1865

Mollie Fancher, dragged by a horse car for a block, conveyed to her house at 160 Gates Avenue, Brooklyn that she would never leave again (Stacey 5ff.) Classic symptoms of hysteria included alternating spasms and trances (44-46), fainting spells, progressive loss of all her senses (49f.), inability to take food or drink (the spasms closed her throat) -- a “mind-numbing progression of seesawing symptoms through the days and nights of the spring of 1866” (50), then a nine-year trance from 1866 to 1875 (63-64) followed by five alternating personalities (DID) (65-68). Her alleged clairvoyance and 12-year fast erupted into public consciousness in the papers of Buffalo, Brooklyn, and NYC in 1878; the breakthrough story, “Dead and Yet Alive!”, appeared in the Sunday New York Sun on 24 November 1878 (90-96); it brought her to the attention of the NY neurologist William Hammond (surgeon general under Lincoln for two years, whose personal conflict with Secretary of War Stanton led to his dishonorable discharge), who became her “chief adversary” (96, 116ff.), who issued two public challenges to her to prove her clairvoyance and her fasting. Stanton was joined by George M. Beard, for whom Fancher was a case of “hysteria of a traumatic origin, with contractures and attacks of ecstasy” (149) or, if not a hysteric, then an intentional deceiver (149-50). Her condition is tantamount to “Victorian anorexia” but not to modern anorexia nervosa, as she lacked an obsession with thinness (184-85).