Dr john lemuel murray willis (1 risultati)

Concord and Boston, Mass.; New York; and elsewhere, 18971921. Approximately 628 pages of autograph and typed letters signed (ALSs and TLSs). Various sizes, mostly 4to and 8vo. Fold lines; overall very good condition. Archive of 628 letters received by Dr. John Lemuel Murray Willis (18561924), physician of Eliot, Maine. The most important facet of this archive centers on the mental health crisis and institutionalization of Sarah Jane Farmer (18471916), whose religious beliefs and public role as founder of the Green Acre Bahá'í School shaped both her treatment and the responses of those around her. The collection includes firsthand correspondence from Transcendentalist biographer Franklin B. Sanborn (18311917), along with letters from fellow physicians, concerned friends, and advocates seeking Farmer's release and legal protection during her prolonged and contested institutionalization. A native of Eliot, Maine and Sanborn friend, Sarah Jane Farmer came from a Transcendentalist family aligned with abolitionism and other progressive causes. She joined her physician, Dr. John Lemuel Murray Willis (18561924), and others in 1890 to open a hotel in Eliot named "Green Acre," a title suggested by poet John Greenleaf Whittier. By 1894, Farmer dedicated Green Acre to the ideals of peace and the comparative study of religions. She instituted a series of Green Acre Conferences, there flying the first-ever peace flag. After traveling to Palestine and a conversion to the Bahá'í faith, Farmer founded what would become the Green Acre Bahá'í School. By 1909, Farmer began to experience symptoms of mental illness. Her longtime physician, Dr. Willis, became enmeshed in efforts to institutionalize her. Friends such as Sara Bull and Sanborn pleaded for more humane treatment. Sanborn, acting as her legal representative, accused Willis of concealing her condition from specialists and misleading authoritiescharges reflected in a series of scathing letters. Sanborn's accusations culminated in Farmer's transfer to McLean Hospital without the knowledge of her Boston circle. In the Spring of 1910, friend of Farmer's, Sara C. Bull, wrote to Dr. Willis about Farmer receiving treatment in Bengal, Maine. A typed copy of her letter noting, "It seems to me Bengal promises new conditions with skill and as good care as elsewhere? The miracle of Miss Farmer's spiritual nature overcoming the psychic and physical disease may occur" By mid-1911 Farmer suffered a mental "attack" of some kind. Five letters by Franklin B. Sanborn demonstrate his involvement as Farmer's power-of-attorney in protecting her interests from caregivers, guardians, and even from her personal physician, Dr. Willis. Two letters from Louise Chapman Hotchkiss seek the help of Dr. Willis and Dr. Edward S. Cowles, a proprietor of a psychotherapeutic sanatarium in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to find her suitable living arrangements: "Six months agoshe was was violent, noisy and destructivefor three or four days. Since then the "attacks" have grown wilder; until she now passes through them (she has had four) the nurse informs me, almost without losing conscious control. So you can see that any rational and unprejudiced mind must entertain large hope for Miss Farmer's still greater improvement" In July 1913, Franklin B. Sanborn, wrote to Dr. Willis excoriating him for his poor treatment of Farmer: "You will remember that, more than three years ago, I wrote you, strongly urging you to see that Miss Farmer was put under the care of experts in insanity, from which malady she had been suffering for at least a year. Her malady was then increased by being restrained under improper care in her own new house [Farmer] has now told me what happened soon after. She says that Dr. Brownrigg of the Highland Sanitarium at Nashua came down to see her in her house, apparently at your suggestion; that she was then in one of her lucid intervals, and that he was not informed that she had attacks of violent mani. …