HER SON FALLS ILL, AND A BOOK PROJECT CHANGES DIRECTIONS

by Scott Heller

It was only his elbow. And he was a kid, after all, able to snap back in a minute, to brush himself off and charge on, smiling.

So when a schoolteacher called to tell Joan L. Richards that her 10-year-old son, Ned, had fallen in the playground and hurt his arm, she didn't panic.

She was concerned, of course. She was his mother. And they were in a faraway place-Berlin-where Ms. Richards had a year's leave at the Wissenschaftskolleg to work on a long-delayed book. It was an important time-out for Ms. Richards, a chance for the associate professor of history at Brown University to write up her research. She needed a second book if she hoped to make full professor. She had tried once, and been turned down by her department.

As a historian of science, Ms. Richards was already a strange bird among her Brown colleagues. As a historian of mathematics, whose first book was on Euclidean geometry and who was now writing about algebra and logic, she was twice-removed from the mainstream. Being in Germany, away from departmental politics, was a relief.

She and Ned and his older brother, Brady, had been there for less than a month. Her husband, Rick, who couldn't take a long leave from his job in Rhode Island, was helping them settle in. When she finally saw Ned at his school, clutching his swollen left arm tightly to his chest, she knew a visit to a local doctor was in order.

Then again, after Ned's brain tumor the year before, a broken arm wasn't very worrisome at all.

Or so she thought. But just when she hoped to buckle down and produce her second book, Joan Richards found herself facing a second medical crisis, requiring her to be a mother, a translator, a guide, and a watchdog. It's a story she shares in Angles of Reflection: Logic and a Mother's Love (W.H. Freeman, 2000). She describes it as a "nonfiction novel" that raises questions about the boundaries between a scholar's professional and personal lives.

"Children remain a very big taboo," Ms. Richards says. "You don't talk about them. And if you do, you respond emotionally, not reasonably."

Angles of Reflection is not the conventional scholarly book she set out to write. But it's the tale she had to tell. "The crisis with her son was so all-consuming it was important for her to work this out through writing," says Mari Jo Buhle, a professor of history and American civilization at Brown. A career-no, a life-built on the rational scaffolding of math and history had come undone. "I reached the point where I no longer could do the history of mathematics," Ms. Richards explains. "The whole subject required that I ignore a fault line that I was living in-a fault line that protects mathematical reality from the chaos of personal life."

The cover should explain what's inside a book. But Angles of Reflection eludes easy categories.

The dust jacket lists two subjects: autobiography and mathematics. The Library of Congress subject headings are even more idiosyncratic: "Mothers--Rhode Island. Mathematical historians--Rhode Island. Sabbatical leave--Germany. Tumors in children--case studies."

"No one's real clear about what genre this book is in," says Janet Cooper Nelson, the university chaplain and a friend of the author's.

"A career-no a life-built on the radional scaffolding of math and history had come undone."

Ms. Richards is clear about what Angles of Reflection isn't. It isn't a memoir. Nor is it a book about the everyday struggles of a mother trying to balance her career and family.

If you read it as the story of triumph, you're getting it wrong. Ms. Richards couldn't do it all. She couldn't obsess about a brain tumor, fight with American doctors, pack a family off to Europe, visit her son in a German hospital every day for weeks, fight with German doctors, keep her other son happy, stay in touch with a husband an ocean away, listen to papers by her European colleagues and ask smart questions-and still make room for her own research and writing.

She couldn't do it all. She didn't do it all.

"I live in a world in which you're supposed to manage your private life out of the picture," she says. "In that sense, I failed."

At bookstores, Ms. Richards finds the volume shelved amid algebra textbooks. "The categories of motherhood and mathematics seem so incommensurable," she says. Politely but firmly, she suggests the book be moved. Usually it ends up in Parenting.

Adolescence is hard on an ungainly 13-year-old girl who stands 5-foot-9 and counting. For Joan Livingston, math class was always a safe haven.

Yet within weeks of her arrival at Radcliffe College, in 1966, the young math whiz who had gone to public schools in Seattle realized that she was out of her league. She chose instead to major in the history of science. There she took comfort in the certainties of Newtonian physics. Newton recognized that we experience time and space as relative. Still, Ms. Richards writes, "Newton also understood that beyond all the time that we know, beyond all the space that we know, beyond all of everything that we know, was an absolute world-calm, clear, and undisturbed."

She met Rick Richards, the man who would be her husband, during her junior year in college. In 1971, right after graduation, they married and left for Ethiopia, where they ran an orphanage for two years. When they returned, Ms. Richards continued her history-of-science studies in a doctoral program at Harvard. Brady was born in 1979; Ned followed six years later.

Ms. Richards finished her Ph.D. in 1980. After a visiting stint at Cornell University, she settled into a tenure-track post at Brown, while her husband began what would be a long career with the Rhode Island Department of Education.

In 1988, she published her first book, Mathematical Visions: The Pursuit of Geometry in Victorian England (Academic Press). She earned tenure the same year.

But her place in the department was never very happy. She clashed with colleagues, and her inability to draw graduate students left her isolated. In the 1993-94 academic year, weighing an offer from Indiana University at Bloomington, she asked to be promoted.

The department turned her down. With only one book and an edited collection to her credit in the 13 years since her Ph.D., she wasn't full-professor material. (She stayed anyway, because the family was happy in Providence.)

After tackling geometry in Mathematical Visions, Ms. Richards planned to turn in her next book to the development of algebra and logic in Victorian England. Her sons were 9 and 14; finally she had cleared enough time. She had a fellowship at the Dibner Institute in Cambridge, MA, followed by the year in Germany.

"I live in a world in which you're supposed to manage your private life out of the picture."

As she began her research, Ms. Richards became interested in the work of Augustus De Morgan, a relatively obscure mathematician who died in 1871. Among the first people in England to write about probability theory, he's still known today as the originator of the "four-color problem," a mathematical challenge that was proved only by computers a century after he proposed it.

Reading a biography written by his wife, Sophia, Ms. Richards empathized with the mathematician. De Morgan, who kept his religious affiliations to himself, had chosen to teach at a new, secular university because of hostility to non-Anglicans at Oxford and Cambridge. "De Morgan pioneered the divided life of the academic professional," she wrote later, "leaving his religion at home during the long days at work."

She understood the divided life only too well. But for Ms. Richards the split wasn't between her religious and rational sides; it was between her professional and personal lives. That balancing act was familiar to many female scholars of her generation.

Still, her gift for compartmentalization failed when the first surprising telephone call came.

"I'm in a neurologist's office," her husband said. "Ned had some kind of seizure at school . . . Can you pick us up?"

There were several more seizures, many trips to the doctor, and maddeningly contradictory diagnoses before the ordeal was over. During one conversation, her son's harried neurosurgeon insisted that a lesion was on the right side of Ned's brain, and needed to be removed. Only after prompting did he admit his mistake: As all the X-rays had shown, the lesion was on the left side.

For every visit to a neurologist, every disturbing symptom, every question relayed by her son or husband or friend, Ms. Richards opened a page of a tiny, yellow spiral notepad. She brings it out now only once a year, when Ned has an MRI for a checkup.

Ultimately, a benign tumor that caused epilepsy-like symptoms was diagnosed. The neurosurgeon cut it away, and Ned continued to take Tegretol, an antiseizure medication, for two years.

The opening chapters of Angles of Reflection detail that trying journey through the American medical system. Ms. Richards pressed for second opinions, mustered as many informal medical advisers as she could, and wouldn't take no for an answer. When one surgeon gave her the runaround, she insisted that his secretary put her through, claiming-not dishonestly-that a "Dr. Richards" was on the line.

Later, she overheard the angry neurologist explaining the situation to his colleagues. "She said she was a doctor, but she was really a mother."

The bulk of the book takes place in Germany, where the injury to Ned's arm gobbled up untold hours of her time, including three bouts of surgery. In some ways, if you're going to break an arm, Berlin is a good place to do it. The paternalistic German medical system demanded that Ned return to a hospital for frequent physical-therapy sessions. And, as the family discovered later, the German surgeon who finally mended the bone did a superb job, restoring 95 percent of the arm's mobility. Few surgeons could have done so well.

Still . . . it was only an elbow. "You say to someone, 'My son has a brain tumor' and there is no further discussion," Ms. Richards acknowledges. "You say, 'My son broke his elbow,' and people are much less accommodating. The assumption is I should be able to manage that."

Even the professor's mother wondered whether she had lost perspective. The book emerged out of Ms. Richards's long letters home to the United States, in which she chronicled her struggles with the German medical establishment. That one medical crisis followed on the heels of the scarier tumor diagnosis was lost on Ms. Richards; she didn't see the connection between her reactions until her mother pointed it out, and urged her to deal with both experiences in her writing.
There were still more connections to be made. When she returned home from Germany, a little shell-shocked but glad to be back, Ms. Richards had read a lot but written very little. By then, the Newtonian certainty that had comforted her in college had collapsed. "Newton gave no credence to chaotic time," like the hours she had spent in hospital waiting rooms, she writes. And the lives and theories of her coterie of Victorian mathematicians had begun to look very different indeed.

Even when she gave her final seminar paper at the Wissenschaftskolleg, she keenly felt the artificiality of what went unsaid: her family life and the family lives of her subjects. "Even as I spoke of logic," Ms. Richards writes, "I recognized that its definition created by default a separate sphere to house all the contradictory realities that families represented.

Historians believe that admitting a personal investment in a subject would be clouding your objective judgment.

"But even as I did what was expected," she continues, "I realized that I was never again going to be able blithely to follow De Morgan or my colleagues without noticing what their thinking implied for their wives and for me."

In Augustus De Morgan's correspondence, she saw his struggles to satisfactorily answer the "four-color problem."

"Lacking a proof, he searched for consensus, urging friends to try it for themselves and even to test other people," she explains. "Ultimately, he just neutralized the problem by sticking it, however awkwardly, into the world of simple absolutes."

That "drive toward purity," she writes, had a dark side, including how De Morgan made a minor player out of his wife, Sophia, a woman of considerable intellect. The mathematical work of De Morgan and his colleagues "was magnificent, but they had only been able to sustain it by disparaging the relative and consigning it to their servants and their wives."

Back home in Rhode Island, Ms. Richards continued to collect information about De Morgan. She had to look hard, but she found oblique references to his first-born daughter, Alice, in letters and documents. Late in 1853, at 16, Alice had died of tuberculosis.

"I am just beginning to recover-I will not say my spirits-but power enough to attend to things not absolutely essential," the mathematician wrote to a colleague asking for professional advice. "I shall take your different notes soon-I read them hurriedly as received-and have quite forgotten the contents-in fact, all my papers look as they might if I had been suddenly carried off, all round the world, and set down again at my desk."

But De Morgan was never again really the same. Tuberculosis claimed two more of his children. And in 1866, he was dismissed by the college where he had taught for 40 years. Five years later, he was dead.

A small magazine clipping touting Angles of Reflection was tacked to the corner of a bulletin board in Brown University's history department this summer, soon after the book came out. Not many of Ms. Richards's colleagues have read the volume.

"In the history department at Brown," she says, "this book is at best politely ignored." The fashion among scholars in fields like anthropology and literary studies to conduct a more personally inflected scholarship hasn't caught on among historians.

"Historians in this department believe that admitting a personal investment in a subject would be clouding your objective judgment," explains Amy G. Remensnyder, an associate professor of history. In that regard, she says, the Brown department is no different from most. Last spring, she taught a course on how the "personal voice" does-and doesn't-make its way into historical writing. Generally, historians remain suspicious, she finds. "It's a lot easier to deceive ourselves that there is objectivity out there," she says.

In 1987, James T. Patterson, a veteran Brown historian, wrote The Dread Disease: Cancer and Modern American Culture (Harvard University Press). His wife had died of the disease just as he began the research, but you wouldn't know that from reading the book. "It pretends as if she never existed and that I never had problems in dealing with her illness, which of course wasn't true," Mr. Patterson says today.

He hasn't read Angles of Reflection. But he doesn't think there's more room now than there was then for historians to take such chances in their writing. Tenure gave Ms. Richards the opportunity to experiment. "No one will fire her or dock her salary or demand she write a different kind of book," says Mr. Patterson.

Friends do wonder, though, whether the book will help Ms. Richards's stalled bid for promotion to full professor. She says she's not concerned. She wrote what she needed to write, and she'll continue to do the same.

The history of algebra she began during the fellowship year in Cambridge has been shelved. Instead, Ms. Richards plans to write a joint biography-of Augustus De Morgan and his wife, Sophia.

Last month, almost six years after that first telephone call from her husband-Ned had some kind of seizure at school-Ms. Richards took her son, now 15, to his neurosurgeon for a checkup. As it had every year since the operation, the MRI was "clean as a whistle," according to the doctor.

A long, wavy scar peeking out from the left sleeve of his T-shirt is the only tangible reminder of a sick child, two worrisome years, and a changed career.
After all, it was only his elbow.

A Historian's Tale, and a Mother's, Too, Chronicle of Higher Education, Oct. 20, 2000.

Scott Heller is a correspondent with the Chronicle of Higher Education.

---

Return to NASW homepage.

Return to NASW Members' Lobby.

Return to ScienceWriters Newsletter homepage.