Download He Wanted the Moon: The Madness and Medical Genius of Dr. Perry Baird, and His Daughter's Quest to Know Him AudioBook Free
A mid-century doctor's natural, unvarnished consideration of his own descent into madness, and his daughter's attempt to part his life again together and make sense of her own. Texas-born and Harvard-educated, Dr. Perry Baird was a rising medical celebrity in the later 1920s and 1930s. Early in his job, ahead of his time, he grew fascinated with identifying the biochemical root of manic depression, as he began to suffer from it himself. By the time the results of his groundbreaking tests were shared, Dr. Baird had been institutionalized multiple times, his medical permit revoked, and his partner and daughters estranged. He later received a lobotomy and passed on from a consequent seizure, his research incomplete, his successes unrecognized. Mimi Baird grew up never completely knowing this history, as her family went silent about the father who was simply absent for most of her childhood. Decades later, a string of astonishing coincidences led to the recovery of a manuscript which Dr. Baird had worked on throughout his brutal institutionalization, confinement, and break free. This remarkable document, reflecting times of both manic exhilaration and clear-headed health, presents a startling portrait of a man who was a distinctively astute observer of his own condition, fighting a disease that there is no cure, racing against period to unlock the key to treatment before his health problems became impossible to manage. Fifty years after being told her father would permanently be "ill" and "away", Mimi Baird set off on a goal to patch together the memoir and the person. With time her hands became stained with the business lead of the pencil he had used to create his manuscript, as she committed herself to understanding who he was, why he vanished, and what legacy she had inherited.
