A Dreamer & A Visionary; H.P. Lovecraft in His Time

For a year past he has shown obscure symptoms of mental disease—doing and saying strange things at times; has, also, grown pale and thin in flesh. He continued his business, however, until Apr. 21, when he broke down completely while stopping in Chicago. He rushed from his room shouting that a chambermaid had insulted him, and that certain men were outraging his wife in the room above. He was extremely noisy and violent for two days, but was finally quieted by free use of the bromides, which made his removal here possible. We can get no history of specific disease.

Upon Winfield’s death in 1898, the medical record diagnosed him as having ‘General Paralysis’; his death certificate listed the cause of death as ‘general paresis’. In 1898 (and, for that matter, today) these terms were virtually synonymous. What was not then known —and would not be known until 1911—was the connection between general paresis and syphilis. Although general paresis was a kind of catch-all term for a variety of ailments, M. Eileen McNamara, M.D., studying Winfield’s medical record, has concluded that the probability of Winfield’s having tertiary syphilis is very strong. Winfield displayed nearly all the symptoms of tertiary syphilis as identified by Hinsie and Campbell in their Psychiatric Dictionary (4th ed., 1970):

(1) simple dementia, the most common type, with deterioration of intellect, affect and social behavior; (2) paranoid form, with persecutory delusions; (3) expansive or manic form, with delusions of grandiosity; or (4) depressive form, often with absurd nihilistic delusions.¹²

The medical record clearly bears out at least the first three of these symptoms: (1) on 28 April 1893 ‘the patient … broke out violently this morning—rushed up and down the ward shouting and attacked watchman’; (2) 29 April 1893: ‘says three men—one a negro—in the room above trying to do violence to his wife’; 15 May 1893: ‘believes his food is poisoned’; 25 June 1893: ‘looks upon the officers and attendants as enemies and accuses them of stealing his clothing, watch, bonds, &c.’; (3) under the heading ‘Mental Condition’: ‘boasts of his many friends; his business success, his family, and above all his great strength—asking writer to see how perfectly his muscles are developed’. For the fourth symptom—depression—the record is not sufficiently detailed to make a conjecture.

If, then, it is admitted that Winfield had syphilis, the question is how he contracted it. At this point, of course, we can only indulge in conjecture. McNamara reminds us that the ‘latent period between inoculation and the development of tertiary syphilis is ten to twenty years’, so that Winfield ‘might have been infected as early as eighteen or as late as twenty-eight, well before his marriage at age thirty-five’.¹³ It is, unfortunately, exactly this period of Winfield’s life about which nothing is known. It is difficult to doubt that Winfield contracted syphilis either from a prostitute or from some other sex partner prior to his marriage, either while attending the military academy or during his stint as a ‘Commercial Traveller’, if indeed that began so early as the age of twenty-eight. (The conjecture that Lovecraft himself might have had congenital syphilis is disproved by the fact that the Wassermann test he was given during his own final illness was negative.)

The course of Winfield’s illness makes horrifying reading. After the first several months the entries become quite sporadic, sometimes as many as six months passing before a notation is made. Occasionally there are signs of improvement; sometimes Winfield seems to be failing, and toward the end of 1895 it was thought that he had only days to live. A few times he was permitted to go about the ward or take some air in the yard. His condition began to decline markedly by the spring of 1898. By May he had developed constipation and required an enema every three days. On 12 July he had a temperature of 103° and a pulse of 106, with frequent convulsions. On 18 July he ‘passe[d] from one convulsion into another’ and was pronounced dead the next day.

The trauma experienced by Susie Lovecraft over this excruciating period of five years—with doctors ignorant of how to treat Winfield’s illness, and with periods of false hope where the patient seems to recover only to lapse into more serious physical and mental deterioration—can only be imagined. When Susie herself was admitted to Butler Hospital in 1919, her doctor, F. J. Farnell, ‘found disorder had been evidenced for fifteen years; that in all, abnormality had existed at least twenty-six years’.¹⁴ It is no accident that the onset of her ‘abnormality’ dates to 1893.