Many of us claim dysfunctional mothers. I do. Reading about Julie Gregory's mother makes me thankful for what my mother did not do to me. Gregory suffered from a condition with the extravagant name of Munchausen by Proxy.
Baron von Munchausen was a real life teller of tall tales, and is best known through the Terry Gilliam movie, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. In the Munchausen syndrome, people make themselves ill for perverse psychological reasons. In the "by proxy" variant, a person makes someone else ill. Julie Gregory's mother made her sick.
Gregory grew up in a rural section of Ohio southeast of Columbus in the 1970's and 1980's. Her parents were in a mutually abusive relationship. There were many guns in the house, and her mother frequently threatened suicide. According to Gregory's account, her parents eventually set fire to the house for the insurance money. Much of what Gregory describes of her childhood fits in with stereotypes of Appalachian hillbilly life, though Gregory nevertheless finds fresh horrors to describe.
What makes the memoir unusual is the series of medical procedures which Gregory was subjected to, including cardiac catheterization, to investigate "heart ailments" which Gregory's mother had detected in her child. Gregory's doctors were duped by an apparently concerned mother to write prescriptions and do procedures, refusing only her mother's request to perform exploratory open-heart surgery on Gregory! In all likelihood, Gregory's symptoms were the results of stress and the side effects of unnecessary medication.
Gregory eventually ran away from her family and got Children's Services involved, though through a series of events, she was coerced back into the family before leaving for good. Gregory reports that, to her horror, her mother has taken in a set of foster children and may be abusing them. Her website reports correspondence with Child and Family Services in the state of Montana, where her mother now lives.
Article comments
1 - DrPat
There's an amazing scene in Sixth Sense involving the ghost of a child who died of this kind of abuse. For many people of a certain age, that was their first experience with "Munchausen's by Proxy."
2 - Dave Nalle
Baron Munchausen was actually a fictional character, rather than a real person, but that doesn't make the bizarre syndrome named after him any better.
Dave
3 - Rick Heller
According to this 1997 link, he was a real person:
"On February 22, two centuries ago the "baron of lies" Karl Friedrich Hieronymus Baron von M?usen passed away. Born in 1720 in Bodenwerder, M?usen served initially as a page to Prince Anton Ulrich von Braunschweig, and later as a cornet, lieutnant and cavalry captain with a Russian regiment in two Turkish wars. M?usen was known during his lifetime as an excellent raconteur of anecdotes about war, hunting and travel adventures."