Itinerantdaughter's Blog

I’ve always been sort of obsessed with the islands off the coast of Maine, and I’d especially like to see Widow’s Island, but I can’t find it on a map.  Maybe I should just get in a canoe off Penobscot and start paddling:

Richard J. Kahn, M.D., practices internal medicine in Rockport Maine and is on the clinical faculty of University of Vermont and Dartmouth Medical Schools. Current projects include a paper on Noah Webster’s efforts in the field of epidemiology circa 1800 and publication of an annotated transcription of the manuscript, Diseases of the District of Maine by Jeremiah Barker (1752-1835). His most recent publication: “William Withering’s Wonderful Weed” appeared, with chapters by a number of Oslerians, in Clio in the Clinic, edited by Jacalyn Duffin in 2005.

Widow’s Island is a fifteen-acre island in the Fox Island Thoroughfare off Rockland, Maine. Today the island appears untouched by anyone but vacationers. As unlikely as it may seem, in the late 1880s the U.S. Navy built a two-story, brick, fifty-bed yellow fever quarantine hospital on this little island between Vinalhaven and North Haven. Certainly Maine has never been a hotbed of yellow fever. Why was the hospital built in Maine at this time and place, who were the people involved, and what happened to the facility over its forty-year lifespan and beyond?

Yellow fever was active in Latin America. In the 1880s, attempts to build the Panama Canal led to the US Navy to dispatch troops to the region. In 1883 a group of residents near the Portsmouth Navy Base petitioned the Secretary of the Navy, protesting the presence of infected vessels in Portsmouth Harbor. The then Secretary of the Navy William Eaton Chandler (1882-85), who was born in Concord, NH, decided to build a new quarantine station among the islands off the coast of Maine and ordered a search for a suitable location.

Though major ports did have quarantine stations by this time, some Navy surgeons believed that certain patients, particularly those with yellow fever, could best be treated if they were isolated in a sparsely settled, cool climate. Maine certainly fitted this description, and there had been no actual epidemics in the state. In 1884 the US Lighthouse Board, which had jurisdiction over Widow’s Island, offered it to the Navy Medical Department.

This paper will discuss the issues involved with the community response, building, and functioning of the hospital, which never actually admitted a yellow fever patient. Formal control of the hospital passed from the Navy to the State of Maine on June 1, 1904, marking the end of the Naval Hospital on Widow’s Island. For more than ten years thereafter the building was used as a summer retreat for selected patient from the Augusta and Bangor Insane Hospitals.

Email from ID to AL: my friend and I are going to explore an abandoned psych ward this weekend, and last night I had a VERY elaborate dream that I went and that you came with me.  We got kicked out of the children’s ward when they realized we weren’t actually visiting patients.  It was awesome.

Response from AL to ID: ummm that would have been my JAM in high school. my friend charlie was a security guard at mclean and we used to drive around the abandoned buildings at night when he was on duty and scare the shit out of ourselves. so fun.

Response from ID to AL: WHAT THAT IS SO AMAZING WHY HAVE YOU NEVER TOLD ME THAT STORY BEFORE

AL: great question. that’s probably the first thing i should have told you about myself.

I really wanted to post something original––I have an okay original essay that I shopped around a bit and might slap up here––but when I came across this anecdote about Sylvia Beach, doyenne of the original Shakespeare & Co., my most special home, I just couldn’t resist sharing it.  Background: this take place during the Nazi occupation of Paris, obvs.

“My German customers were always rare, but of course after I was classified as ‘the enemy,’ they stopped coming altogether––until a last outstanding visit ended the series.  A high-ranking German officer, who had got out of a huge gray military car, stopped to look at a copy of Finnegans Wake.  Then he came in and, speaking perfect English, said he would buy it.  ‘It’s not for sale.’  ‘Why not?’  My last copy, I explained.  I was keeping it.  For whom?  For myself.  He was angry.  He was so interested in Joyce’s work, he said.  Still I was firm.  Out he strode, and I removed Finnegans Wake from the window and put it safely away.

“A fortnight later, the same officer strode into the bookshop.  Where was Finnegans Wake?  I had put it away.  Fairly trembling with rage, he said, ‘We’re coming to confiscate all your goods today.’  ‘All right.’  He drove off.

“I consulted my concierge.  She opened an unoccupied apartment on the third floor.  (My own apartment was on the second floor.)  My friends and I carried all the books and all the photographs upstairs, mostly in clothesbaskets; and all the furniture.  We even removed the electric-light fixtures.  I had a carpenter take down the shelves.  Within two hours, not a single thing was to be seen in the shop, and a house painter had painted out the name, Shakespeare and Company, on the front of 12 rue de l’Odeon.  The date was 1941.  Did the Germans come to confiscate Shakespeare and Company’s goods?  If so, they  never found the shop.

“Eventually, they did come to fetch the proprietor of Shakespeare and Company.”