Patient H.M. by Luke Dittrich Page A

and then began a slow decline, brought on by the rise of rayon and other synthetic materials. No matter: She wasn’t going to be tasked with saving the company. Women had never played important roles in the family business. Her mother had ten siblings; most of them lived on the Cheney Brothers compound, and my grandmother could have gauged the relative importance accorded the sexes with a quick glance at the comparative sizes of her aunts’ and uncles’ cottages and mansions, respectively.
    She adored music, always. After graduating from Vassar in 1933, she moved to Vienna to study the piano and spent a gilded year in the city. She embarked on an affair with a married concert musician and found employment as a pianist in silent-movie theaters, improvising emotional soundtracks to the oversize characters flickering on the screens above her. But the year came to an end, and she boarded a ship back home to Connecticut. Shortly after her return, while she was riding in the passenger seat of a friend’s Model T, a dashing young medical student jumped onto the running board and introduced himself as Bill Scoville.
    The Cheney Brothers Silk Manufacturing Company declared bankruptcy in 1937, selling off, among other things, its private railroad. At the time of my grandmother’s institutionalization, however, the company was experiencing a brief resurgence, having scored a contract to manufacture the silk parachutes used by most American aviators during World War II. But I imagine that the ups and downs of the silk industry were far from her mind as she sat at the piano in the residential hall, temporarily subdued by her hydrotherapy, perhaps playing from memory one of her beloved Chopin pieces.
    It was a moment of respite, a brief interlude, before her next treatment began.
    —
    One morning during my grandmother’s second week at the Institute of Living, attendants woke her at six A.M. and served her tea and toast before escorting her to the Pyretotherapy Room on the first floor of White Hall, a brick building on the eastern edge of the campus. The room was medium-size, and a mural of a desert oasis covered the walls, palm trees and sand dunes and birds silhouetted against a blue sky. Alongside one of the walls, pushed up against a painted dune, there was what appeared to be a copper coffin with a semicylindrical lid. A nurse opened the top of the device, revealing a thin mattress inside. Once my grandmother had disrobed, she lay down on the mattress, and a blanket was placed over her before the lid of the device closed. Her body, from her neck down, was entirely inside. Her head protruded from a hole at one end and rested on a pillow.
    An infrared lamp inside the device radiated heat, while a machine called an inductotherm monitored the temperature, allowing staff members to adjust it as desired. A fan circulated hot air inside the device. A pan of water sat near the fan, maintaining high humidity to prevent excessive skin dryness. Every fifteen minutes, a nurse took my grandmother’s temperature. Humans are warm-blooded and can generally maintain a uniform body temperature of approximately 98.6 degrees regardless of their environment. Eventually, however, when exposed to relentless heat, the body’s thermostatic ability breaks down and its internal temperature begins to rise.
    That first day, within the first two hours of treatment, the attendants managed to induce a fever of 102 degrees in my grandmother and then adjusted the inductotherm to maintain that approximate level of fever for the remainder of the session. Along with her temperature, they monitored my grandmother’s pulse and respiration, looking for signs of acute distress. By the time they let her out of the cabinet, she had been inside for a total of eight hours. She was allowed to rest for an additional hour inside the Pyretotherapy Room and then was escorted back to her residence. The next morning attendants woke her at six A.M. again, and the process