Was Everything Legit in Worcester, "The Heart of the Commonwealth"?

A 1910 dispatch from Massachusetts raises serious questions about early lobotomies, and other things.

“Worcester, Mass., Polytechnic Institute”

Postmark:

Worcester, Mass.

May 18

4 PM

1910

“Miss Doris Blodgett

Kellyville

NH

Box 48.”

“From a

Friend in

Worcester Mass

The Quack Doctors City 

and the meanest

place on earth.”

Whoa, Anonymous! That’s quite a charge!

The Easy Interpretation:

a) Since there’s no personalized greeting or goodbye — no “Dear Doris”…”Best, Louise” — the women were probably close (the author’s handwriting is definitely female). In 1910, it’d be the equivalent of familiarly texting her best friend bitching about a bad day.

b) Since the reference to “Quack Doctors” was coupled with calling Worcester the “meanest place on earth,” it seems likely that the author — let’s call her “Louise” because we already have — had an unpleasant thing happen to her pertaining to a medical issue, and wanted to vent to her pal because her complaints about the doc and his staff were rudely dismissed.  

c) It’s pretty unlikely she really meant that all of Worcester was a “mean” city; “The Heart of the Commonwealth” in 1910 was a prestigious college town (Clark, as well as Worcester Polytechnic Institute), with factories humming. A few years later Worcester would receive an award for its manufacturing performance during World War I. In 1913, it would unveil the grandest train station in Massachusetts, if not New England.  

Unless…

The less likely but more intriguing: 

a) The photograph is clearly of an insane asylum, and had been mislabeled at the factory. WPI would sue and get a settlement from the printer, THE HUGH C. LEIGHTON CO., MANUFACTURERS, PORTLAND, ME. U.S.A.

b) She wrote the message on a diagonal, which most people don’t. It could be seen as an expression of a creative mind — the kind of mind that, studies have shown, is likelier to become prey to demons.

c) She’d been an inpatient at the hospital with depression issues for five years when the Behavioral Health Wing hired a gaunt-faced, imperious, sadistic graduate of the Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine to take over the BH department on the strength of his tabloid-press reputation as a proponent of a controversial new treatment for depression. 

d) After the writer’s best friend came back from the doctor’s lab with the personality of a slug on qualuudes, and the doctor then told her she’d be his next patient, and not to worry, it was a simple procedure which involved sliding an ice pick up into the prefrontal lobe through the orbital cavity and poking around a little, she easily jimmied the wire cage over her window, dropped to the ground, and escaped to a women’s shelter, where a sympathetic administrator got her a day job at the library.

d) A few week’s research in medical journals turned up a bio of the man, Dr. Tennyson Blodgett, born in Kellyville, New Hampshire. A few weeks’ more research revealed the name and address of her daughter Doris.

e) She then pencilled the ominous “From a friend in Worcester, Mass.” intro, with its obvious subtext: “I’m not a `friend.’” Your dangerously demented father and I crossed paths in Worcester. Needless to say, this town is a very, very mean place where bad things often happen to bad people unless monetary remuneration is involved.”