That Which Steals Men's Brains

When I was a little girl spending the summer months in our family home in the Berkshires, I would, on rainy days—and days following a “fight” with the neighbor kids—ramble around the twenty-room house, spending hours in the many walk-in closets opening boxes, sorting through the contents, uncovering the layers of life that had inhabited the home before me.

George Gilson Merrill
as a young man

When I was about ten I found a photo of a coffin with a man in it. I was transfixed, not only because I had never seen a dead man before, but because this coffin was in that very same house, in the very same spot where I was sitting in the small addition of the “other” living room framed by an arched entryway. I would sit for hours at a time at the secretary desk there, leafing through old books and sorting through the contents of the two small and three large drawers filled with a century of belongings. That particular photo was of my then deceased great-grandfather George Gilson Merrill, a foggy to me, yet prominent figure in my mother’s family. The moment I found this visual memorial, my understanding of the complexity G.G. Merrill began to deepen.

In 1871, thirty-five year old George Merrill built the house where I spent my childhood summers. Understandably, because of the time period, not many photos exist of him, nor more than a handful of letters penned by his hand. I have only the words of others writing about him to unravel the complicated man he was. The mystery of George Merrill’s life and death lay in the depths of my mind for decades. He died on March 13, 1912 at the age of seventy-six after years of back-breaking labor as a stone mason, bridge builder, and general contractor. I asked my mom about the strange photo. She told me that her grandfather had died of “hardening of the liver” and that the funeral took place in the house.

“Hardening of the liver? How does that happen?”

“It’s called cirrhosis,” my mother told me. “That’s when you drink too much alcohol and it makes your liver hard,” she explained in the simplest terms she knew.

Alcoholism. The word always ruminated in my mind.

At about the same time, my dad’s brother was fighting (and eventually overcame) the demons of alcohol; rather than hide it, my parents were open about his struggles.

Alcoholism. Something to fear. Something to be cautious of.

So…I knew what drinking too much alcohol meant. At least to the degree my young brain could process.

Alcoholism. Something to remember.

I took my mother’s explanation in and thought about it for a while, then went out to play with the kids next door.

Still, George Merrill’s cause of death sat in the recesses of my mind, coming to consciousness every so often.

Forty-five-ish years later I recalled the photo of the man in the coffin and my mother’s explanation. Now able to access death records from the comfort of my upstairs office, I discovered that G.G. (as I affectionately refer to him now to differentiate him from his son George) actually died of something completely different.

Arteriosclerosis. Hardening of the arteries.

Not Cirrhosis. Hardening of the liver.

The truth, I thought to myself, was probably somewhere in between. I laid aside the information, accepting that the reference to his drinking was possibly a misinterpretation. Like a child’s game of telephone, the exact words related to G.G.’s death had, maybe, been twisted and turned and made their way to the 1970s in a very different form.

I was recently reading through and scanning letters saved from the old house. These particular ones were from the 1890s. I was going through any written by G.G.’s wife Emma and their children—Alice, Georgie, Philip, Roy, and Eddie—written to Arthur, who was away at Williams College. I wanted to better understand their daily life and was also trying to uncover clues about the history of the old house—the same one I spent so many of my summers in.

Emma was the family writer, for the most part. Often a letter from ten-year old Alice would be included with her mother’s. The boys wrote sporadically. G.G. rarely wrote.

I came to a letter postmarked Oct 10, 1895 Lexington, Mass. and addressed to Mrs. G.G. Merrill. This stuck out. Upon opening it and seeing the letterhead, my brain raced like it was being sucked through a deep tunnel at a hundred miles per hour to the word my mom had first introduced me to fifty years earlier: cirrhosis.

The letter had been written on stationary emblazoned at the top with “The Keeley Institute Dr. Leslie E. Keeley's Double Chloride of Gold Remedies for Nervous Diseases Inebriety. Neurasthenia. Morphine, Tobacco AND ALL OTHER DRUG ADDICTIONS.” Still, I couldn’t quite get my thoughts wrapped around what I was looking at. Did G.G. have a contracting job at this location? He often traveled for construction jobs, and although Lexington would have been a little far from his usual territory, it was, in fact, somewhat near his sister Maria's home in Lowell.

Nothing in the initial letter mentioned anything about his purpose there, although I did note his spelling and scrawled writing were most defintely slurred. "Arived here 6:30 last nigt found 15 pates all having a good tim as nice set of men as ofen seen on ur siting rom is 36x75 feet fire pits lake 4 feet round…it is improper to be home sick here."

Was this a job? Was this rehab? In 1895? Was this really a thing? It was, in fact, a trend—some likely even called it a fad.

Leslie Keeley (1836–1900), a graduate of Rush Medical College in Chicago and then a doctor in

Dwight, Illinois, collaborated with Irish immigrant chemist John R. Oughton to create a so-called cure for alcoholism—the Keeley Double Gold Cure. “In mates” (as George Merrill himself described the patients) reportedly received four daily injections of this gold cure, which apparently did not contain any gold but rather a good deal of alcohol, ammonium chloride, tincture of cinchona, aloin, strychnine, boric acid, and atropine…many of the ingredients we use for insecticides today. The idea, it seems, was to keep alcohol, or whatever their vice might have been, available to the patients while simultaneously making them sick all day, every day for four weeks. It likely “worked” because the patients were too sick to desire any alcohol or whatever their drug of choice was.

A positive effect that Dr. Keeley likely introduced, however, was that alcoholism, as well as other addictions, is a disease and not a moral breakdown of the individual, as most medical professionals at the time believed. While Keeley downplayed the importance of group therapy and healthy living in favor of his Gold Cure, both did play a significant role in the daily lives of his patients and likely had an influence on the methods of later addiction recovery groups like Alcoholics Anonymous.

Yes, George G. Merrill was in Lexington to be “cured.”

He had most certainly struggled with the decision to leave his family and his business. Emma was very honest and open when she wrote to Arthur that month. “It was hard for him to make up his mind to go but I think he knew his weakness and will be cured. The doctor says he will. He has changed very rapidly this summer and was not capable of managing his business.”

Like most patients, G.G. stayed at the Keeley Institute for four weeks. He left on Wednesday, October 6, 1895. Emma met him at Lexington along with his sister Rosabella, who had stayed the entire four weeks in nearby Lowell so she could visit him regularly. “I need not tell you how thankful we are to see the father ‘himself’ again. He is every way improved and I hope has got the victory over that which ‘steals men's brains.’”

The candor with which Emma discusses G.G.’s situation with her children is eye opening. It is evident from family discussions that he had not been hiding nor able to mask the depth of his addiction. Twenty-one-year-old Georgie conveyed the transformation to Arthur, “Papa is home now…he is very much better and you would not know him for the same man.”

Despite all the openness during G.G’s stay at Keeley, after he returned home (and thereafter) neither Emma, nor any other family member, made any reference to George G. Merril’s apparent recovery nor

The same nook where G.G. Merrill
lay in his coffin

any potential relapses. Even that photo of G.G. in a coffin is nowhere to be found today.

Of course whispers were passed on from his children to their children. It may even be the reason why Eddie’s son Edward told me that his father (a chemist) decided to study “anything his father didn’t know anything about.” Alice, as a ten-year old child, must have witnessed the worst of her father’s alcohol abuse at such an impressionable age. But, of course we don’t glorify the history which paints our loved ones in a bad light. Thus, there is no mention in his obituary of G.G.’s struggles. It contained only the facts about what well-known bridges and buildings he built, not the construction jobs he lost out on nor the months or years he couldn’t function.

While G.G. and Emma did speak about and fight his addiction openly—at least openly within the family—once the ordeal was done it was done and tucked away. Whispers maybe continued. “Hardening of the liver,” was likely said softly so that it wafted to the future like an aroma we couldn’t quite identify, until it nearly dissipated. It was nearly forgotten, only softly hinted at, because they stopped talking about it when they thought it was all fixed.

On Thanksgiving Day, 1895, Emma clearly misses Arthur’s presence at their table but shares her thoughts about his father’s recovery. “Thankful for the Father restored in mind and body to the former condition of years gone by. Money is nothing to the comfort of having him able to think and judge once more.”

The story of this difficult time may not have made it to the future had it not been for that photo. It might not have left a mark on future generations had Emma, and then Alice, not put all of those letters into a box, then placed that box with other family keepsakes into a larger steamer trunk left untouched for seventy years, to be found by another little ten-year-old girl in that same house, who could then talk about it with her children.