I just stumbled across the following article and thought Mudcatters would enjoy it. Seems that some things just never change... like attitudes toward folk music and certain instruments. Anyone who has seen the movie "Awakenings" will recognize this story as an awakening gone awry! Reprinted from The New York Times, originally published on August 20, 1897, and submitted for your approval...


THE MANDOLIN IN HEALTH AND DISEASE

The case of Mamie Steinhaus, an inmate of Bellevue Hospital, has lately amazed a few physicians and made a lot of good, sentimental "copy" for the readers of some of the newspapers, but the most important and interesting aspect of the case seems to us to have been missed altogether. The mysterious malady of Mamie is a kind of catalepsy, and some ingenious medical practitioner prescribed music to awaken her from her protracted slumber. What the result might have been, if the advice thus given had been faithfully followed, may never be known. Music has not been used in medicine before, we believe, or if it has been, no record of the result is at hand. But the power of music, in fable if not in fact, is ever restful and soothing, inclining the listener to a state of physical tranquility. It was Congreve's idea that it possesses charms to soothe the savage breast, and presumably the poet believed that its influence was proportionately charming upon the breasts of folks not actually savage. But all music is not alike, and we can well understand that the right sort of music properly performed might exert such an influence upon a human being in a trance as to gently awaken him. The subject is certainly worth much thought, and in the case of Miss Steinhaus the experiment was worth making.

But it was not made. Instead of using music to awaken the patient, a creature in human guise was permitted to pick "Sweet Rosy O'Grady" on the mandolin by her bedside, the result being that Mamie presently barked like a dog, snarled, and foamed at the mouth. It is useless to argue that she was, nevertheless, awakened, and that, so far, the experiment was successful; for the prescription called for "music," and while the circumstances show that the girl was awakened by noise, there is no proof that any other noise would not have answered quite as well. Few noises are so disagreeable as the sound of the picking of a mandolin even when the formula followed in the picking is not that technically described as "Sweet Rosy O'Grady."

But no well-informed person ever called the picking of the mandolin music. To be sure, it has been exalted by a lot of third-rate poets with unmusical and rather too obvious ears; but facts are facts, and the mandolin really is no more closely related to musical instruments than a xylophone or a comb wrapped in a bit of paper. Its effect upon Mamie Steinhaus was not peculiar to her case, except that it was intensified because of her weak and hysterical condition. She did exactly what many sensitive persons with difficulty restrain themselves from doing when they are compelled to listen to the mandolin.

Copyright © The New York Times