Mrs Robinson's Disgrace by Kate Summerscale

Author:Kate Summerscale [Summerscale, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2012-04-29T23:00:00+00:00

See Notes on Chapter 9

10

An insane tenderness

Westminster Hall, 15 June 1858

At lunchtime the judges withdrew for refreshment – typically a meat chop and a glass of sherry – and then took up their places on the bench for the afternoon.

Dr Phillimore, having raised the possibility that parts of Isabella’s diary were fictional, still needed to explain to the court what had driven her to invent such degrading scenes. He told the judges that the journal was the product of uterine disease.

‘I will be able to prove,’ said Phillimore, ‘that it is a characteristic of this disease that it produces sexual delusions of a most extravagant character’, making a woman ‘suppose herself guilty of the most horrible, and, indeed, the most impossible crimes’. The illness, he said, sometimes arose from a pressure on the brain, sometimes from malfunction in the uterus itself. To establish this, he said, he would call a number of medical witnesses.

Joseph Kidd was sworn. He was an Irish Quaker, tall, fine-featured and blue-eyed, who had been admitted a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1847 and had taken his medical degree at Aberdeen in 1853. No mention was made in court of the unconventional branch of medicine in which he had trained: he was a homeopathic doctor, like John Drysdale, and had returned to Ireland in 1847, during the Great Hunger, to try to alleviate his countrymen’s suffering with his alternative remedies. When Isabella had first consulted Dr Kidd in Blackheath, he had been twenty-five years old. He was her type: young, handsome, clever, idealistic, open to new ideas.

Kidd testified that Mrs Robinson had been his patient between 1849 and 1856, especially 1849 and the three or four years after that. In 1849, he said, he had treated her for a disorder of the womb. He based his diagnosis on the headaches, depression and irregular menstruation that she suffered after Stanley’s birth, all of which he believed to be manifestations of post-natal uterine disease.

Kidd was asked to describe Mrs Robinson’s temperament.

‘Her general tendency was a morbid excitement,’ he said, an allusion to Isabella’s heightened sexuality. ‘I regarded her as of a naturally morbid and depressed condition. Her mind alternated between excitement and depression.’

Might her uterine disease have produced such symptoms? asked Phillimore.

‘I did not refer them to it at the time,’ said Kidd, ‘but from the statements in the diary, I think they might be attributed to this cause.’

Phillimore asked Kidd whether he was prepared to state that Mrs Robinson had suffered from nymphomania or erotomania since 1852.

He could not testify to that, he said, as she had not been so directly his patient during this period.

Phillimore dismissed Kidd and proceeded to call three more physicians as witnesses. Their task was to confirm that uterine disease, the condition that Kidd had diagnosed, could cause erotomania or nymphomania, the conditions from which Isabella’s counsel claimed that she was suffering.

The first of the specialists was James Henry Bennet, forty-one, a cherubic man with lustrous eyes and luxuriant black hair.

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