Word: sanitarium
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Lilith, in ancient Babylonian mythology, was a female embodiment of evil. In J. R. Salamanca's gaudy, gothic 1961 novel she was a wildly desirable schizophrenic whose corruptive beauty disrupted the routine of a private sanitarium. In Director Robert Rossen's movie version of the book, she is Jean Seberg, who enjoys an unholy liaison with a young therapist-in-training, lures an inmate toward destruction, steals away with a lesbian patient, and occasionally whispers improprieties into the ears of small boys...
...Defense is Nabokov's version of one of the most dependable items (almost as obligatory as the one about a tuberculosis sanitarium) in the repertory of the young European romantic after World War I. It is the story of a genius chess player who is at last driven insane by his obsession with the game. Aleksandr Ivanovich Luzhin is an unappealing, neurasthenic child who finds refuge from an incomprehensible world in the ordered clarity of the chessboard. The child prodigy grows to be a grand master and to play for the world championship-only to crack up from fatigue...
...Psychiatrist Gotthard Booth, who has been administering psychological tests to ministerial candidates for 24 years. Since the fulfillment of the deep need that impelled them to seek the ministry often has a balancing effect on mentally disturbed ministers, said Dr. Booth, many churchmen find in clerical garb "an ambulatory sanitarium." But a good minister, said Dr. Brown, may operate successfully while driving his wife "to the brink of psychosis and his children into neurotic reactions." Concluded Booth reassuringly: "There is some evidence that serious 'nervous breakdowns' occur less frequently in the clergy than in the average population, only...
...Drifter. Carpenter's father, a chemist, and his mother separated soon after Scott was born. Stricken with tuberculosis, his mother went into a Colorado sanitarium, and Carpenter was raised in Boulder, Colo., by his maternal grandfather, Editor Victor Noxon of the Boulder County Miner and Farmer. (The Noxon house stood on Aurora Street, a name that Carpenter later was to borrow for his space capsule.) The old man gave the boy his first lesson in self-reliance: how to live by hunting and fishing in the mountains of Colorado...
...Noxon died when Carpenter was 14. Although his mother was out of the sanitarium by this time, she was still too tired to ride herd on the boy, and Scott cut loose. He told a LIFE reporter: "The local papers that say I was just a normal boy are trying to think of something not bad to say. I had a wonderful time, but I was a real rounder. I didn't study hard, and I had to quit high school football because I couldn't devote myself to learning the plays. I stole things from stores...