Woman Born in 1852 Talks About the Doctor Who Told Her She Would Never Walk Again

Описание: Woman Born in 1852 Talks About the Doctor Who Told Her She Would Never Walk Again

Edith Voss (née Voss) (1852–1937) was born on a flat-land farming property outside Millbrook, Indiana, the middle child of a plain-working household that asked little of life beyond enough to carry through the season. She fell from a hayloft at nineteen, sustained a serious injury to the spine and hip, and was told by the attending physician that she would never walk again. He was wrong. She walked — to the Miller farm and back, to the church, down the road to town — and went on to marry a carpenter, raise three children in a small Indiana town, and outlive most of the people who knew her young, including the doctor who delivered the verdict. In this account, given in her eighty-third year, Mrs. Voss describes for the first time not the triumph of the recovery but what the recovery required of her: the two years of fighting her own body past what it could sustain, the steady young man she sent away in the middle of the proving, the mother whose grief reorganized the household around an absence that never came to pass, the husband who received the capable woman she had become without ever being told what it had cost to become her. She sets down, without resolution, the question she has carried for sixty years — whether she got back everything that mattered, or only the parts that showed. A plain wooden cane, given to her the afternoon of the verdict and kept ever since in the corner of whatever room she has called her own, is present throughout.

#1800s #19thcentury