Patience Worth and Pearl Curran

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So, since we're still
in October, I thought today would be fun for a

(00:21):
literary mystery sort of. It's technically a ghost story, and
it had a lot of speculation about what was going
on when all of this was playing out in the
early twentieth century. More than one hundred years later, there
are still only theories about what actually took place, although

(00:42):
the nature of those theories has almost always been more
about psychological profiling than any paranormal Today we are talking
about Patience Worth and Pearl Curran, who I mentioned last
year during our wag Aboard episode that this might be
an episode, and it finally is a yearly. I mean,
that's not that long considering how long no, so of

(01:04):
our stuff on the list is way older than that. Yeah. So,
Patience Worth was an english woman born in sixteen forty
nine maybe sixteen ninety four. As an adult, she immigrated
to North America, settled on the island of Nantucket, and
she would eventually become a prolific and popular writer penning

(01:26):
multiple novels and poems and other works, but that all
happens after she was dead. She, according to this, was
killed by Native Americans, and her writing career was centuries
later because Patient's Worth was just almost certainly a fiction herself,

(01:47):
although for a long time it was claimed that she
was dictating her writing through a wija board. Yeah, that
life story or things that she told people that have
never been very in any way. Yes, as I understand it,
this isn't a person we can conclusively point to in
the historical record and say, like, here's her name on

(02:10):
the ship's manifest et cetera. Pearl Lenor Pollard, a very
real person, was born in Mound City, Illinois, in eighteen
eighty three. Her father was George Pollard, a railroad worker,
and her mother was Mary Pollard. George duded the nature
of his job went where work was, so the family
moved pretty frequently. This was apparently not a life that

(02:32):
Mary was really cut out for. She was not ever
really able to find a way to live with the
uncertain nature of her husband's job that was not very stressful,
and after Mary had what is described as a nervous
breakdown when Pearl was still a small child of four.
At that point, Pearl went to Saint Louis for a

(02:52):
while to stay with her grandmother. Pearl struggled in school.
She was creative and she got along well with her peers,
but she just didn't do well academically. She later described
herself as an impudent child and bored with school. At
an early age, she was given music lessons, which she
saw as her one way out of a life that

(03:13):
she otherwise thought was hopeless. Then at thirteen, her education
abruptly ended when she had some kind of a nervous collapse.
She told an interviewer in nineteen twenty seven that she
broke down. She chalked it up to quote, too much
piano elocution, Delsarte, school and entertainments. Details beyond that we

(03:36):
don't really have. But she did not return to school.
She was re enrolled, but the long break in her
education meant that she was bumped back a grade. Rather
than fall back to that lower grade, she just dropped out.
She also wasn't raised in any particular religion, and later
in life recounted asking her father if there was a god,

(03:57):
and her father replied, my dear, I don't know her
only exposure to spiritualism was a brief stay with an
uncle in Chicago. That uncle was a medium. She played
piano in his church briefly and later said she didn't
like the people that it attracted. In nineteen oh seven,
Pearl married John H. Curran, who was a land developer. Yeah,

(04:21):
her early life is a little bit tricky to piece together,
because it does seem like she bounced around from relative
to relative sometimes when her mom felt a little bit overwhelmed.
But she did end up back with her mother after
a while. And then in nineteen twelve, Pearl and her

(04:42):
friend Emily Grant Hutchings. It sounds like Emily's husband and
Pearl's husband were friends. These two women decided to play
with a Wigi board. There are different versions of this
story somewhere. They were first at another woman's house and
then Emily got very interested and bought a board for herself,
and it emits that part entirely. So it's unclear which

(05:03):
of those is real. But at this point in nineteen twelve,
Pearl's father had recently passed and Emily, who had been
very much swept up in the tide of spiritualism that
was happening in the US in the nineteen teens. Spiritualism
had been happening before that, but there was a particularly
big wave of popularity then. She one hundred percent believed

(05:25):
in the supernatural, and she thought that perhaps she and
Pearl could contact Pearl's father, George on the other side.
Pearl later described her own position on the matter as
skeptical at best. She called it silly chatter. She was
not afraid of the weige aboard, but she also wasn't
all that interested, and the two ladies would kind of
mess around with it when their husbands got together, but

(05:46):
they never got much of anything but random, kind of
jittery pointer movements until July third, nineteen thirteen, when the
two women sat down with the board between them that night,
a clear message came through. It started with the word many,
and then it quickly continued from there. When all the

(06:09):
letters had been pointed to one by one, the message
was quote many moons ago, I lived again. I come,
Patience worth my name. There was a brief pause, and
then the communication continued and the ladies wrote down Patience's
words as she spelled them out, quote wait, I would
speak with THEE if thou shalt live, then so shall I,

(06:32):
and make my bread by thy hearth. Good friends, let
us be married. The time for work is past. Let
the tabby drowse and blink her wisdom to the fire log.
At this point one of the women commented that this
communication was quaint, and then the spirit continued, quote, good mother,
wisdom is too harsh for thee, and thou shouldst love

(06:54):
her only as a foster mother. I do love the
the line. Let the tabby drowse and blea her wisdom
to the fire log. Well talk about some of Patients's
other bits of wisdom later on, but this was merely
the beginning, because it turned out that Patience was a
pretty chatty spirit. She communicated it seemed any time that

(07:14):
Pearl Current touched the wijiboard, Emily Hutchings did not have
the same effect. It was Pearl, always Pearl, no matter
who her wigeaboard partner was. And from that very first instance,
the dialogues were always documented with notes about the situation
and whoever was partnering with Pearl on the wi jam.

(07:35):
But these sessions with patients are interesting in the spiritualism
picture because they were never dressed up in the trappings
that came with it. They were all very casual. They
happened in full light, like in a living room. There
were no incantations, there was no formality. This is not
a lip candles in darkened room situation. It's like, would
you like to come over and sit on the couch

(07:56):
and I'll get out the wigiboard. These sessions had observers
pretty frequently because talk about what was going on with
Missus Curran spread rapidly. Pearl had started to describe her
own experience when communing with Patience to her friends and family.
This became a source of fascination for everyone they knew.

(08:18):
Pearl said that in addition to the words patience spelled
out on the wijaboard, she was also receiving mental pictures
and sometimes additional text in visual form. Soon, Pearl and
her husband John were essentially hosting just a continuous run
of open house events where they served food. Anybody could
come and watch Pearl and patients talk. In a lot

(08:40):
of cases, guests even participated. They acted as Pearl's weja
partner while John recorded everything that patients was sharing. Guests
could ask questions and patients would rapidly answer them. She
was very quick with a sharp retort when any of
the participants said anything that she did not like. One
of the exchanges between Patience and a physician who visited

(09:03):
the currents and was not a believer, it's a good
example of this, and it went in part like this.
The doctor says, I hope Patience worth will come. I'd
like to find out what her game is, and Patience
quickly replied. Doss then desired the plucking of another goose,
and the doctor says, by George, she's right there with
the grease, isn't she. Patience replies, enough to base the

(09:26):
last upon the spit. The doctor says, well, that's quick
wit for you. Pretty hard to catch her. Patient says,
the salt of today will not serve to catch the
bird of tomorrow. When visitors came and questioned patients, a
lot of the time they wanted to ask about the future,
but the spirit was always mum on such queries. She

(09:47):
would not tell anyone the future, but she would write poetry,
and she wrote a lot of it. She had carried
literary ambitions, but she explained to Pearl that she'd just
been looking for the right vessel to work through. At
one point, Patience was reportedly sending as many as fifteen
hundred words an hour through the ouija, but eventually that

(10:09):
became too cumbersome, so Patience was just speaking directly through Pearl.
Missus Curran described just sort of getting a feeling before
it began, and then there was Patience. Pearl didn't appear
to be in a trance or tuned out of her
surroundings in any way during these sessions. She could converse
briefly with the people around her, or lay out food

(10:30):
on a platter, or anything else that a hostess might do,
but she was also speaking the words that Patience Worth
was sending through her. One of the things that always
sounded like a pretty amazing part of her story is
that a lot of the witnesses say she never backtracked,
never repeated words, and that she didn't include any filler words.

(10:51):
All of Patience's communications came through clear with no kind
of editing, which is astonishing if you just listen to
people conversation at all. We are going to delve into
some of the writings of patients Worth after we paused
for a word from our sponsors. One of the earliest

(11:18):
pieces of poetry that Patients wrote through pearl is as follows.
A blighted bud may hold a sweeter message than the
loveliest flower. For God hath kissed her wounded heart and
left a promise there. A cloak of lies may clothe
the golden truth. The sunlight's warmth may fade its glossy
black to whiten and green, and prove the fault of

(11:41):
weak and shoddy dye. Oh, why let sorrow steal thy heart?
Thy bosom is but its foster mother, the world it's cradle,
and the loving home its grave. Weave sorrow on the
loom of love and warp the loom with faith. So
as we said, that was one of the earlier efforts.
But Patients evolved and became a stronger writer and produced

(12:02):
some really striking lines of verse. Here's an example. I
am molten silver running. Let man catch me with his cup,
Let him proceed upon his labor, smithing upon me. Let
him with cunnings, mte my substance, Let him at his dream,
lending my stuff onto his creation. It shall be no

(12:24):
less me. The line I am molten silver running is
so striking to me I want to put it on shirts.
I just love it those things that just when I
read it, I was like, Oh, I love uh. Sometimes
Patience would reveal more about herself and where she had
lived when she was alive, theoretically in the seventeenth century.

(12:45):
At one point she shared this recollection quote, well, I
remember a certain church with its wei windows and its
prim walls, with its sanctity and meekness, with its aloofness
and chilling godliness. Well, I remember the Sabbath and its
quietude of uneasiness, wherein the creaking of the wood was
an infernalism, the droning and scuffing of the menfolks shoes,

(13:06):
and the rustle of the clothes of the dames and maids,
the squeaking of the benches, and the drowsy humming of
some busy bee who broke the Sabbath's law. Aye. Well,
I remember the heat that foretold the wrath of God,
making the good man the parsons sweat Aye, and heaven
seemed far far. In nineteen sixteen, Casper Yost, who had

(13:29):
become one of Kurrn's friends after Patients appeared, and who
was also editor of the Saint Louis Globe Democrat, wrote
a book about Patience Worth titled Patience Worth a Psychic Mystery.
This was written with the Kurran's permission and their collaboration.
That book opens with the following message quote. The compiler

(13:50):
of this book is not a spiritualist, nor a psychologist,
nor a member of the Society for Psychical Research, nor
has he ever had anything more than a transitory and
skeptical interest in psychic phenomena of any character. He is
a newspaper man whose privilege and pleasure it is to
present the facts in relation to some phenomena which he

(14:12):
does not attempt to classify nor to explain, but which
are virtually without precedent, and the record of occult manifestations.
The mystery of Patience Worth is one which every reader
may endeavor to solve for himself. The sole purpose of
this narrative is to give the visible truth, the physical evidence,
so to speak, the things that can be seen and

(14:35):
that are therefore susceptible of proof by ocular demonstration. In
this category are the instruments of communication and the communications themselves,
which are described, explained, and in some cases interpreted, where
an effort at interpretation seems to be desirable. Make no mistake,

(14:56):
though Kaspri Jost believed in Patients this book. Book describes
the early experience of Pearl Keran and her friend meeting
patients in the summer of nineteen thirteen, and he discusses
patients as a real person, writing quote. Patience as a rule,
speaks in archaic tongue that is, in general the English
language of about the time of the Stuarts, but which

(15:18):
contains elements of a usage still more ancient and not
rarely word and phrase forms that seem never to have
been used in English or in any English dialect. Almost
all of her words, however, whether in conversation or in
literary composition, are of pure Anglo Saxon Norman origin. There
is seldom a word of direct Latin or Greek parentage.

(15:42):
Virtually all of the objects she refers to are things
that existed in the seventeenth century or earlier. In all
of the great massive manuscript that has come from her,
we have not noticed a single reference to an object
of modern creation or development. Nor have more than a
dozen words been found in her writings that maybe of
later origin than the seventeenth century, and some of these

(16:04):
words are debatable. She has shown in what would seem
to be a genuinely feminine spirit of perversity, that she
can use a modern word if she chooses to do so.
And if she is living now, no matter when she
was on earth, why should she not. Yos then goes
on to catalog all of the interactions with Patients up

(16:24):
to that point when he wrote the book, and so
there's a lot of record of what she had said
included in this writing. After Yost's book came out, patience
Worths work had an explosion in popularity. The whole country
wanted to see Pearl and Patience, and if they couldn't
do that, they wanted to read more about them. And

(16:45):
in a very auspicious bit of timing, Patience was ready
to write a novel right around this time. Her first
book was The Sorry Tale, which relayed the last several
days of the life of Jesus from the point of
view of one of the other men crucified at the time.
The book includes a preface that explains to anyone who

(17:06):
might not be familiar with the workings of Patience in
Pearl's relationship, quote, Missus Curran, through whom all of this
matter has come is a young woman of normal disposition
and temperament intelligent and vivacious. She receives the communications with
the aid of the mechanical device known as the wigiboard
as a recording instrument. There is no trance or any

(17:28):
abnormal mental state. She sits down with the wigi aboard
as she might sit down to a typewriter, and the
receipt of the communications begins with no more ceremony than
a typist would observe. Missus Curran has had no experience
in literary composition, and has made no study of literature
ancient or modern. Nor, it may be added, has she

(17:49):
made any study of the history, the religions, or the
social customs of the period of this story, nor of
the geography or topography of the regions in which it
is late. The introduction also details how initially Patients normally
dictated three hundred to one thousand words of the book
to Pearl in a sitting, but that she would also

(18:11):
dictate verse and didactic or humorous conversation in the same sittings.
But then the sessions became more focused, and soon twenty
five hundred to thirty five hundred words were being produced
in a session of ninety minutes to two hours. The
description continued quote. As in all her work, it mattered
not who was present or who sat at the board

(18:32):
with Missus Curran, whether the visa VI was a man
or woman, old or young, learned or unlettered. The speed
and the quality of the production were the same from
start to finish. Some two hundred and sixty persons contributed
in this way to the composition of this strange tale,
some helping to take but a few hundred words, some

(18:53):
many thousands. Parts of the story were taken in New York, Boston,
and Washington. Each time the story was picked up at
the point where work was stopped at the previous sitting,
without a break in the continuity of the narrative, without
the slightest hesitation, and without the necessity of a reference
to the closing words of the last preceding installment, and

(19:14):
then maybe to get out in front of criticism. The
elephant in the room is addressed head on quote. The
interesting question arises, if Patience is, as she says, an
English woman of the seventeenth century, where did she get
the knowledge and the material for this story. It is
a question that gives rise to many speculations, But apparently

(19:34):
she answers it for herself. In the words of THEA
to Tiberius in the garden of the Imperial Palace at Rome,
thy hand did reach forth and leave fall a curtain
of black that should leave a shadow ever upon the
days of THEA. And the hand that shall draw the
curtain wide and leave the light to fall upon thy
shadows shall be this. And she held her hand high.

(20:00):
Convenient Patience's literary career, it turned out, was just getting started,
and we're going to talk about how it continued and
how Pearl's life continued. After we paused to hear from
the sponsors that keep stuff you missed in history class going.

(20:23):
Patience Worth's first novel, The Sorry Tale, was a hit
when it came out in nineteen seventeen, both financially and critically.
Patience Worth was lauded as a literary genius like she
literally got put on lists of like the greatest authors
of the year. So naturally there was call for another book,
and Patience obliged, this time, producing a work that was

(20:46):
titled Hope True Blood. This book did not get the
same loving reception as the first. The main issue was
that while people seemed able to accept that somehow Patience
had not of the days of the Crucifixion, which would
have happened before she was allegedly alive. They were not

(21:06):
as able to accept that she had intimate and detailed
knowledge of life in Victorian England, which happened almost two
hundred years after she would have been alive and when
the book is set. Even believers at this point started
to doubt, and critics kind of got over her in
a hurry and started deeming her work boring and kind
of silly. For the next several years, Patients through Pearl

(21:29):
continued to churn out literary work to ever mixed reviews.
After Hope True Blood, opinions stayed very divided about whether
Patience was a real entity or Pearl Kurran was experiencing
some sort of mental illness, and there were also people
who thought she was just faking it for fame or money.

(21:50):
They didn't really need to worry about the money part, though,
because Patients really did not help the Currans financially, at
least not very much. They made a little bit from
the deal they had made with Casper Yost, but that
money went to the adoption of a daughter who they
named Patients worth current, but the Patient's Worth novels did
not really bring in much money, even though they were popular.

(22:14):
Pearl and John tried to start a magazine named for
their spirit author, but this turned out to be a
money pit, and then it kind of sputtered out. Yeah,
there's also a great quote from John where he was
talking about like how expensive it was to start the
magazine and to do some of the touring that was
going on, and then he makes a comment that, like,
and we also had basically like fed eight thousand people

(22:36):
in our home already at this point, Like, patients is expensive, right.
In nineteen nineteen, Pearl and Patients appeared before an audience
in New York City. That audience was filled with people
eager to see their unique working relationship. Patients dictated a
poem about Russia and then another about the Red Cross
in front of the curious group. There were definitely still

(23:00):
people who supported Pearl's claim of being a vessel for
a ghost author, but overall, the novelty that had brought
Pearl rapid fame was kind of wearing off. By the
nineteen twenties, fewer and fewer people were following Patience Worth's
literary career, even though she did continue to churn out plays, novels,
and poetry. That same year, Pearl published a work not

(23:23):
under Patience's name but under her own. The short story
Rosa Alvarro Entrante appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, and
it bore a striking resemblance to the story of Pearl
and Patience. When the main character of Maimie, who lives
a dull life, visits a clairvoyant, she's told that the
spirit of a beautiful woman from Spain named Rosa Alvaro

(23:46):
is watching over her. Mamie starts to manifest Rosa, and
Mamie's intentions, intellect, and sanity are all called into question,
but she comes clean to her best friend that it
was an act all along, and one that was sparked
by feeling unimportant and unseen. In her confession made me
says quote, I was sick of myself. I wanted to

(24:07):
feel feel like a woman that somebody cared about. This
story was adapted into a movie called Whatever Happened to Rosa. Yeah. Surprisingly,
this did not get a lot of attention in nineteen nineteen,
and one would have thought that it would, but it didn't.
Uh During this time, though, there were also numerous accusations

(24:28):
of fraud against Pearl. Psychologists and other scientists wanted to
study Pearl, and while she did meet with some of
them and allowed a lot of them to watch her
use the weageboard and channel patients, she never submitted to
anything like a psych evaluation, and she refused flat out
refuse to be hypnotized. She generally begged out of such
scenarios by saying that she was worried that something like

(24:50):
hypnosis was going to damage her ability to connect with
patients in the long term, but that did not stop
papers from being written about Pearl current and what people
thought was going on in her head. In nineteen nineteen,
Charles Corey of Washington University wrote of Pearl and patients quote,
it should be said at once that the case is
one upon which no satisfactory report can be made without

(25:13):
the aid of hypnosis. Anything like a real explanation of
the problems to be solved requires data that can be
obtained no other way. He makes the case that the
likely explanations of subconscious memory or subconscious thought can't really
be explored without hypnosis, and he notes that it's interesting
that there's no trance state when Pearl is channeling patients,

(25:35):
and no displacement of the primary identity, that being Pearl.
He suggests that rather than a subconscious identity of Pearls,
which is a popular theory that was going around at
the time, that Patience might be considered more of a
co conscious manifestation. Near the end of the paper, Corey
says this of pearl current quote. It is worth noting

(25:57):
that Patience Worth made her appearance after Current had spent
many evenings with a friend, a confirmed spiritualist with a
view of getting a message from the spirit world in
the atmosphere of expectancy of hope that a voice from
the dead might be heard. She may be said to
have been born, and it is more than possible that
the idea became at that time a vital part of

(26:19):
the dissociated self then developing. Now, we've said a lot
of times on the show, we are not mental health professionals.
Even if we were, we would not diagnose people who
are not even alive to be examined. But it just
seems extra unethical for a person who is a science
professional to write and publish papers essentially diagnosing a person

(26:43):
who is still alive without their consent. This is only
one of several such papers that were written about Pearl
Kurran during her life, and for the record, Patience was
apparently really amused by Charles Corey's opinions. Yeah, I forget
exactly how she put it, but basically it made her laugh.

(27:05):
In nineteen twenty two, Pearl's husband, John died. He had
been sick for a while, and at this point Pearl's
mother was living with them, So she suddenly found herself
with a daughter and a mother to support on her own,
and as a little surprised there was another child on
the way. Pearl, who was thirty nine at this time,
had tried to have a child biologically with no success

(27:27):
earlier in her marriage, but she was pregnant when John died. Additionally,
John had been really instrumental in her rise to fame.
We mentioned earlier that he was the one most frequently
making notes and writing down the words of patients. One
of Pearl's followers and supporters, a man named Herman Behar,
arranged to give her four hundred dollars a month after

(27:48):
John's death to help her out. Bear also translated some
of Patients's writings into German, but though that was certainly
no paltry allowance. In nineteen twenty two, Pearl took Patie
on the road and started accepting appearance bookings to help
provide for the family. She demonstrated the way that she
used the wage board to talk with patients and receive

(28:10):
her thoughts and writings, and these demos were performed for
anybody basically that would book her. She would do these
in large auditoriums, or she would do them in small groups.
She would sometimes be in the private homes of very
wealthy and famous clients, just kind of seeking to slake
their curiosity. I wasn't able to find verification, but one

(28:31):
biography of her mentioned that she did this like in
Douglas Fairbanks's home for example. Pearl got married two more
times after John's death. First, four years after he died,
she married a Saint Louis doctor who was older than
she was. His name was Henry Rogers. That marriage ended

(28:51):
after several years, and she moved to Los Angeles and
rekindled a romance with a man she had known when
she was a lot younger. That was Robert Wyman. They
got married in nineteen thirty one and Unfortunately, Pearl and
Robert's marriage did not last long either, but this time
it was because Pearl died after they had been together,
just six years after allegedly receiving a warning of something

(29:14):
bad coming from patients, which Pearl is said to have
told friends. Pearl contracted pneumonia in November of nineteen thirty seven,
and she died on December third. An article in the
La Times the following month ran under the headline will
she meet her astral Guide? People continued to debate whether
Patience Worth had ever been a real person, although there

(29:37):
were some efforts to find her, but no evidence of
her in the historical record ever turned up. Casper Yost
even traveled to England and went to the places that
she seemed to be describing, and couldn't really line things
up properly. One aspect of the story of Pearl and
Patience that becomes apparent is how frequently Pearl Kerrn's biography

(29:59):
has been sherry pick. These biographies characterize her in ways
that would suggest that she just wouldn't have been capable
of writing the works of Patience Worth, or they kind
of insinuate that she was a bored housewife who was
maybe faking this whole thing because she needed a thrill.
Regarding that first angle that she was too uneducated to

(30:20):
write the works that were attributed to patients, that doesn't
really hold up. Even though she did end her formal
education early. Even when she was a preteen, she wrote
what have been described as incredibly imaginative letters. That was
according to family members, she would write to them when
she was staying at other people's homes. She was known
to be really creative. Also, there are plenty of people

(30:43):
without formal education who were autodide acts that have a
vast range of knowledge. Like before there was compulsory education
in North America that was almost everyone. We have so
little documentation about most people's day to day lives. It
is entirely possible that she was a reader in her downtime. Yeah,

(31:06):
it's interesting. Some write ups about her I have seen
have mentioned like she and John didn't even have books,
and I'm like, really, that's like impossible. And then there
is this idea that Pearl was lonely or bored. Listen,
everyone experiences those feelings from time to time. But the
thing is a quick search for Pearl in newspapers from

(31:28):
the years before the appearance of patients worth yielded a
lot of mentions in various write ups. For example, in
January of nineteen ten, her name appears in an article
in the Cherryvale Journal of Cherryvale, Kansas about some efforts
of women's groups to help grow Missouri. Pearl Curran had
spearheaded the whole thing. This article states, quote Missus Pearl

(31:50):
Lenorke Curran, wife of John H. Curran, chief Commissioner for
the Missouri Board of Immigration, is the organizer. She lives
in Saint Louis and is an ardent advocate of the
development of Missouri's resources. She is public spirited and is
a good speaker. Her idea is to enlist the cooperation
of the women's clubs in developing the state and inducing immigration.

(32:12):
Pearl is mentioned in another article that same week in
a different paper, this time the Saint Louis Star in Times.
This one mentions that she was elected president of the
Society to Elevate Missouri. In that instance, the project the
group was focusing on was quote better factory laws for
women and child labor. They were also planning to quote

(32:33):
consider the establishment of restrooms for women in towns. So
it really doesn't sound like Pearl Kerran was sitting on
her hands at home wishing for attention or for something
to do. That isn't to say that she couldn't have
been wanting something more than her life was offering her
before Patients appeared on the scene. But it's just inaccurate
to describe her as having this empty, lonely, isolated life

(32:58):
before this ghost writer brought fame. Yes, she was like
so engaged with community efforts and with like trying to
better her town. There is another really interesting point that
popped up while I was doing research that to me
reframes the Patience and Pearl story a little bit. Everything

(33:19):
that was produced through their connection was published under Patience
Worth's name. The only thing that Pearl Current published as
herself was that Saturday Evening Post short story. But Stephen E.
Broade wrote the following in an article that appeared in
Journal of Trauma and Dissociation in June of two thousand.
Quote one more preliminary observation. Wich aboards have no provisions

(33:44):
for indicating capitalization, punctuation, or parsing into line stanzas and paragraphs. Therefore,
all the published and unpublished versions of Patient's communications represent
a joint creative venture involving the source whatever or whoever
it was, of the words, and the editor who parses
and punctuates them. And because there are no strict or

(34:06):
clear guidelines to follow in these cases, every rendering of
patients's words is inevitably tentative and presumably possible to improve.
This is an interesting thing because it's the only time
I ever found anyone saying, Okay, let's just say she
was channeling a ghost or this was part of her
subconscious mind. Pearl still deserves some credit for actually turning

(34:30):
this into readable stuff, which is an interesting way to
look at it that I had not considered. So to
close out, we're going to share a handful of patients
worths kind of wisdom zingers. These are just a fleet
a few of them. There are a lot of them
on record. Some of them are very funny. So the
first and is he who buildeth with peg and cudgel,

(34:52):
but buildeth a toy for an age, who will but
cast aside the bubble as not? But he who buildeth
with word and a fluid buildeth well? Should I present
thee with a pumpkin? Wouldst thou desire to count the seeds.
A drink of ass's milk would nurture the swine, But
wouldst thou then expect his song to change from Want

(35:14):
Want Want, Puddings fit for lords would sour the belly
of a swine boy. To clap the cover on a
steaming pot of herbs will but modify the stench. And
then one that cracks me up. A lollipop is but
a breeder of pain. For the record, per Miriam Webster,

(35:35):
the word lollipop is in non use didn't appear until
about seventeen eighty four. That would have been one hundred
years after patients Worth was alive. Yeah. I looked in
the Oxford English Dictionary and it had about the same year.
I don't remember if it was exactly the same one,
but it was right around there. Yeah, not really the
I I'm fascinated by Patience Worth. We can talk about

(35:59):
all this on Friday. I have so many thoughts. In
the meantime, though, I have a listener mail from our listener, Heather,
who writes, Hi, Holly and Tracy, thanks for putting so
much effort into your podcast. It definitely has introduced me
to so much history I wasn't aware of or introduced
me to a much deeper context for historical figures I

(36:20):
did know. I especially love episodes about women doing things
that women weren't supposed to do in their era. Since
I am a woman in a male dominated trade. I
shoe horses for a living, and when I began thirteen
years ago, it was pretty rare to see other women
at continuing ed events. But in that time, the demographics
have shifted in a big way, and almost fifty percent

(36:41):
of new students entering the trade are women. It's been
very exciting to watch the change, but I digress. As
a side note, I am fascinated by the fact that,
like the ferrier trade would shift so rapidly, because thirteen
years is not a long time, so that's very cool.
But Heather continues, I got super excited today listening to
the episode about milk sickness when you got to listener Mail.

(37:02):
I grew up near Greenfield Village. That's the collection of
historic buildings that Henry Ford put together, and it was
one of our very favorite places to visit. It is
set up like a historic town and many of the
buildings have costumed living history presenters showing everything from historic
farming techniques to hearth, cooking and crafts like glass blowing, tinsmithing,

(37:22):
and weaving. In addition to the highlights Linda listed in
her Listener mail, they have a replica of George Washington
Carver's cabin, Robert Frost's house, enslaved people's quarters from a
Georgia plantation, something that was often not preserved or considered
a value, and one of our favorites as a kid,
the William McGuffey one room log Schoolhouse McGuffey of McGuffey

(37:44):
reader fame. I would highly recommend visiting if you're ever
in the Detroit area. There's also an amazing museum attached
which has many high profile artifacts like the chair Lincoln
was assassinated in and the Rosa Parks bus, which is
part of an exhibit on the civil rights movement that
was really eye open for me as a teenager. Sorry
about the long email, but I love the place so
much and I had to share more about it. Here

(38:06):
is a picture of our extremely sweet cat, Lucy, named
after Lucy Oball listen, am I in love with everything
about this? Yes? She is a rare female orange tabby
and loves everyone and purrs pretty much all the time.
Thanks for all the education and entertainment, Heather, Lucy is adorable.
She's so cute. I want to kiss that face. Heather,

(38:26):
thank you so much for sending this email. I love
hearing about ways that people have engaged with history, like
when they're kids, and that it got them excited. That's
always nice to hear, because sometimes those museum trips weren't fun,
so I'm glad she loved them. If you would like
to write to us, you can do so at History
Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also find us
on social media as missed in History, and if you

(38:48):
have not subscribed yet and would like to, you can
do that on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows. Missed in History Class is a
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your

(39:09):
favorite shows.

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Tracy Wilson

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