The dominant topic of conversation, according to passenger Harold Smethurst, was “war, and submarines.”
FOR THEODATE POPE, there was tedium, but also depression. Ever since childhood she had struggled with it. Theodate described herself once as being afflicted with “over consciousness.” During her time at Miss Porter’s School in Farmington she had often become depressed and was hobbled by fatigue. In 1887, when she was twenty, she wrote in her diary, “Tears come without any provocation. Headache all day.” The school’s headmistress and founder, Sarah Porter, offered therapeutic counsel. “Cheer up,” she told Theodate. “Always be happy.” It did not work. The next year, in March 1888, her parents sent her to Philadelphia, to be examined and cared for by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, a physician famous for treating patients, mainly women, suffering from neurasthenia, or nervous exhaustion.
Mitchell’s solution for Theodate was his then-famous “Rest Cure,” a period of forced inactivity lasting up to two months. “At first, and in some cases for four or five weeks, I do not permit the patient to sit up or to sew or write or read,” Mitchell wrote, in his book Fat and Blood. “The only action allowed is that needed to clean the teeth.” He forbade some patients from rolling over on their own, insisting they do so only with the help of a nurse. “In such cases I arrange to have the bowels and water passed while lying down, and the patient is lifted on to a lounge at bedtime and sponged, and then lifted back again into the newly-made bed.” For stubborn cases, he reserved mild electrical shock, delivered while the patient was in a filled bathtub. His method reflected his own dim view of women. In his book Wear and Tear; or, Hints for the Overworked, he wrote that women “would do far better if the brain were very lightly tasked.”
Theodate complied with the rules of Mitchell’s rest cure, even though she believed rest to be the last thing she needed. She wrote, “I am always happy when I keep so busy that I cannot stop to think of the sadness of life.” The cure didn’t help. And in fact, Dr. Mitchell’s approach was soon to undergo a nationwide reevaluation. In 1892 a writer named Charlotte Perkins Gilman published a popular short story, “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” in which she attacked Mitchell’s rest cure. Gilman had become a patient of his in 1887, a year before Theodate’s treatment, suffering from what a later generation would describe as postpartum depression. Gilman spent a month at Dr. Mitchell’s clinic. Afterward, he wrote out a prescription for how she was to proceed after treatment: “Live as domestic a life as possible. Have your child with you all the time. Lie down an hour after each meal. Have but two hours intellectual life a day.”
And this: “Never touch pen, brush, or pencil again as long as you live.”
Gilman claimed that Mitchell’s cure drove her “to the edge of insanity.” She wrote the story, she said, to warn would-be patients of the dangers of this doctor “who so nearly drove me mad.”
Theodate continued fighting depression throughout her thirties. By the autumn of 1900, when she was thirty-three, it threatened even to deaden her love of art and architecture. “I find that my material world is losing its power to please or harm me—it is not vital to me anymore,” she wrote in her diary. “I am turning in on myself and am finding my pleasure in the inner world which was my constant retreat when I was a child.” Even her interest in paintings began to wane. She wrote, “Pictures have been dead long ago to me—the ones that please me, please me only at first sight—after that they are paint and nothing more; to use a vulgar expression, ‘sucked lemons.’ ” Architecture continued to engage her, but with less ferocity. “My interest in architecture has always been more intense than my interest in any other art manifestation. And on my word I think it is not dead yet—not quite.” She was, she wrote, “tired of seeing these fluted flimsy highly colored hen houses going up—and am gnashing my teeth over them.”
She and Edwin Friend dined together, and at least for a time shared their table with a young doctor from Saratoga Springs, New York, named James Houghton, and with one of the ship’s more famous personages, Marie Depage, a nurse who, along with her physician-husband, Antoine, had gained fame for tending Belgians wounded in the war. Depage had spent the previous two months raising money to support their work, but was now on her way back to Europe to see her son, Lucien, before he was sent to the front. Dr. Houghton, en route to Belgium to help Depage’s husband, at one point revealed that on the night before the Lusitania’s departure he had signed a new will.