We received Ruth Ate Anderson's records from Western State Hospital yesterday. Almost all of the 22 pages are unreadable. Don't ever think that microfiche is a reliable method of archiving. But the parts that are readable tell a very very sad story.
A ruined life.
Ruth was born in 1900. She married Victor Anderson in 1921. She gave birth to a daughter Lanaya in 1926. Recently we learned that she was at Western State Hospital from 1935 until her death in 1948.
Ilana and I traveled to the State Archives last week, found her record in the huge admissions book which confirmed the diagnosis of Parkinson's and psychosis of endemic encephalitis. I had guessed that diagnosis twenty five years ago based on an off-hand remark by Cousin Alice and an epidemiology book from the library.
The legible entry sheet fills in some of the details. Apparently she contracted encephalitis in 1922 (right after her marriage and at the height of the epidemic).
Husband states she had sleeping sickness in 1922; she first showed mental symptoms two weeks after the onset of sleeping sickness. Her mind seemed to return to normal; then in 1926 she again manifested mental symptoms. Became delusional, hallucinatory, and these symptoms have continued to the present time. At one time attempted suicide.
Ruth reported that she had been hearing voices for five years and they worried her and told her to do things. She presented with "typical Parkinsonian picture with expressionless face, absence of winking reflex, posture rigid and fixed monotonous speech". Along with tremors to extremities, face and mouth.
I am leaving out some other very troublesome upsetting details. She had been in Napa State Hospital in California for 4 1/2 years and in Meadows Sanitarium in Seattle previous.
She never got better. In the file I can see that they administered some medications that were thought to help at the time including stramonium and strontium. She died at age 48 in the Washington Hospital for the Insane of pneumonia and kidney failure.
Leaving her daughter Lanaya (Dennis mother) truly without a mother which haunted her her entire life.
Picture of Ruth as a young woman. She's on the right, looks just like Lanaya. Having a great time and looking forward rewrding lifetime that never happened, derailed by endemic encephalis.
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