Mary Toft’s final downfall came at the hands of a porter at her lodgings. Unable to procure rabbits in central London, she had tried to bribe a porter into tracking some down. The porter talked, and Mary eventually confessed. She explained that when the doctors’ backs were turned, she would transfer into her birth canal a rabbit, or rabbit portion, which she had had concealed in a special “hare pocket” inside her skirt. Whether John Howard was in on the hoax or simply another victim of it was never clear. What is clear is that male medical professionals could be ruinously susceptible to vaginal deceits.
IT’S 1:40 P.M. now, but no one at my table has left for lunch. I pick up the box of ectoplasm and rest it on my lap. It’s worse than I thought. Slipped under the string is a three-by-five card, upon which is typed the official archive summary:
Material alleged to have been captured from Mrs. Helen Duncan, materialising medium, at a seance in 1939…. She had been stripped and searched but with no vaginal examination. The material was smelling and had bloodstains on it which appeared at regular intervals. The suggestion was that the blood had soaked into the material while it was folded up, and that the most likely explanation was that it had been secreted in the vagina.
Inside the box, a yellowed paper envelope is tied with a length of pink bias tape. It’s a large envelope, bigger and heavier than a four-month-old rabbit. I would put the weight at close to a pound. That is a lot of stinky ectoplasm. It’s a lot of stinky ectoplasm to spread out and examine in the still, reverent hush of the Cambridge Manuscripts Reading Room. I want to smuggle it out of here and open it up in the ladies’ room, but my bag is checked in a locker downstairs, as per manuscripts room rules. Oh, for a hare pocket.
I turn to the Helen Duncan file, in the hopes that by the time I am done reading, the people at my table will have fainted from hunger or gone home. Duncan was ectoplasm’s last stand. And what a stand it was. A histrionic Scotswoman of poor health and bad habits, Duncan weighed close to 250 pounds. She smoked constantly and moved with obvious difficulty, often requiring assistance to rise from her seat and make her way across the séance room. She had nine children, who hung from her hems and scaled her bulk like small mountaineers. One biographer described the youngest child atop her lap, dandling the flesh that hung down from her massive upper arms. Her séances were high drama. She tended to swoon and fall off her chair and occasionally wet herself in the frenzy of spiritual possession. She once emerged from the séance cabinet naked under a floor-length “ectoplasmic veil.” For those whose interest in spiritualism was purely voyeuristic, Helen Duncan was the hottest ticket in town.
Duncan produced ectoplasm as readily and lustfully as she produced offspring. However the two did not typically—item SPR 197.1.6 notwithstanding—issue from the same anatomical opening. Owing to the well-publicized stunts of Margery and other 1920s mediums, those active in the 1930s were subjected to thorough body cavity searches by researchers before each séance. “Thorough” meaning:
May 14, 1931
After the séance room and cabinet had been examined, the medium was led into the room by Mrs. A. Peel Goldney…. The doors having been locked, the medium was placed upon a large settee… and in the presence of Dr. William Brown, Mrs. Goldney (who has trained and worked for many months in a midwifery hospital) made a thorough vaginal and rectal examination. The rectum was examined for some distance up the alimentary canal and a very thorough vaginal examination given.
This passage, written by magician-turned-psychic-researcher Harry Price, describes preparations for a séance undertaken in Price’s National Laboratory of Psychical Research (NLPR) in London, part of a two-month investigation of the Duncan mediumship. Price covered all the angles. He designed a special fraud-preventing “séance garment” that enrobed the entire medium, including her hands and feet, such that only her head stuck out. So even if Mrs. A. Peel Goldney had managed to miss something in her anatomical inspections, it would have been impossible for Helen to get that something out of the suit and into the open. Price’s book about the Duncan investigation includes a dozen or more photographs of the medium ensconced in her special garment. It is fashioned from satin in a loose jumpsuit style, which, in combination with Mrs. Duncan’s sizable mid-torso circumference, brings to mind late-career Elvis, or the sad clown in that Italian opera. I should point out that Mrs. Duncan was compensated for her humiliations at the NLPR. Handsomely so—five hundred pounds in all. This helps explain the medium’s seemingly inexplicable decision to risk her career in the laboratories of the NLPR.
Price was surprised and confounded to see that Helen Duncan was able, despite his precautions and within minutes of the séance beginning, to produce a six-foot-long ectoplasm. “The séance garment should absolutely preclude the secretion in or extraction from the orifices I have mentioned, even had she not been examined medically.” Forced to rule out “the vaginal-cum-rectal theory,” he came up with an equally extraordinary possibility: “That the medium possesses a false or secondary stomach (an esophageal diverticulum) like the rumen or first stomach of a ruminant, and that she is able to swallow sheets of some material and regurgitate it at leisure—like a cow with her cud.”
This was not as far-fetched an idea as it sounds—particularly in Price’s day. Search the British medical journals from the early 1900s, and you will come across lengthy articles on the subject of human ruminants: seemingly ordinary citizens who could effortlessly “bring up” portions of their most recent meal for further mastication and—quite often—enjoyment. “It is sweeter than honey, and accompanied by a more delightful relish,” a Swedish ruminator is quoted as saying in E. M. Brockbank’s “Merycism or Rumination in Man,” which ran in the February 23, 1907, issue of the British Medical Journal.
No one could say whether the condition was hereditary or learned. Brockbank cites the case of a tin worker as support for heredity’s role. “He looked upon it as a perfectly natural phenomenon, descending from his grandfather and father to himself, and to all of his sisters and brothers and to many of their children…. [His wife], a bright intelligent woman who does not ruminate, states very definitely that as soon as the children began to walk they used to bring up mouthfuls of food, which at first they spat out, later they began to rechew it, especially after a meal they liked.” Other physicians insisted the habit was passed along by imitation, citing as evidence a Swiss ruminator who lived among cows all his life, and a boy who was suckled for two years by a goat, and “acquired by imitation his foster-mother’s… habits.”
Though the act appears identical in cow and man, only in the bovine does it serve any useful purpose. Though occasional exceptions did exist, such as this 1839 Lancet case study of a farmer: “To save time, he had acquired a habit of ‘bolting’ his food… then getting on horseback, and subjecting his dinner piecemeal to mastication at his leisure.” The farmer didn’t seek medical advice until later in life, after falling into some wealth and attempting to mix with a higher cut of society, who found his habit “very disgusting.” Two papers I read implied that ruminating was accepted as normal behavior among the working class, implying that cud chewing was as common among nineteenth-century laborers as tobacco chewing among modern-day major league pitchers. These days, rumination articles are confined to literature about psychologically or developmentally impaired individuals. (Happily, there is help. A surgical technique recently perfected at the Swallowing Center at the University of Washington[25] stops rumination in its tracks.)
25
As opposed to the Swallowing Center at Northwestern, or the Swallowing Center at the University of Southern California, or the one at Holy Cross, or the Rusk Institute, or the Nebraska Medical Center. Of course, the original “swallowing center” is a chunk of your brainstem that coordinates chewing, gagging, vomiting, coughing, belching, and licking, all with minimal fuss and no funding from the NIH.