Nuns and Doctors

A history of dotage wrested through the substance of old women's cries, gestures, bodies, and brains: the captive material of the Salpêtrière, for Charcot's theater of clinico-anatomical correlation, the old women who offer us knowledge, and through their inexhaustible numbers the possibility of a science of old age and of the boundaries of the pathological. But for a twentieth-century science of vivisection and recombination, the surplus material of old women was not enough; their live bodies could not circulate into the laboratory, and the search was on for the animal model, culminating in the arrival of several subspeciated brands of Alzheimer's mouse on the business pages of the Wall Street Journal and New York Times in 1995.

It is no longer a question of relative ethics, mice versus doting old women. Old women could not serve as the materialization of Alzheimer's as Alzheimer's was increasingly less a metonym of old age than a metaphor for it, its structural replacement. No one ever dies of old age anymore, but of the nation's fourth leading yet most insidious killer, and the material for a science can no longer be limited to the old. One looks for clues, rather, among the young: skin tests or other quick and painless assessments of future hell.

But the history of dotage still exacts its occasional pull: its reliance on the subaltern physiology of woman did not disappear with Alzheimer's plaques or with the celebrated arrival of genetically engineered mice. Like Scot with his witches and Charcot with his vieille femmes , a group of researchers at the University Of Kentucky discovered the disciplinary possibilities of old nuns. One-third of the elderly School Sisters of Notre Dame were diagnosed with Alzheimer's, but all had kept written traces of their youth—autobiographical essays they had been instructed to write as novices, under the confessional authority of the church.

The Kentucky doctors found that the demented of the old nuns had, as young

women, been more likely to have written simple sentences devoid of grammatical complexities; the old "mentally sharp" nuns when novices had in contrast written complex sentences. "Study Suggests Alzheimer's May Begin Early," ran the headline in the San Francisco Chronicle .^[1] The possibilities for Alzheimer's swelled as the ever more contested distribution of intelligence—heretofore limited to the revived Bell Curve nature-nurture debates of the 1990s academy—could be framed as the harbinger of worse hard-wired horrors.^[2] Once again, the institutionalized bodies of old women are the substrate for geriatric knowledge, but these bodies are now extended back in time to a plumbing of a youthful confession for new stigmata. Other explanations for the distribution of novitiate intelligence and for its correlation with the mental status of aged nuns were unimaginable.

From the wordplay of Mary Daly, ex-Catholic and self-proclaimed Witch: "academentia."^[3] But real.