Show Notes
In February of 1969 a man stood in a telephone booth on a public street, coins ready, and asked to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital. He said he had been hearing an unfamiliar voice. As far as he could make out, it said three words: empty, hollow, thud. Everything else he told them was true. He was perfectly well.
Eight people did that, across twelve hospitals in five states. Every door opened. The moment they were inside they stopped pretending — said the voices had gone, behaved exactly as they behaved anywhere else — and it changed nothing. They stayed between seven and fifty-two days. They took notes in the open, for weeks, and one nursing chart recorded the activity, entry after entry, as "patient engaged in writing behavior."
The other patients saw through them. On the wards where counts were kept, thirty-five of a hundred and eighteen said out loud that the newcomer did not belong. The staff, trained and paid to make that judgment, went twelve for twelve the other way.
Nine pages in Science, in January 1973, ending on a sentence that went round the world: it is clear that we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals. Thirteen days later the American Psychiatric Association's board met in Atlanta over what to do about it.
Tonight is that study, told the way the world received it — and then what happened afterward, which almost nobody has heard.
Robert Spitzer answered it in 1975, with seventy-one references and an argument that has never been refuted: a man who swallows blood and walks into an emergency room proves nothing about internal medicine. He won that argument. He simply lost the story.
And forty-three years later, to the day, the filing cabinet was opened. Of the eight pseudopatients, only two can be found. The author's own admission record does not match the account he published. The clever second experiment has no hospital attached to it and no paperwork anywhere.
But the part I cannot put down is the ninth man. He went into a hospital that was good — doors unlocked, nobody in uniform, better than an hour a day with doctors against the six point eight minutes in the famous paper. His data was cut to a footnote. So he published it himself, in 1976, under his own name, in a journal his own profession puts out.
Nothing came back. Not one letter anyone has ever found.
A calm, unhurried telling of the record, for sleep, rest, or a long drive in the dark. Nothing here will startle you or wake you.
LANTERN & LEDGER — quiet tellings of the record, for sleep.
More from Lantern and Ledger
In a parish office in Haggerston, in the first years of the reign, a registrar sat filling in a printed form about the streets where the dying was worst. He wrote down the drainage. He wrote down the water. Then he added a third line nobody had asked him for, standing up for his neighbours — that the people there were generally of cleanly habits, and that what was wrong with their streets was not their doing.
In a farmhouse room on a small island in Nova Scotia, somewhere in the eighteen-nineties, a county historian stood looking at paper silhouettes on a wall — the cut-out profiles people made of one another before photography. One of them was of a woman who had been a servant in the Treasurer's house at Halifax. The man who built that room had been born into slavery in South Carolina, got out during the Revolution, took his owner's surname because it was the name he had, and came north with the Loyalists. His name was Samuel Ball, and no likeness of him has ever existed.
On a summer day in Hertfordshire in sixteen seventy-eight, a poor man who cut grass for a living ran after a farmer along a track beside three half-acres of ripe oats, to offer to do the work for less than he had asked a moment earlier. The farmer refused anyway, and said with a stern look and a hasty gesture that the Devil should mow it rather than he. That night, the pamphlet says, the field showed as if it were all of a flame, and in the morning the oats lay cut in a circle so neatly that no mortal man could do the like.
In the spring of nineteen hundred, sponge divers from the island of Symi sheltered from bad weather off a rock between Kythera and Crete, and one of them went down on a rope in canvas and lead and tinned copper, with his air coming down a hose from a hand pump on the deck. He had perhaps ten minutes. What he was standing on was the cargo of an ancient ship — bronze and marble statues, glass, gold, coins — and one corroded lump about the size of a thick book that nobody recognised for the better part of a year, while the beautiful things beside it were cleaned and admired and photographed.
In eighteen eighty-four, in Baltimore, two men sat at a table with a rebuilt post-office scale and a pack of shuffled playing cards, pressing weights too small to feel onto each other's fingertips. One of them marked almost every answer as a pure guess — and was right two times in three anyway.