Butcher Quotes

“This is a work of fiction incorporating episodes from the lives of the historic J. Marion Sims, M.D. (1813–1883), “the Father of Modern Gynecology”; Silas Weir Mitchell, M.D. (1829–1914), “the Father of Medical Neurology”; and Henry Cotton, M.D. (1876–1933), the director of the New Jersey Lunatic Asylum from 1907 to 1930. Several passages, scattered through the text, have been adapted from passages in Sims’s The Story of My Life (1888). Particular thanks are due to Andrew Scull’s Madhouse: A Tragic Tale of Megalomania and Modern Medicine (Yale University Press, 2005), a chronicle of the life and career of Henry Cotton; and Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture (1830–1980) (Pantheon Books, 1985).”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Butcher

“for my pioneering work in the treatment of fistula, as a prevention of mental illness, with a most flattering citation in which it was claimed that Silas Aloysius Weir, M.D., is the Magellan of female genitalia.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Butcher

“And when they are reminded of their status, it is like the pricking of a child’s balloon, immediately they shrink to their proper size.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Butcher

“Once they perceive weakness in a man, they will burrow into you like the boll weevil into cotton.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Butcher

“would be unseemly for a physician to reveal such ignorance in the company of female subordinates; I could only imagine how they would whisper of me, behind my back in the Asylum, & elsewhere.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Butcher

“might be contagious in the Asylum.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Butcher

“in the highest echelon of Trenton society, the wife of a lunatic-doctor was not held in high regard, despite the fact of my elevated status.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Butcher

“Nervously I joked to Gretel, I had seen corpses in the morgue with a healthier skin color than”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Butcher

“Hysteria is indeed a kind of convulsion specific to females.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Butcher

“There is little point to life, without heirs.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Butcher

“it is far better for a doctor to be overworked than underworked.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Butcher

“As a surgeon must keep in mind—Pride goeth before a fall.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Butcher

“In medical school we had learned that hysteria is a distinctly female malady & that it has one primary cause: a “tilted” or diseased uterus. I believe that this discovery originated with the great Greek philosopher Aristotle,”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Butcher

“Do not think, thinking is not natural in women. Do not think, thinking is harmful in women. Thinking too freely led unhappy Eve to pick the fatal apple from the tree, to press upon Adam, her husband, to incriminate him in her sin of disobedience.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Butcher

“Hysteria” is caused by a wandering womb, or broken-off parts of the womb circulating through the arteries, most virulent in the brain. So the revered ancient physicians have instructed us, beginning with Aristotle; even in our enlightened time, no man of science had persevered beyond this wisdom.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Butcher

“But it would look very bad, to lock up all the lunatics as prisoners. For then we would be signaling to our adversaries that we have given up trying to ‘cure’ them—which is our mandate.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Butcher

“Emotions in the female arise from the specifically female organs, while emotions in the male rise from the cerebral.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Butcher

“by questing young minds.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Butcher

“The physical repulsiveness of the female body is not a matter of race, ethnic identity, or tincture of skin; rather, an inheritance from Eve accepted as such by the wisest females.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Butcher

“by their fathers in Europe, to pay for their transportation to America, & seemed a particular sort of cruelty, of fathers selling their own children for profit. A further danger was, as the indentured entered the final months of their servitude, their Masters had no great reason to continue to feed them, or seek medical treatment for them, but might “cast them to the wind” as their contract was voided.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Butcher

“Though Father regarded the female vagina as a “hell-hole of filth & corruption” & the female genitals as “loathsome in design, function, & aesthetics,”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Butcher

“God had allowed him to fail at the first experiment of his career.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Butcher

“family, a funeral, a period of mourning…”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Butcher

“What Providence grants us, it is for Providence to uphold. It is vain for us to wish otherwise.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Butcher

“Poetry is the speech of the soul.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Butcher

“Jesus had done very little for the meek & helpless—we who, it was promised, were to inherit the earth, & be privileged in Heaven. Jesus had done nothing for the Black enslaved Africans—that was certain. Yet there remained the hope that, if you thanked Him most profusely, & God the Father, Creator of Heaven & Earth, & flattered both with their goodness & mercy, they would do some good for you eventually, if you did not give up & curse them, instead.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Butcher

“A flame seemed to rise in me, of pure Irish obstinance & mutiny.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Butcher

“How strange it was, & how terrifying, Dr. Weir would play with my tongue with his fingers. Strength drained from my limbs like water, & seemed to flow into the physician, to suffuse him with a virility not ordinarily his, & the quickened breathing of lewdness. I tried to shrink from him, yet without offending him, for we must never offend our oppressors, lest they punish us severely. In this way quick-breathing, the Butcher held me fast, my pale hair in a waterfall straight & flattened against his shoulder in a hellish embrace of mock-intimacy.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Butcher

“Nothing so pleasurable as numbness to one so miserable in affliction as I,”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Butcher

“Do not think, thinking is not natural in women. Do not think, thinking is harmful in women.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Butcher