Fasting Girl A True Victorian Medical Mystery

CHAPTER ONE The Accident It is better to believe a little than too much. -The New York Times, December 15, 1878There is very little as a matter of fact, in the great domain of nature, that we actually understand. -Abram H. Dailey, Mollie Fancher, the Brooklyn Enigma, 1894ON JUNE 8, 1865, eighteen-year-old Mollie Fancher went shopping in Brooklyn, New York. Two months short of her nineteenth birthday, she was tall, well made, willowy, with light wavy hair and an oval face. Her features were regular, and a photograph made around this time shows eyes with a serious, direct gaze. Mollie was active and energetic, and on this day she took brisk, hearty steps along the bustling sidewalks of Fulton Street-named for the forward-thinking Robert Fulton, who in 1814 had established the first ferry service linking Brooklyn and Manhattan. Her arms were full of packages; her thoughts lingered on an impending journey to Boston, and on her recent engagement to a respectable young man, John Taylor. She was, at that moment, all that mid-Victorian convention could require of a teenage girl. But on this hot, oppressive June day, amid the chaos of dust and horse traffic and noise that was Brooklyn-then still independent of New York City, and the third-largest city in the United States-Mollie's regular progress along the path of middle-class Victorian propriety was about to come to a halt. That path had, in the sophisticated yet also oddly provincial milieu of Brooklyn society, its accepted stations: graduation from the select Brooklyn Heights Seminary for girls; attendance at the Brooklyn Yacht Club regattas and various strawberry festivals and musical performances that enlivened summer days and evenings; marriage to a suitable young man; the bearing of several children; the grace of middle age. Mollie had already experienced interruptions in this progress, including the early loss of her mother and a horseback accident at fifteen, but now she was back on stride. When that stride was next broken, it would be permanently, and in a way that not only would change her life, but would affect the lives of hundreds, even thousands, of people she would never meet. Mollie boarded a streetcar, a trolley-like vehicle pulled along railroad tracks by a team of horses. Most of the old horsecars, which would be replaced by electric streetcars in Brooklyn beginning in 1892, traveled, at their swiftest, at a speed of only six miles per hour over the stone-paved thoroughfares. Even so, they could on occasion be lethal. That very day, June 8, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle had published an irate letter to the editor of the newspaper under the heading "Dangers of Railroad Travel." In it the writer, signing himself a "sorely bruised Sufferer," described his misadventures on a DeKalb Avenue car: He "managed to get a foothold on the rear platform" of a very full car, but when the vehicle rounded a corner at top speed, he "without any warning was suddenly landed in the street, to the detriment of his body, clothing, etc., and his watch thrown out of his pocket." The driver did not even stop the car after this unnamed "Sufferer" landed on the paving stones. And a week later, the Eagle reported that a young girl named Henrietta Cook had died of injuries received when she was run over by a streetcar. Again, the driver of the car did not stop after the accident. Mollie Fancher climbed aboard one of these rollicking vehicles, laden with her packages, the lower half of her body encased in the full, cumbrous crinoline that was the cross borne by every fashionable lady of the Civil War era. When she was ready to descend to the street at her stop, she signaled the conductor. He rang the bell, the car was halted, and Mollie stepped from the rear platform to the pavement. The conductor rang the bell again for the car to move forward, turned away, and walked into the interior of theStacey, Michelle is the author of 'Fasting Girl A True Victorian Medical Mystery' with ISBN 9781585421350 and ISBN 1585421359.