Medicine: Regressive Lady

The Tucker Sanatorium in Richmond, Va. occupies a mansion where President James Monroe once lived. Still nourishing is a grapevine which Monroe imported from France and planted himself. Dr. Beverley Randolph Tucker, Richmond’s leading neurologist, is a descendant of several First Families of Virginia. He took over the property in 1915. Thither, four years ago, was carried a strange patient, a delicate, wistful-eyed old Richmond lady who would not grow old. Her body, dressed as a little girl, was 61 years of age. Her mind and behavior were not more than seven.

As a patient, eloquently reported Dr. Tucker last week on one of the strangest cases ever printed in the Virginia Medical Monthly, “She was a nice little girl in short dresses rocking in her chair. She lead simple things but rather badly; she craved attention; she laughed sometimes and at others she would cry a little. She talked childishly, pleasantly or was mischievous and delighted in trying to play jokes on or fool the doctors and nurses.

She would play with objects as if they were toys. When her children came to see her she would act as if she was their child.

“In a few months she was three or four years of age. Her enunciation became less distinct, she was careless with her spoon, spilling food, and had to be assisted with her feeding, she would prattle at times and occasionally she soiled herself. She had ceased to read and would have crawled around on the floor had the nurse so permitted.

“In several months more she was in bed moving her hands and feet aimlessly, often whining and crying like a very young child and the only articulation one could understand was her frequent calling for ‘Mamma, Mamma,’ although her mother had passed to the ‘great beyond’ some thirty years before. The patient would take a towel or any cloth, roll it up and hug it to her as if it were a rag doll. She now required liquid nourishment because she would not chew, and soon she had to be fed liquids with a spoon, taking them with a sucking movement. She also would suck the corner of her gown or sheet. She began to soil herself regularly and had to be changed without giving any assistance, the nurse using large cloths in the manner of diapers. She would eat, sleep, make peculiar noises and cry. She liked to be fondled and handled by almost anyone. Her only recognition of her family was an expression of delight when they came to see her.

“At about four months of age she left the sanatorium much to our regret for this infant had become the pet of the nurses and doctors. She had been with us six months. . . . She continued to regress until she assumed the foetal posture, breathing gently being her only movement. At this time she was sent to a State hospital where soon she was gathered into the womb of her mother earth to which we all regress soon or late.”

Her environment, explained Dr. Tucker, had been the protected environment of the better class in Virginia during the period shortly after the War of Secession. “She had therefore been rather petted, spoiled, admired, waited upon and had attained a fair non-collegiate education and had acquired a few cultural parlor accomplishments. From this sheltered unmarried life she had been lovingly transferred into the strong, protective, matrimonial arms of an adoring husband. Her husband was a corporation official, intelligent, efficient, alert, but at the same time exceedingly gentle toward and proud of his rather fragile and beautiful young wife. . . .

“Her husband himself did or had done for her all the chores. He provided for her a house, servants, comforts and what luxuries he could afford. He relieved her from all responsibility, smoothed out her annoyances and managed her personal affairs even to details. She told me she had never bought a railway ticket, that her husband always procured for her a drawing room, that he escorted her on every trip, that he assisted her in picking out her hats and her dresses and that in fact he had been an ideal husband.

“Then in life’s prime he died and she was faced with handling the estate and directing the three, then adolescent, children. The situation seemed appalling to her although the estate was ample and the children all that could be desired. She began to feel that she should be younger in order to better understand the children and to be more companionable with them. So, when the usual period of mourning was over, she dressed and decorated herself as a younger woman would. … It was not long before she gave the children considerable anxiety by becoming herself an adolescent and they had to direct her goings out and comings in, to try to persuade her that her clothes were entirely too youthful, and to induce her to converse less flippantly. But the mother continued to get younger. . . .”