Word: venner
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First, let's not do another cover on the McCarthy man. The last one looked like Rocky Marciano, or something. Liked the idea of roasting the old boy, but maybe we let him off too easy. Take the piece about the janitor and Senator Mac Venner. That could have been a pretty funny situation, but somehow it turned into a Ray Bradbury science fiction with everything from flying saucers to atomic cocktails. I think we might have missed an opportunity to really blast those damn investigations...
...schoolmistress he recalled: "Her nose was peculiarly privileged and honored, for it bore two spectacles. The locks which strayed from her close mobcap were most evidently the growth of other times." Clucking sympathetically, Oliver Wendell Holmes struck a similar note. The teacher he described in Elsie Venner was "a poor, overtasked, nervous creature-we must not think too much of her fancies...
...Holmes novels, Elsie Venner, The Guardian Angel and A Mortal Antipathy, seem morbid, sententious, very unlike his other writings. All three deal with characters on the borderline of insanity. Contemporary critics called them "medicated novels." This description is favorably endorsed by Clarence P. Oberndorf of Columbia University, past president of the American Psychoanalytic Association. In The Psychiatric Novels of Oliver Wendell Holmes (Columbia University Press; $3) he finds clear evidence that Holmes was 100 years ahead of his time...
Psychic Suicide. Elsie Venner is Holmes's most interesting and hardest case. Holmes's analysis of her "psychic suicide" is a model of modern psychiatric thinking. His account of her symptoms (a stiff, frozen demeanor, withdrawal into herself, occasional wild behavior) was a precise description of schizophrenia-though the word and disease were unknown in Holmes...
...main emphasis of his Holmes of the Breakfast-Table is on Holmes as a forerunner of the moderns-the cool-headed doctor who not only wrote a medical classic on puerperal fever, but occasionally, as in Elsie Venner, anticipated Freud; the science popularizer whose Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table came nearer to Darwin than to the Transcendentalists; the author of The Professor, the awkward but potent anti-Calvinist Babbitt...