Sykesville, Maryland, October 1950
Let’s go straight to Helen and that Wednesday night when the fever hit. Her name was Helen Starliper then, but she was born Helen Elizabeth Small in 1913 and grew up in a beautiful place near a dam right on the C&O Canal in Washington County, Maryland.
They called the area Two Locks, and during the first 20 years of her life, Helen’s backyard ended at a rock cliff, thirty or forty feet high, that faced out over the Potomac River toward West Virginia.
But now it was October 1, 1952, sometime before midnight, and Helen hadn’t been home in a long time. For almost a year, she had lain in bed, surrounded by other beds, filled with other women, all much older than she was.
She was in Cottage 5, in a place they called The Colony, when the fever hit. It came on suddenly, and soon she stared out at nothing through wet, glassy eyes. She was hot to the touch and breathing hard. On Thursday morning, her temperature crossed 105 and stayed there, right at the edge of human endurance. Her heart raced 140 times a minute, while nurses worked frantically to bring the fever down.
They put an ice cap on her head. They bathed her with sponges and tepid water and fed her crushed ice. She hadn’t moved much in the past year or so, and her bones had pushed up through her skin, causing bed sores, or what the nurses called “pressure points.” They were open and ugly and painful and spread across her back and down to her buttocks.
They cleaned them with water, peroxide, and something called Balsam Peru. They covered the sores with sterile dressings and bathed them with light from special infrared lamps, two minutes at a time. They fed her small amounts of milk and water and food. She had trouble swallowing and sometimes threw everything back up.
They fed her an antibiotic called Gantrisin, something else for nausea, and Demerol for pain.
She was 39. She had seven children. In July of 1950, when she first arrived at the huge facility where she lay now, she was a different person. She smiled all the time. She ate well. She could walk, at least a bit, in her odd way. She could listen and respond and maybe get out a word or two.
You might say she was older then. She was 36. But for several years, she’d been slipping backward through the phases of human development, and now, like a newborn, she was helpless.
The Colony was actually called the Epileptic Colony, although Helen did not have epilepsy. They also called it Clark Circle in honor of Dr. Clement Clark, the hospital superintendent, who had it built for insane epileptics in the 1920s.
By the time Helen arrived, there were fewer epileptics to care for, but many more patients of every other type, and so they put The Colony to other uses.
The Colony’s still there. It sits in the middle of the Springfield Hospital grounds in Maryland, just outside the town of Sykesville. There are seven buildings in The Colony forming a small circle around a plot of grass.
A respected Baltimore architect named Henry Powell Hopkins designed them. He got to work in 1924 and finished with Cottage 5 in 1938. A lot has changed since then. The hospital is much smaller. The men’s wards up a distant hill from the colony are abandoned, overgrown, and crumbling. The women’s wards are mostly abandoned, and the buildings in the colony are all empty. They form a little ghost village, where weeds push up through cracked macadam and gnarled trees grow tall in the circle of grass. There are old fire hydrants painted white. There’s gravel and big white rocks and broken branches on the grass and the paths.
The cottages are mostly brick. There are two floors. Vines climb up the walls and droop down from rooftops. All the first-floor windows are covered with wood that’s painted white. The doors are locked. Hammered onto each door is a piece of unpainted plywood. Hammered onto the plywood is a hard-plastic sleeve of sorts, and inside the sleeve is a white sheet with words and boxes. Some boxes are checked, which means there’s asbestos inside.
A brick path leads up to the door of each cottage. The bricks are broken and partly covered with weeds. There are white columns on each side of each entryway. Most of the paint has chipped off the columns. The architecture is something called Georgian Revival.
When the fever hit, Helen had been in Cottage 5 nearly a year, mostly in bed, watched over by nurses who worked 12-hour shifts for little pay. The nurses dreaded losing a patient and knew they were in danger of losing Helen. Her pulse was erratic. She gasped for air. She arched her neck and grimaced whenever anyone moved her arms or head.
At midnight on October 4, with her temperature at 104 and her heart beating 96 times a minute, Helen smiled at the nurse taking care of her. The nurse wrote it down.
“Smiled. Resting.”
And then at 8 a.m., with the fever down to 103, her color better, and her heartbeat at 104, the nurse wrote the following in the upper right margin of the paper where she reported Helen’s progress.
“Patient was able to talk.”
That’s all. Five words scribbled 70 years ago, but so frustrating, so intriguing, and maybe something like a small miracle. Because on that night in October of 1952, Helen Starliper could not talk and hadn't done so in a very long time.