Psychiatric treatment was virtually nonexistent in early 20th century Alaska. Trained psychiatrists were unknown. General practitioners performed limited psychiatric tasks and usually performed them poorly.
Early doctors drew liberally from phrenology and folklore, not Sigmund Freud. At a sanity hearing, a doctor might run his hand over the head of the poor soul before the court and offer bold pronouncements about his or her mental state after fingering a cranial bump.
Medical education was inadequate in most of the country. The 1910 Flexner Report, a probing study of medical schools issued by the Carnegie Foundation, exposed the inadequacies in detail. For one thing, many doctors earned their diploma by memorizing their professors' lectures, never talking to or touching a patient. Half the medical schools in the United States were forced to close or merge after the report made headlines.
Before 1930, the Alaska doctors I have read about had limited knowledge, limited skills, limited influence over their patients' progress. They were probably typical of their profession. As the research scientist turned popular author Lewis Thomas noted, his father, a New York physician who began practicing around 1910, usually could do little for his patients. Most of them recovered, grew worse, or remained the same regardless of his treatment.
Thomas called the 1930s and 40s decades of exceptional advancement in diagnosis and treatment. Alaska medicine improved too -- and Alaska psychiatry freed itself from pseudo-science.
On June 13, 1950, Anchorage psychiatrist Virginia Wright performed a neuro-psychiatric exam on Carl Finger, a 47-year-old prisoner in the Anchorage jail. I know this because her careful four-plus-page, single-spaced report became part of Finger's criminal file. I was interested because my dad, Fabian, knew Finger and his wife while they were in the Interior.
Finger, who habitually wrote bad checks while habitually under the influence, arrived at Wright's door under a court order. A judge demanded the exam.
In her summary of Finger's history, Wright wrote, "The patient was born in 1902 in Dawson City, and has lived in Alaska all his life. He brings this (up) constantly as though being an Alaskan were a reason for leniency, and he seems bewildered that people won't accept this. 'Here I have lived here all my life, and the judge will give other people suspended sentences -- people who just came up here,' he complained."
Finger said his father was a "steamboat man" who brought him up on the water. He began working at 12 and drinking at 14. "Bad luck" and alcohol, he said, led him to bad checks. Bad checks led to conflict with the criminal justice system and jail sentences. In her summary, Dr. Wright wrote that Finger displayed "a complete lack of sense of responsibility and complete lack of judgment and insight ... ." He seemed to think pleading guilty absolved him of his violations of the law.
Carl Finger wasn't so much a threat to society as a nuisance. No doubt this was why the unnamed judge sent him to Dr. Wright: To obtain a clearer understanding of his disruptive behavior and what might be done to curb it. Curbing criminal behavior -- rather than simply punishing it -- is a basic tenet of modern penal reform. It's to the judge's credit that he sought to find out if Finger had any potential for change. Unfortunately, Dr. Wright concluded "The patient knows the difference between right and wrong, but he cannot learn from past experiences ... ."
My dad met the woman who would become Carl's wife, Carrie Boatman, in the summer of 1937 when he was a 20-year-old greenhorn partner to veteran trapper Carl Hult. Carrie was 30, half the age of her first husband Clarence Boatman, who trapped at the confluence of the Kantishna and Tanana rivers. Fabian and Carl arrived at the Boatmans' cabin on a cold, wet afternoon and spent a night to remember. Carrie located a bottle of "white mule" -- bootleg whisky -- and after finishing most of it, started a brawl with Clarence that he ended with a knockout punch to her jaw.
The Boatmans divorced and Carrie married Carl Finger, who shared her thirst for hootch. Boatman, meanwhile, moved to Fairbanks where, too elderly for trapping, he became the winter caretaker for freighter George Black's fleet of riverboats beached along the Chena River.
In 1946, Carrie came to Boatman for help. She and Carl were homeless. Did the old man have a place the two of them could live, if only briefly? Yes, he said, a small shack on Black's grounds. Not much but dry, clean, safe.
Boatman saw little, then nothing, of the pair and assumed they moved away until his employer asked him to clean up the shack, which reeked of rotting caribou meat. "Soon as I went there, I knew," Boatman confided to Fabian. "No, that wasn't caribou meat I told Captain Black. It was the remains of my wife. She died of consumption and her husband moved out without telling anybody." An inquest confirmed Boatman's analysis.
When Dr. Wright asked Finger about his marital status three years later, he said he was widowed.
Carl Finger died in 1968, age 65. Apparently the government finally accepted his demand that he deserved special recognition as an Alaskan. He finished his life in the Sitka Pioneer Home.
I will look for a probate file. In the meantime, I am guessing he died broke -- empty poke, head full of stories. A classic Alaska ending.
Michael Carey is an Alaska Dispatch columnist.
The views expressed here are the writer's own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)alaskadispatch.com.