Sensational by Kim Todd (good short books .txt) 📗

As it turned out, San Francisco also needed an ambulance. Hospital trips in the police wagon featured wrenching bumps. A carriage ride might take an hour. On Christmas Day 1889, a man hit his head on the cobblestones on Montgomery Street. By the time he got to the City Receiving Hospital, he had to go to the morgue instead. The next day, another man had a fit and died on the way to the hospital. A week into the New Year, timbers fell on a third man, who suffered internal injuries and broken bones. He didn’t make it to a doctor. Neither did a fourth, who had shot himself.

But if they had survived, more trouble awaited them at this particular hospital, an emergency facility next to the jail. Rumors suggested things were particularly bad for women. Like those locked in an insane asylum, nameless patients were at the mercy of the system—often unconscious or too sick to advocate for themselves. A local doctor, “simply sick of hearing these things continually related of the Receiving Hospital,” kept dropping in unannounced, but couldn’t catch anyone misbehaving. Some contacted the newspapers, relating “queer doings” suffered by a friend. Other times, the victims approached the Examiner themselves. As usual, the precise nature of the problem was obscured. “Young girls wandered in with ugly stories,” Winifred Sweet recalled.

And so, on a drizzly Friday afternoon, January 17, 1890, Winifred Sweet slipped on a worn dress, put a dime and several help-wanted ads in an old purse, asked a doctor friend to administer belladonna eye drops to widen her pupils so she seemed ill, and got on a streetcar. Disembarking at Kearny and Market, she put her acting training to good use, weaving and pretending to feel weak. A police officer ignored her. A passerby suggested she head home. Staggering down the sidewalk, she eyed a cluster of men around a cigar shop, and a pile of boxes that might cushion her landing and keep her out of the mud. But she hesitated. As she wrote later: “I kept walking away from it and then back again. I thought I’d have to give it up—that I hadn’t the courage to do anything so dreadful. But I knew that it was my duty as a reporter to go through with it and that if I wasn’t ready for such things I had better choose another business.”

As she wavered, one of the cigar-shop men asked if she was ill.

“I am so sick—oh, my head,” she said, then took a breath, clenched her teeth, and fell. He caught her before she hit the boxes.

The man carried her into a doorway, where a crowd gathered, trying to revive her. One offered to call a carriage. People generally took such good care of her, she worried she’d never make it to the hospital and the stunt would be ruined. But when the police showed up, they dragged her back outside and put her in a covered police wagon, the same one used to take prisoners to jail. The ride was uncomfortable, but she finally arrived at the Receiving Hospital. Here, though she followed Ada’s playbook, things began to veer from the script.

At first, they checked for sobriety.

“I can’t smell any whiskey,” said the policeman.

“Say, did you take opium?” asked someone else.

Smelling her breath and determining she wasn’t drunk, the medical student and nurse wondered whether she’d been poisoned. She should drink hot mustard water to throw up. Sweet resisted, but they held her nose and forced her head back against the chair until she swallowed some, leaving her teary-eyed and retching.

The assistant police surgeon, Dr. Harrison, a tall man with a scarred face and surly expression, came in.

“What’s the matter with her; is she poisoned?” Dr. Harrison asked.

“We don’t know, Doctor. We’re just giving her an emetic on general principles,” one of the caretakers said. “But we can’t get her to take it.”

“Give her a good thrashing and she’ll take it,” the doctor said. Then he gripped her head so hard she screamed, then grabbed her shoulder, scraping the skin off, and threw her down on a cot.

“Let her lie there, and if she makes any fuss, strap her down,” he added, and left.

If there’s any doubt about her sister’s invisible hand pushing her out into the street, there’s the name Winifred gave when asked for identification by hospital staff: “Annie Myers,” the same one used by Nora Marks in Chicago. Winifred’s article, with the byline “Annie Laurie” (like Bly’s pseudonym, taken from a song), ran under the headline “A City’s Disgrace.” Unlike Marks’s ambulance-focused story, though, Winifred’s article underscored the vulnerability of female public hospital patients at the hand of abusive male doctors.

In the aftermath, Dr. Harrison revealed himself as even worse than Annie Laurie’s account described. When another journalist confronted Dr. Harrison about Sweet’s report, the doctor said, “She was treated right, and she’ll get the same treatment again if she comes here.”

“For what was she treated?”

“Hysteria,” Harrison said. When pressed, he added that forcing a patient to drink hot mustard and water was the proper treatment, “that or a good, strong cathartic or an injection of spirits of turpentine.” In the face of the reporter’s astonishment, he doubled down: “Yes, anything to give her something else to think about. . . . The best thing for a young woman like that is______.” Regarding the blank space, the reporter commented, “The suggestion that Dr. Harrison made is not printable. It was couched in language such as one would expect from an inmate of a drunk cell.”

A rival paper, which knew the rumors of hospital abuses, editorialized that “all the numerous complaints made recently against the Receiving Hospital are to be visited on Harrison, who will be presented as a burnt offering to the indignant public.” Maybe so. When he showed up to the Examiner offices to question their motives in running the story, the city editor punched him in the face. After pressure from the governor and questions from doctors