testimony:

"When I got to Danvers, I found a condition of things with which I was wholly unfamiliar.  I found people there who saw God and had communication with Christ, who believe that they were with Christ, who believed they had special revelations, who interpreted signs.  The question arose in my mind, knowing as I did, that these men were insane, unreliable men, many of them filthy and others treacherous, knowing them to be insane, the question arose in my mind whether I was also not insane."  

During his testimony, Freeman wept openly on the witness stand as he described what had led him to kill his daughter.  "I was sent to the insane hospital. and, as I have just stated, I saw my error," he said. "I regret it as the most dreadful act that was ever perpetrated.  I feel that I have been victimized.  I do not blame any person or persons, but I consider it an unfortunate affair from the beginning and for which perhaps no one person has been responsible." 

The prosecutor questioning him was very careful to point out the legal implication of Freeman giving in to his religious visions.  To that,  Freeman replied that "I thought we ought to obey God rather than man."   As for the question of remorse, Charles Freeman's answer was likely less than what the courts deemed acceptable: "I can not conceive of an honest man feeling remorse if he acts up to the very highest concept of his duty at the time."   He did feel that he had enough of religion and vowed never to return to Pocasset or the Second Adventists   All that his release plan involved was to find a job and to support his wife and remaining daughter. 

Harriet Freeman described her husband as being kind to his children and being a good provider for this family.  After his religious conversion in 1879, everything changed.  Not only did he neglect his business and devote himself to Second Adventistism, he also began experiencing visions telling him to send a message  to the world.. His newfound religious enthusiasm certainly caused problems with the rest of his family (his brother-in-law threatened to shoot him at one point due to his proselytizing).  

The presiding judge declared that he had no doubt over Charles Freeman's fitness to stand trial.   That trial was then held in December of  the same year and the outcome was never in doubt.  Not only did the court hear evidence from several medical experts that Freeman had been insane at the time of the murder but even his defense attorney wholeheartedly agreed that he was insane.   

In her own testimony,  Harriet Freeman provided more details about the vision in which he had been told to sacrifice Edith came after several days of going without food and sleep.  Though she admitted to agreeing with her husband that he needed to sacrifice their young daughter, she defended herself by saying that she could not believe that he would ever hurt Edith.   She regarded it as a test of faith, much like Abraham and Isaac, and that God would stop him from going too far.  Describing how her husband had acted on previous occasions, she said that his faith had been tested in the past and that he would not be allowed to do anything to endanger their children. 

On the night that Edith died however, she was told by her husband that God had asked him to make a great sacrifice.  She then saw him "leave the room, and when he came back he had the child in his arms; it was dead; he walked the room with it and prayed and wept; he took it to bed with him and kept it with him all night; the whole scene is like a terrible dream, which one remembers, but can't distinctly connect, and which, when I try to think of it, seems like an awful recollection." 

Weighing all the evidence, Judge Morton declared that he had never seen such a case in which there was no conflict in the testimony.   Since Charles Freeman faced the death penalty for Edith's murder, the judge fully recommended that the jury find him not guilty by reason of insanity.    The jury agreed and returned that verdict after only ten minutes of deliberation.   Charles Freeman was  sentenced to the Danvers Lunatic Hospital for the rest of his life. 

What little information there is on the Freeman case seems to end with his sentencing.  During his trial, he indicated that he functioned well in the Danvers hospital and seemed resigned to work there in one of the jobs assigned to inmates.  I have been unable to find out what became of him and how long he lived after his sentencing.   As well, the fate of Harriet Freeman and her surviving daughter isn't given either.  

While religious fundamentalism is still widespread, the case of Charles Freeman continues to resonates today.   The religious hysteria that apparently drove him to kill his young daughter has its parallels in similar cases, often involving exorcism to "drive out" evil influences.  Still, the death of Edith Freeman provides important lessons in avoiding other tragedies    Not only in terms of watching for the kind of hallucinations and delusions that can lead to murder, but also the bizarre enabling behaviour shown by Harriet Freeman and her husband's fellow believers.  Would Charles Freeman have committed murder without the support provided by Harriet and the others?  And where to draw the line between religious mania and mental illness?

Questions that need to be asked, time and again.