Doctor Olaf van Schuler's Brain

by Kirsten Menger-Anderson

Genres: Literary Fiction; Historical Fiction; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

In 1664 Dr. Olaf van Schuler flees the Old World and arrives in New Amsterdam with his lunatic mother, two bags of medical implements, and a carefully guarded book of his own medicines. He is the first in what will become a long line of peculiar physicians. Plagued by madness and guided by an intense desire to cure human affliction, each generation of this unusual family is driven by the science of its day: spontaneous combustion, phrenology, animal magnetism, electrical shock treatment, psychosurgery, genetic research. As they make their way in the world, New York City, too, evolves—from the dark and rough days of the seventeenth century to the towering, frenetic metropolis of today.

Like Patrick Süskind's classic novel Perfume, Kirsten Menger-Anderson's debut is a literary cabinet of curiosities—fascinating and unsettling, rich and utterly singular.

Release date: October 9, 2008

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 290

Sample

Doctor Olaf van Schuler, recently arrived in New Amsterdam with his lunatic mother, two bags of medical implements, and a carefully guarded book of his own medicines, moved into a one-room house near White Hall and soon found work at the hospital on Brugh Street. There, surrounded by misshapen bottles containing tinctures of saffron, wild strawberry, maple, and oil of amber, as well as more common tools of his trade — amputation saws, scalpels, sharpened needles, and long, painstakingly pounded probes — he indulged his peculiar perversion: slicing heads.

Mostly he studied the heads of pigs and cows, the latter of which had a brain that resembled the human one pictured in Dr. Galen’s anatomy and was therefore of particular interest to the doctor. Late nights beneath the warm glow of the hospital’s oil lamp, he unlocked his personal cabinet and marveled at the perfectly preserved, gray-pink tissue he’d sealed in glass jars of brine.

Had the Catholic Church not condemned his work, Olaf would have studied his brains during the day as well. But propriety compelled him to conceal his true passion and instead care for his mother, his patients, and his small bed of medicinal herbs. Mornings, when obligation did not busy him, he sat at Geert’s Inn. Under the low wood ceiling, he pressed his forehead to his hands and thought about the brain and the human soul until his musings formed words, spoken words, like “animal spirits” and “the phlegm in man’s head,” which he repeated until the innkeeper said, “Beg your pardon?”

“The phlegm in man’s head.” Olaf blushed, his pale skin bursting with a pink that colored the dark circles beneath his eyes. His high forehead had led most of New Amsterdam to conclude that he had a large heart as well. And despite his odd outbursts and solitary conversations, his behavior confirmed this opinion. He was always willing to make late-night house calls and attend to the penniless when they complained of boils, headache, or gangrene. Unlike his predecessors — sullen young doctors who had crossed the Atlantic in search of a better life — Olaf even made an effort to treat the farm animals. “Forgive me,” he said.

“It’s that time,” Geert chuckled. “Tonight’s moon will be big as an udder. Best to stay in today. There’s nothing but wickedness afoot this time of the month.”

“I have work,” Olaf said. “Two cases of fever and a child with a broken clavicle. And a call out to Bouwerie Lane to look at a cow.”

Geert patted the doctor’s shoulder. “Take good care.”

“Don’t touch me!” Olaf realized that he sounded like his mother; the strain of her care still lingered in his body.

“It’s the moon. She gazes upon us, even now.” Geert stepped away from the table, and Olaf, wondering if he should apologize again, gazed after him. Olaf had already felt the moon’s effect. Just before sunrise, his mother, wielding a skillet, had broken through the wood wall at the back of their house. He’d been forced to bind her wrists with twine before locking her in the crate he’d built for her. He feared the strength of her madness would find expression in her hands and shoulders, allowing her to escape and run through the streets. Already the neighbors spoke in hushed tones when he passed by; he sensed that they suspected what he alone knew, that his mother was not merely feverish, as he’d claimed upon their arrival.

ON HIS WAY HOME from the inn, Olaf stopped at the bakery on Marktvelt to buy a loaf of white bread and two of the sweet currant rolls his mother liked. Rumor held that the shop’s fresh-baked loaves fell short of the mandated two pounds, but the colored glass above the door, the smell of sugared raisins and ginger, and the baker girl’s plump red lips always lured Olaf inside.

“We have fresh dark bread, still hot.” Adalind Steenwycks smiled from behind the counter. Flour covered her neck and egg yolk stained her apron. She wore her hair in two thick braids.

“No,” Olaf said, though he lingered by the counter staring helplessly. Even if she were not married, what would she want with him? A bachelor at twenty-four. A man who cut his own hair, as well as his mother’s. A man who had learned to darn socks and make stew and pea soup. A man whose cares cut across his forehead in deep lines that pressed into a constant frown.

“How is your mother?”

“Well,” Olaf lied.

“I thought I might call on her.” She reached over the counter to hand Olaf the bread. “I don’t mean to be forward.”

“She prefers solitude.”

“She has such a — such a goodness about her. Won’t you bring her on Sunday?”

Olaf nodded, though he’d ceased going to church, not for want of faith — he prayed to the same God his neighbors did — but for the men who failed to have faith in him, men who watched a sick baby die and called it God’s will, and who called the search for a cure devil’s work. Even Olaf’s only colleague, Dr. Johannes le Sueur, who owned not a single book and worked exclusively with urine to diagnose disease, knew nothing of Olaf’s studies. Had he known of the brain experiments, he might have reported them to Petrus Stuyvesant of the Dutch West India Company, who certainly would have run Olaf out of town, as he’d done with the Quakers and had tried with the Jews. Olaf could say nothing — must say nothing.

“Send her my regards,” Adalind said as Olaf turned homeward, carrying his warm packages as he might a sick child, gently, but far from his body.

OLAF ENTERED HIS HOUSE, hesitant to follow the narrow path that wound between the stacks of dishes, burlap sacks, cast off garments and precious belongings: a dried peony root, a small wooden box of ground pearls, his father’s Bible, his mother’s collection of carved wood saints. At home, Olaf lost his need for order, or the will to impose it. The disarray was foreign, yet comforting, a state that nearly convinced him that the place was not his, that he and Olaf were two different men, one destined for truth, the other only darkness.

“Adalind sends her regards,” he said to his mother.

He tried to place a roll between his mother’s tied hands, but it slipped from her fingers and fell. She had grown thinner as her illness became more pronounced. Her hair, once full and auburn, was now brittle and gray. A long red scratch, still moist with curative honey, ran down her left thigh.

When he was home, he sometimes released her so she could pace the thirty-foot length of their single-room dwelling, or kick the straw pallet he slept on. He let her shuck the corn that grew wild in the small lot behind their back door, and stir empty iron pots, which he set up on the dining table. She liked tangled yarn. He left bundles — in every color — on the floor amidst the clutter. He recited scriptures to her, knelt with her in prayer, and said nothing when she woke late at night to call upon God and plead for forgiveness.

“She’s a whore,” his mother muttered through the wooden bars of her cage. Today, he would not even untie her hands, though she looked up at him as a dying creature might, searching for meaning or relief. When he returned her stare, he comforted himself with his medical training: the watery, soulful appearance of her gaze was no more than the light on the clear, protective coating of the flesh of her eyes. She did not feel shame because she was mad. She did not feel trapped or sorrowful; she had lost the faculties of reason. She did not hate or love, and would not until he could cure her.

“That’s unkind.”

“Whore!”

“Come,” Olaf said. “Come, let me see your nails.”

His mother’s hand shook as she placed it in his, and he knew that the pull of the moon had not yet left her. “We’ll file these later,” he said. “We’ll take care of you later, once you’ve calmed down.”

The soft, September sun cast a broken rectangle of light through the one transom window. Olaf again tried to hand his mother bread.

“I had breakfast at the inn,” he said. “I’ve had my bread. It was a long night, and tonight will be also. But I’m getting closer. Very close to a cure, dear, dear Mother.”

DOCTOR OLAF VAN SCHULER was born Olaf van Dijk in a small coastal town outside Amsterdam. His father died during childbirth — his heart failing as he sat powerless beside his wife who thrashed with the pain of her contractions. Olaf’s Uncle Joris said the madness started that day, that his sister began to decline the moment her son was born. But he shared this thought only much later, after the madness was undeniable and nothing the minister did could dispel the demons from her soul.

A quiet, studious child, given to fits of anger, Olaf preferred the company of adults to children. He enjoyed the shipyards and spent hours watching arriving vessels. He claimed he would grow up to be a sailor, even practiced the seaman’s swagger and, once, the seaman’s foul mouth. He learned to tie knots — slipknots, square knots, figure eights. Clove hitch, bowline, sheet bend. He worked rope till it frayed and then wove it into the kind of bracelets he’d seen the sailors wear. Had fever not struck him the winter of 1651, he might well have followed through with his childhood plans. But during his convalescence he learned the pleasure of books, and he spoke so often to the doctors that he soon forgot the swarthy sailors and applied himself to medical science.

Filled with hope and the thrill of saving others as he himself had been, Olaf moved to Amsterdam, where he and his mother shared a two-room abode near the medical school. His mother’s health continued to deteriorate, and he began to take over her work: preparing meals, tidying, hanging laundry. He had hoped her condition would improve — that the move to Amsterdam would relieve her deep melancholy, a malady that would pass as she grew familiar with her environs, or that with the help of God, she’d find strength to rid herself of the devil that sometimes raged inside her. As his studies enlightened him, he realized that matters were more complex.

Olaf began his study of the brain in 1662, two years before he was forced to leave Holland. He sliced open the heads of dogs, fish, lobsters, snakes, and chickens. He saw what other scientists had seen: that the brain was connected to the extremes of the body by a series of strings, and that the soul must rely on those strings to impart its will. The soul lived in the head, not in the heart, and bodily sickness could prevent its flow. Violence, anger, madness — all were symptoms of the soul’s mortal conduit. All were conditions he could remedy, as soon as he learned how.

He tended to his mother dutifully, mixing tinctures of herbs and metals, which he spooned between her lips, sealing her mouth with one hand and stroking her throat with the other to make sure she swallowed. She seemed most lucid after a simple mix of wine and dry tobacco, a well-known curative that Olaf refined and recorded in his medicine book. He began to treat cases of fever and headache, for neighbors mostly, who knew of his art. News of his medicines spread, and he was gaining a reputation as a skilled alchemist when the incident changed everything.

The day had been unusually hot, though it began as most other days did, with Olaf rising to find his mother in tears.

“Henrick, Henrick,” she repeated. The name not of her dead husband, but of a cow she’d grown fond of when she was a child.

“Good morning, Mother,” Olaf said. He examined her skin and lips for any sign of rash or abrasion, sniffed the glass jar of urine she’d filled for him, poked the fleshy part of her arm to see how her body responded, searching, as always, for signs that his latest cure had improved her condition.

“I have two hands,” she said. “Two hands.”

“Indeed you do.” He took his mother’s trembling hands in his and pressed her fingers to warm them.

She surprised him with a bite on his shoulder.

“Come now, Mother dear,” he said. She had not bitten or struck him in months, leaving him to believe that he had mastered the violent symptom of her madness with a mix of ground millipede and mercury. Now he was no longer sure.

He helped her dress and then tended to his own attire: the usual breeches, coat, and feathered hat. He prepared a breakfast of sliced bread with preserves, and explained to his mother that he had four appointments that morning. He did not mind that she looked past him to the bare wall of their home, or that she traced the deep lines she’d scratched into the wooden tabletop.

Looking back, he wondered if the heat was to blame, or the fact that he felt preoccupied by the dull pain where his mother’s almond-colored teeth had nearly broken through skin. He wondered if the preserves had gone sour, or the bread, allowing a poison to find his blood. He had not been himself, could not even remember rightly.

He’d walked down Hoogh Street, his box of tinctures beneath one arm, his bleeding knives in a leather bag, which he swung absently as he turned right, then left, at last arriving at Jeremias Smits’s home, where the bedridden Jeremias awaited. He’d sliced open the skin of the frail man’s fingertips, a routine bleeding, and advised him to avoid organ meats and all things pulled from the ground. He then wiped the blood from his knife.

His previous visits had ended here, with a professional nod and a kindly word or two about the weather. Olaf must have remarked about the heat as he wrapped linen around the man’s fingers to stop the blood. He must have noted how unseasonable it was, how the crops would surely be affected. Perhaps he even wiped the moisture from the old man’s forehead. But he remembered only waking, hours later, as if from a stupor, the old man dead beside him, his bleeding unstopped. Fear commanded the doctor’s hands. He rolled Jeremias’s body in a long winter cloak. The corpse could not remain where the old man’s daughter would find it when she next called. He panicked. How could he have failed at so simple a treatment? What had he done? What of his reputation? What of the body itself? He could not carry it through the street in broad daylight, though this is exactly what he did, cradling the wrapped corpse in his arms, his eyes wild with fright.

He might have escaped undiscovered had he not carried the corpse to his home, where he decided to slice open the skull. A human brain, a brain that had actually housed a soul, would further his studies. He would make up for the man’s untimely death by naming his cure for Jeremias.

But then Olaf’s mother was beside the corpse, screaming, and the neighbors came to check on her, and what they found so disturbed them that they ran from the front door screaming as well.

Olaf wiped the blood from his hands and face, gathered his tinctures and medical notes, along with a few of his mother’s belongings and, leaving the half-opened skull on his bedroom floor, guided his mother to the docks, where he sternly bid her to remain until his return. Luck was on his side, as the Broken Heart was leaving for New Amsterdam that afternoon, and under the name Olaf van Schuler, the doctor booked two passages.

THE FULL MOON made Olaf nervous, for he, too, could feel the pull of the heavenly body. His senses heightened — he could smell the lichen that grew beneath his floorboards and the mold on the bread left out for the pigs in the street. He could hear the sigh of his bedclothes, the whisper of the words in his notebooks, the echo of clanging saucers and spoons he’d put away hours before. When he ran his fingers through his hair, he could almost feel his brain, as if the organ were raw and exposed. He touched his scalp, gently rubbed. Since arriving in the colony, he had experienced four stupors, all of which descended upon him at home. Only time stood between him and another public bout of illness, or worse, another incident.

“Mother,” he said, but she was now sleeping, her head tucked close to her chest, her fingers splayed over bent knees. She was sitting, back pressed to the wall. Her shadow, hunched and dark, could belong to a demon, and on the full moon, Olaf thought it might.

“Mother,” he said again. He wanted her to open her eyes and say that she would recover. He prayed — the words running fast through his head — that sense and sanity would return to carry away his troubles. But his mother only smiled, her lips an empty arc. “I must attend to my patients,” he said, and if she heard, she did not respond.

HIS FEET HEAVY as he strolled along Smits Vly to visit Farmer Janssen’s cow, Olaf worried that he had not taken enough rest before departing for his rounds. The dirt road was soft after the late-summer thundershowers. The air smelled of sheep dung and ripening apples. He paused to rifle through his medicine bag, pulling out a dented tin of tobacco. A teaspoon or two between his cheek and jaw would do the trick — raise his spirits, dispel his dread. Beside the road, a wolf, recently shot and left to decompose as a warning to his kin, caught his eye. If he succeeded in saving the cow, he could always take the wolf head back to the hospital for the evening’s studies.

The cow, however, did not survive. She was dead upon his arrival.

“Nothing we can do for her now,” Janssen said, accepting Olaf’s sympathetic hand.

“She has some meat on her,” Olaf noted and, proffering his usual excuse, that his mother made a fine stew from the brains of the cow, offered to buy the head. He could leave it on the street in front of his next patient’s home — no one would steal it — and then take it to the hospital, where he could saw it apart.

“You shall have it,” Janssen said, removing his ax from the stable wall.

OLAF AND THE COW head arrived at the hospital just before nine, when the inns and taverns closed their doors, and the denizens of New Amsterdam abandoned their empty glasses and cards and backgammon games to return home to bed or a nightcap of West Indian rum. Had he arrived at the iron-braced door any later, he would have had to wait for the streets to clear before he stepped into the hospital. But as long as he entered before the mandated closing time, he could confidently as. . .