Medicine: Case of Jeanne Eagels

Actress Jeanne Eagels, restless and intemperate, died last October in Manhattan at the Park Avenue Hospital, a private psychotherapeutic sanitarium. Last week the New York Daily Mirror revealed, for the first time, the official findings of her autopsy. An overdose of heroin killed her. The Daily Mirror’s article was a piece of journalistic enterprise designed to vex the publishers of the New York Daily News, its rival, and of the nickel weekly Liberty. For Liberty the week before had commenced a vivid, sympathetic biography of Jeanne Eagels, “genius and drunkard—artist and hellion—poet and devil—she battled to the stars!” Liberty’s article said she died of a dose, not an overdose, of chloral hydrate, not heroin. The distinction: heroin is an out law, habit-forming narcotic. Chloral hydrate is a non-habit-forming, much-used hypnotic.

Revival of the case of Jeanne Eagels focused attention on her physician, Dr. Edward Spencer Cowles, 51, neurologist, psychiatrist, son-in-law of William Gibbs McAdoo, proprietor of the Park Avenue Hospital. A licensed physician since 1907, Dr. Cowles is not considered “orthodox.” He is not a member of any local or state medical society, nor of the American Medical Association. Nor does the A. M. A. accept his sanitarium for its register of hospitals. Nevertheless his personality, his shrewdness, his results have won him many a famed and wealthy patient and his little stucco establishment between two churches on upper Park Avenue is both, prominent and profitable.

On the case of Jeanne Eagels he was positive last week. Said he sharply: “I had treated Miss Eagels for almost ten years and never knew of her taking any drugs. Any story that drugs caused her death or contributed to her death is false.”