He Wanted the Moon: The Madness and Medical Genius of Dr. Perry Baird, and His Daughter's Quest to Know Him

In her mid 50s, Mimi Baird received a box of papers written by her father some decades before. Now, her father had mysteriously disappeared from her life when she was a child - her mother divorced him and she married another man without ever really telling Mimi and her sister much about their father.

Mimi found out that her father was a promising doctor who suffered profoundly from bipolar disorder, was hospitalized multiple times,and eventually lobotomized as treatment for severely manic episodes. She also found that her father, before his manic episodes became too severe to continue, had begun research into the biochemical causes of bipolar disorder, even publishing a paper with some interesting results years before John Cade's show more experiments leading to lithium treatment for the condition.

He Wanted the Moon is part transcription of Baird's writing during his hospitalization (and a fascinating look into the mind of a person in the throes of a severe manic condition) and part her story of discovery as she learned about her father - good and not so good. Ultimately it's a tragic story, given the state of mental health care at the time, especially as his lobotomy was performed not so very long before lithium revolutionized treatment for bipolar patients. show less

Dr. Perry Baird (d. 1959) was a promising dermatologist and medical researcher who had the misfortune of suffering from severe manic-depressive psychosis (now known as bipolar disorder) before effective treatments were available. During his manic phases, he was prone to violent rages, spending sprees and other impulsive, destructive behavior. For years Baird shuttled back and forth between various hospitals and the outside world, losing his family and medical license along the way. Finally, he was given a lobotomy that calmed him down, but took away his personality as well. He died a few years later, his promise as a man of science unfulfilled.

Baird's daughter Mimi inherited the disorganized pages of the memoir her father wrote while show more hospitalized, a work he called "Echoes from a Dungeon Cell". She pieced the document back together and sought out his few surviving friends in order to interview them. He Wanted the Moon is the result of her years of work on this project.

It is a harrowing story. Baird described in heartrending detail the daily indignities of life a mental hospital in the 1940s, including the agony of spending hours encased in cold packs or a straitjacket. Baird tried very hard to be "cooperative" in order to gain privileges and ultimately, his freedom, but the course of his illness was unrelenting. The contrast between the degrading conditions he endured in the hospital and the posh "country club" lifestyle he enjoyed during his more "normal" periods is remarkable.

As a physician, Baird suspected that his extreme mood swings had a physiological basis. During his healthier periods he tested this hypothesis through experiments that he designed himself. Modern science has since proven that his thinking on the subject was years ahead of its time.

This is a sad but necessary book. I highly recommended it to anyone interested in the history of mental health treatment. show less

He Wanted the Moon is a captivating account of Dr. Perry Baird's mental illness as recounted by his restored memoir and by his daughter. The book is split into roughly two parts, the first composed of Dr. Baird's painstakingly reconstructed manuscript and the second more autobiographical about the author and her father.

Dr. Baird's account of his manic-depressive illness in the mid-1940s is honest, compelling, and absolutely horrifying to read. It saddens me so much to think of how poorly people with mental illnesses were treated and the stunning amount of ignorance in not only people without mental illnesses but also among the very people caring for mental patients. Dr. Baird was subject to all sorts of horrifying "treatments" from show more restraint, cold packs, and finally, a lobotomy that led to his early demise in his mid-50s.

Dr. Baird had a brief career as a notable dermatologist and a medical research scientist hoping to find a cause or a cure for his illness. Unfortunately, his career was held back and ultimately ended by his illness. It's heartbreaking to think that, had he become ill a few decades later, he could have benefitted from mood stabilizing medications such as lithium. But either way, his "treatment" in several mental hospitals certainly helped to provoke relapse and worsen his symptoms and disease.

The author, Mimi Baird, grew up mostly not knowing her father, as the culture of silence pervading mental illness in the beginning of the 20th century led her mother and other family members to refer to her father as being "away" and leaving it at that. This book catalogues her attempt to get to know her father posthumously, to preserve his genius and make sense of his illness.

I would highly recommend this book to anybody interested in mental illness, as the first-person account of Dr. Baird's treatment is, although absolutely horrifying and breathtakingly sad, probably one of the best accounts of early-mid 20th century mental illness "treatment" that I've read. show less

Such a sad and beautiful book and breathtakingly honest, which left me in awe.
It begins as the story of Perry Baird and his manic depression. What I loved from the start is that the author has allowed her father's words to show him as a very real human being, rather than serving him up as a saint. He is smart and creative and passionate; he is also flawed, he fails and he stumbles like everyone else.
But then this seemingly ordinary man becomes terribly troubled, and he is placed in an extraordinary situation as he is sent away and treated in the most inhumane way (I found it almost unbearable to read).
Then comes the author's perspective. She has received a copy of her father's "manuscript" (mostly a collection of papers in disorder) show more and she becomes determined to learn his story. Her writing is stark and beautiful, and her yearning so sincere and poignant that many readers will be moved to tears.
This is certainly a book about dealing with mental illness and its brutal treatment, providing a rare firsthand glimpse into a world of institutions of the 1940s and '50s. But it's also a story about family and loneliness and mystery and curiosity and one of love's greatest gifts: making certain that someone will never be forgotten. show less

Six-word review: Daughter lovingly penetrates father's dark world.

Extended review:

Mimi Baird was only six when her father unaccountably disappeared from her life. "He's away" was all her mother would tell her. Nearly seven decades later, her quest to comprehend his history and publish his own account of his experience with mental illness sees fulfillment with this book.

And a compelling narrative it is, disturbing and emotionally affecting, though not for the faint of heart when it comes to barbaric treatments for the mentally ill. In 1944, manic depression, now better known as bipolar disorder, was so little understood that therapy in a hospital amounted to physical torture, meant to impose discipline on patients who had lost the show more ability to control their own behavior. Dr. Perry Baird, himself a physician and lauded graduate of Harvard Medical School, turned his powers of observation upon himself. He strove to document both his mental states in the active phases of his crippling illness and the character and effects of institutional psychiatric medicine at the time:

"Westborough State Hospital and other places like it have nothing to offer; nothing but a jail-like incarceration, brutality and ugliness. The patients who come here recover not because of the treatment they receive, but in spite of it. Some are submerged by it, die of it." (page 124)

Baird's searching and desperately honest efforts to chronicle the course of his mental deterioration are matched by his daughter's determination to accomplish the unfolding of her father's mystery. At times overwhelmed, first by the dearth of material and later by the sheer unruly bulk of it, Mimi dedicated herself to piecing together his scrambled memoir, along with his correspondence, medical records, interviews with those who had known him, and fragments of her own memories. The core of the narrative is Dr. Baird's account of his periods of mania and extreme depression and his confinements in mental hospitals. His attempts to describe faithfully his own mental state when he knows it's abnormal and is being recorded by a faulty instrument seem to me nothing short of heroic.

Particularly striking are the instances of the logic of delusion--and it is delusion, he is careful to point out, and not hallucination: he doesn't see anything that isn't there; rather, he has a mistaken understanding of what he does see:

"Once, as I was making my bed jump up and down, I heard a crashing of boards and the bed seemed suddenly to get jammed on the floor and I couldn't move it. This made me imagine that the hospital building had been placed on wooden boards on a lake and that I had created a vibration with my bed that had crushed the boards and let the building sink to the bottom of the lake. For a while I thought we were at the bottom of the ocean between Greenland and the British Isles." (page 81)

Examples of this sort remind me of E. Thelmar's work The Maniac: A Realistic Study of Madness From the Maniac's Point of View (http://www.librarything.com/work/8175500), another remarkable view into a highly intelligent and severely deranged mind. For a time, it is marginally possible to see as these sufferers see, and this insight is both sobering and strangely uplifting. Mad magic is still, in some inexplicable way, magic. The link between a deluded imagination and creative genius is not easily denied. Baird himself cites the connection, perhaps in an unconscious echo of Rilke's famous line about fearing to lose his angels if his devils were taken away.

With respect to the "medical genius" of the subtitle, however, I consider this label to be overselling. In my opinion the content does not substantiate this characterization; it is, I'm afraid, the author's wishful thinking. Dr. Baird failed tragically to fulfill his potential as a researcher. His vision of a possible cause of manic depression and its implications for treatment anticipated the first effective medications but did not play a role in their development. Rather than exaggerating her father's actual accomplishments, it would have been better to keep the spotlight on his attempts to document and analyze his malady and his delusional states as a contribution to the literature.

And not only does the subtitle miss the mark. I think the book's main title, He Wanted the Moon, is a stunningly poor choice and will fail to attract the target audience. No matter that it was a one-liner handed to her by an old associate of her father's; it is jarringly inconsistent with the subject character and his story as presented in these pages, and I think someone ought to have told her so. Wanting the moon is about ambition, but this book is not about ambition. If it had been my role to advise the author in an editorial capacity, I would have strongly suggested that she take her metaphor from her father's indefatigable struggles to escape from bondage: literally to wriggle out of straitjackets, to run away from captivity, to overcome his illness. That, to me, is the central theme of the book.

I'm looking at a copy marked "uncorrected proof," but there are relatively few typos. It's remarkably clean; I normally spot more errors in a final printed copy. I do hope a few probable transcription errors are caught: "formable" for "formidable" on page 160, "in most of" for "in midst of" on page 225. Also a list of photograph credits at the back refers to a photo on page ii, but there are no Roman-numeral pages of frontmatter, and there is no such photograph in the book.

The typography is another matter. It is painful to the eye. There was no need to mix fonts as the book designer has done, no need to assign each "voice" its own typographic representation. Traditional typographic conventions together with appropriate introductory and transitional text would have done very nicely to distinguish blocks of content without assaulting the sensibilities with clashing styles or subjecting the reader to more than a hundred pages of sans-serif body font, useful enough in onscreen displays but suboptimal for sustained reading in print on paper. The excessive leading and word spacing do not compensate for the lower readability of a sans-serif font; instead, the combined effect gives the pages of Dr. Baird's memoir a look of vacuousness and floating detachment that insults the focused intensity of his words.

Typography that both calls attention to itself and detracts from the reader's ability to sustain engagement with the text is undesirable in any context. In a book, it is something like using the musical score in a movie to cover weak moments in the script: if the content is strong enough--and here, it is--you don't need special effects to underscore the drama.

One other thing that irritated me is the use of a variant spelling that compromises meaning: a straitjacket (strait = narrow, restricted, confined) is referred to throughout as a "straightjacket." I'd risk a wager that Dr. Baird himself, in his transcribed memoir, used the original spelling.

Despite these production-level faults, however, I remain impressed by the strength of the book. Mimi Baird's journey of discovery not only bears witness to her father's thwarted life and in some sense configures a redemption. It is also a moving journey of self-discovery. By telling his story, she tells her own story as well. And the courage to do this is the source of its power: the honest self-revelation of daughter and father, the laying to rest of a long struggle, a vast longing now fulfilled. show less

Whoa, this book was difficult to read. I have a family member who is bipolar. Books that give voice to this illness give me a sense of understanding and perspective that's sometimes hard to have in the moment.

Mimi Baird, at the twilight of her life, honors the father she barely knew by publishing his memoir years after his death. Her father's story is a tragic one. A brilliantly-capable, Harvard-educated physician, he had considerable promise and a big personality. However, he was severely manic-depressive and entered into a downward spiral of hospitalizations and 'state farm' commitments, escapes and 'treatment' that sometimes bordered on barbaric. He desperately tried to escape the literal and figurative confinement of his disease. show more Illness ended up taking everything from him - his freedom, his ability to practice medicine, his friends, his family and eventually, his life.

Written by Dr. Baird at a period that he's confined against his will: "I cast about in every direction for whatever help I could find. I found none. I pray to God that in the future I shall be able to remember that once one has crossed the line from the normal walks of life into a psychopathic hospital, one is separate from friends and relatives by walls thicker than stone; walls of prejudice and superstition."

That's heartbreaking and powerful. This book is recommended for those who have a connection to or interest in manic depression or care about someone who does. show less

Mimi Baird, a senior citizen and grandmother, has traveled a long way in her life. In her 70s, she is realizing the dream of knowing her father and, at the same time, publishing her first book. HE WANTED THE MOON is a moving and, at times - heart wrenching - story. In the epilogue, the author says: "My editor had asked me to go back into my archive of my father's writings and to transcribe every single word that I could find there." One can hear the editor saying this - and for good reason. The sections written by Dr. Perry Baird - most of them when he was a patient at Westborough State Hospital in Massachusetts in the 1940s - are the core of the book.

Mimi Baird's memoir of growing up mostly without a father, of living within a family show more where her father was never mentioned or, if he was, it was fleetingly and vague, is similar to other young girls being raised with absent fathers. The difference is that Mimi remembered her father; she was six when he "left" (was hospitalized). Dr. Perry Baird was a brilliant doctor with an active dermatology practice who also studied bipolar disease (then known as manic depression) and tried to find a biochemical cause for it. He had everything going for him: intelligence, personality, good looks, and a wife and two young daughters. Unfortunately, he had a psychiatric illness and was being treated for it during a time in history before the discovery of Lithium.

The pages written by Dr. Perry Baird are chilling, terrifying, and superbly rendered. When he describes how he feels in his mania, the reader can almost ride along beside him in this unwanted adventure. When he is strapped into a straightjacket or given various treatments that sound like medieval torture, the reader cringes and feels for him. His cameos describing fellow patients, supervising psychiatrists, and staff at the State Hospital are clever, creative, and put the reader squarely in the "scene." One senses Dr. Baird's creativity, his sensitivity, and his ability to grasp what was being done to him while, at the same time, his inability to keep the disease from allowing him to accept treatment. One scene in which he - logically it seems to the reader - works at getting himself loose from the straightjacket is so vivid that the reader will feel as though he/she has been straightjacketed. Yes, Dr. Baird certainly knew how to write.

Throughout the book, one feels hope. Perhaps a medication will be invented, perhaps his manic depression will go into a long remission, perhaps he will find a new psychaitrist with a different approach. All this hope creates suspense in the story of his life. When one reaches the chapter about the lobotomy, however, all hopes are dashed and the reader feels the letdown - strongly.

How hard and yet how fascinating it must have been for Mimi Baird to relive her father's life through his old writings (luckily preserved) and his old medical records (luckily released). For anyone with bipolar disorder or anyone who has a friend or family member who has struggled with the disease, this book will speak to the heart as well as to the love and concern we have for those in our lives so afflicted. For someone with no experience or knowledge of manic depression, HE WANTED THE MOON will be a very educational experience.

Mental illness is one of the most difficult challenges in our society today. Mental illness tears up individuals and families, often causes substance abuse issues and homelessness. Although it can't be made to go away with the snap of a finger, we are all grateful for progress - ANY progress. Reading about Dr. Baird's hospitalization in the United States in the 1940s is like reading about something that might have taken place in the Victorian era. The field of mental health has come a very long way in the 70 years since Perry Baird was treated at Westborough State Hospital. Today, perhaps, someone like Dr. Baird may be treated with Lithium or another prescription drug. There would be better versions of talk therapy, more understanding of the illness. It is hard to speculate whether he would have been able to carry on with his own medical career if he were alive in today's times - or not. But one certainty is that the treatments would be very, very different and his chances of a normal life much greater.

Mimi Baird deserves commendations for writing this book about her father. It certainly could not have been easy for her to relive her childhood, but it must have been very difficult for her to read her father's writings and the reports other medical practitioners wrote about him. She is a very brave woman who took on a very heavy task, but - by doing so - she has done an incredible service not only to her father's memory but to all those who suffer or suffered with issues of bipolar.

Writing the book must have exhausted her. The only extra a reader might wish for was a longer book. There were so many areas left unexplored: background on her father's family, more on her maternal grandfather who also suffered from the disorder. A genealogy of family from both sides might have added to the book as well as a discussion of current generations and the health issues they do - or do not - face. Still, despite the brevity of the memoir, it is a very important and recommended book. show less