He Wanted the Moon

October 27, 2014
Thanks to a chance meeting 20 years ago with one of her father’s former colleagues, Baird, daughter of Perry Baird—a Harvard-educated mid-20th-century physician of some renown who was locked away and never spoken of as he succumbed to the ravages of mental illness—gets the keys to unlocking the mystery of what happened to her father. Perry Baird was diagnosed with manic depression in the 1930s at a time when doctors had little comprehension of the disease and employed shockingly barbaric and useless “cures” such as straitjackets, isolation, and lobotomies on institutionalized patients. Perry Baird was a pioneer in attempting to understand the workings of manic depression, conducting lab experiments to find the biochemical cause as the illness steadily took hold of him. His daughter, who saw him only once after he’d been sent to a mental hospital when she was still a young child—aided by the unearthed manuscript her father had written while committed that she pieces together and includes—seeks to unravel the heartbreaking circumstances of what befell her father for all those decades when her family refused to talk about him. She is the one who rediscovers her father’s experiments and gets him the long overdue credit from the scientific community he deserved. In bringing her father’s harrowing, tragic, and moving story to life, Mimi Baird celebrates him and gives voice to the terrible suffering the mentally ill once endured, and still do today, and challenges the prejudices and misperceptions the public continues to have about the disease.

December 15, 2014
Mimi Baird's father, a Boston dermatologist, disappeared from her life when she was nearly six in 1944. Thereafter, all she knew was that he suffered from manic depression until his death in 1959. In 1994, she was given his unfinished memoir about his forced commitment to a state psychiatric institution. Perry Baird wrote out of a cauldron of despair, and indeed, his chronicle, which his daughter now shares, of the barbaric treatments he endured in the era before psychoactive medications is harrowing and sad. Yet it is also astonishing in its illuminations. Here is a doctor precisely describing his own delusions, bizarre strength and energy (he was a veritable Houdini with straitjackets), and overwhelming destructive urges. With cowriter Claxton, Mimi, formerly a medical center manager, provides a rich biographical context, complete with hospital records, for her father's nightmarish ordeals and, in a surprise twist, secures his rightful place in medical history by documenting Perry Baird's pioneering research into the biochemical source of his disease. This striking and poignant family story evokes compassion for everyone affected by this cruel malady.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)