In Leslie Jamison’s “Devil’s Bait”, we are told the story of a Morgellon’s disease conference. In it, we are asked to consider if these people, who may or may not be faking their illness, are worthy of our empathy. Jamison says they are. But let’s establish what Morgellons is first. If you haven’t read the article yourself or don’t know about Morgellons, this probably doesn’t make any sense. After all, why would people doubt that Morgellons is real? So let me explain.
What is Morgellons?
Morgellons is a disease that was initially mentioned in “a treatise written by a seventeenth-century doctor named Thomas Browne,” (Jamison 508). But while the idea of Morgellons has been around since the 1600s, the consensus is that Morgellons first originated in 2001 with a mother named Mary Leito. Mrs. Leito’s son had mysterious sores that wouldn’t go away and doctors didn’t know what to do about it. After countless fruitless efforts to help her son, doctors finally decided that this might be a case of Munchausen’s by proxy. Basically, they accused the mother of making her son sick. However, Mrs. Leito didn’t agree with this diagnosis and came up with her own – Morgellons, (Jamison 508). With rocky origins like these, it isn’t hard to see why Morgellons was born with doubt already etched into its very existence. Morgellons has varying symptoms to varying degrees, but often includes “sores, itching, fatigue, pain, and something called formication, the sensation of crawling insects. But its defining symptom was always the same: strange fibers emerging from underneath the skin,” (Jamison 507). You have a ton of people, over 12,000 of them, who have physical symptoms like these but are always labeled by doctors as having something called DOP, delusions of parasitosis. Essentially, people aren’t sure if this is a real disease or simply a group delusion that has some physical manifestations. I’ll elaborate on this more later, but for now let’s take a look at what Jamison actually wrote the article about: is it possible to empathize with someone if you aren’t confident or even believe in the cause of their suffering?
Earning Empathy
Throughout the article, Jamison deliberately builds up and emphasizes certain aspects of the “Morgies”, the people self-diagnosed with Morgellons, in order to make them more attractive, trustable, and relatable. After all, if you can step into someone else’s shoes, then you’ll be more likely to empathize with them.
At the very start, Jamison makes this clear by beginning with the lines, “For Paul, it started with a fishing trip. For Lenny, it was an addict
whose knuckles were covered in sores. Dawn found pimples
clustered around her swimming goggles. Kendra noticed ingrown
hairs. Patricia was attacked by sand flies on a Gulf Coast beach,” (Jamison 507). By introducing them on a first-name basis, Jamison draws a connection between the Morgies and the reader. This personalizes the disease and helps keep at bay the idea of a collective delusion because if you can draw a connection to someone afflicted by Morgellons, you will be less likely to toss aside any instant judgments of doubt.
Jamison works upon this by constantly building up their reputations and throwing positive adjectives at them. For example, when Jamison meets Dawn, she describes her as “an articulate and graceful nurse from Pittsburgh,” (Jamison 513). By establishing her as graceful and a medical professional, it builds up Dawn’s trustworthiness and makes us more likely to believe Dawn’s story. She does it again with Kendra by saying that “Somehow this makes me feel for her as much as anything — that she has the grace to imagine her way into the minds of people who won’t imagine hers,” (Jamison 522). Again, Jamison builds us the reputation of Kendra, singing praises about her grace and her empathy.
Jamison also tries to establish the Morgies by making them relatable. She talks about how Dawn was so angry about the fact that her Morgellons was being dismissed because she was ” ‘being told that it was anxiety, in my head, female stuff… [and when Jamison] ask[s] her about this phrase: female stuff [Dawn explains that] It’s like heart disease… For a long time women’s heart attacks went unnoticed because they were diagnosed as symptoms of anxiety,” (Jamison 513). While Jamison explained the concept of “female stuff”, I know that, at least in my life, almost everyone knew about this fact. By drawing this connection, it instantly links the female audience to Dawn. I’m sure that a lot of women have experienced this disregard for themselves, and others, like me, have felt this outrage on their behalf. She goes on to develop this relationship by mentioning the statistic of how “70 percent of Morgellons patients are female — and that women are especially vulnerable to the isolating disfigurement and condescension that come attached to the disease,” (Jamison 511). She heavily links the Morgellons experience to the female one, trying to make their problems and their issues relatable to the female audience.
Jamison to continues to try and make Morgellons relatable by describing the disease as “like a crystallization of what I’ve always felt about myself — a wrongness in my being that I could never pin or name, so I found things to pin it to,” (Jamison 514). She links Morgellons as a metaphor of body issues and self-hatred, something that everyone has experienced at some point in their lives. She continues this train of thought throughout the whole article, making sure to mention how Dawn has issues with the scars that she has obtained from the disease and how she worries that “with scars
and stuff that I have from this, what guy’s gonna like me?” (Jamison 514). Dawn’s issues with her appearance can be linked to anyone who has felt self-conscious about some part of their body.
Jamison also tries to link the Morgies to those struggling financially. Twice Jamison mentions how some of the Morgies “[haven’t] had health insurance in years,” (Jamison 515). This linkage to the contempt against the American health care system is a feeling shared by many, with the lofty prices for medical procedures or even consultations, a lot of Americans would rather use a home-remedy and avoid going to the doctors simply because they can’t afford to make the appointment.
So, the Morgies are definitely painted as relatable. Their characters are shown as trustworthy and likable, and their struggles are painted as experiences that other people can relate to. By doing all this, Jamison definitely proves that it is possible to empathize with someone even if the causes of this pain are different or if you have doubts that the cause is real. And this is where we pick up that train of thought again – Is Morgellons real, or a delusion?
Morgellons: Real or Delusion?
Jamison, for her part, gives evidence for both sides of the argument. However, it is clear that she is skeptical of the disease. And personally, I agree with her. But in order to do the disease justice, I will also be sure to include evidence for both sides. After all, who am I to say with 100% certainty that its fake?
Its Real
Morgellons, for all its diversity of symptoms, shows itself to be more real because there are common symptoms. Remember, there are “sores, itching, fatigue, pain, and something called formication, the sensation of crawling insects. But its defining symptom was always the same: strange fibers emerging from underneath the skin,” (Jamison 507). These similarities give credibility to Morgellons being real because it shows that several people under one category have the same symptoms.
Jamison also gives Morgellons some more credibility by mentioning a possible cause, insect bites, several times. There’s Patricia who had her symptoms start after being attacked by sand flies in the , Shirley who says she got it after camping in a tick-infected forest, and Paul who was covered in chigger bites after a fishing trip (Jamison 513, 530). These are some of the only times Jamison mentions the cause of Morgellons, and the fact that they are all linked to animal bites gives credibility to Morgellons by giving the idea that there is a cause, or at least an origin, to the disease.
Its a Delusion
From the very beginning, it is imperative to keep in mind two facts:
- Morgellons was born from a woman who was accused of making her son ill
- Munchausen’s by proxy
- Morgellons started in 2001
The first point makes obvious sense. No one wants to be accused or poisoning their child, so they are likely to turn to another explanation to save their own fate. So right off the bat, we have a reason for why Morgellons would be made up.
The second point also leads to doubt because, as Jamison points out herself, Morgellons appears to be “[Transmitted] by Internet… [And] It’s true that Morgellons wasn’t officially born until 2001. It’s grown up alongside the Internet,” (Jamison 537). If Morgellons truly is a collective delusion, it would have been able to spread easily through various people on the internet seeing the disease and adopting the inflection themselves. Even Jamison herself admits that this is possible when she says that “Doubting Morgellons hasn’t stopped me from being afraid I’ll get it. I buffered myself before the conference: ‘If I come back from Austin thinking I have Morgellons,’ I told my friends, ‘you have to tell me I don’t have Morgellons.’ Now that I’m here, I wash my hands a lot. I’m conscious of other people’s bodies. Then it starts happening, as I knew it would,” (Jamison 533). Jamison tells the audience that it is possible to psychologically catch a disease, and even shows that for a time she truly thought that she had caught the disease after seeing blue fibers on her calf that she later rationalizes as threads from the hotel towel. All of this gives credibility to the idea that Morgellons is simply a group delusion. After all, even Jamison almost fell victim to the delusion herself despite being decisively not afflicted by Morgellons in the end.
Morgellons is also discredited by how fervently those suffering from it try to prove its existence. If you’re like me, you might be wondering how this could prove to discredit Morgellons existence – surely gathering evidence would do more to prove Morgellons is real than prove it isn’t. Jamison reminds us of why this is negative by sharing her own story about doctors disbelieving her when she insisted she could see and feel a worm in her ankle. After she was proven right a few weeks later, “I had about thirty minutes of peace before I started suspecting there might be another one left behind. I spent the next few weeks obsessed… I turned from a parasite host — an actual, physical, literal host — into another kind of host: a woman with an idea, a woman who couldn’t be convinced otherwise,” (Jamison 517). Jamison gives us first-hand evidence of how an obsession over an illness doesn’t always mean it’s right – She only ever had the one worm.
Also, the only person who has been cured of Morgellons was a meth addict, who wasn’t present at the convention to testify this, and was cured by an electrician who couldn’t even give specifics as to the process he used (Jamison 528). Not to say that all meth addicts are untrustworthy, but it has to be considered – especially when we are dealing with a disease that may or may not be a delusion.
Conclusion
Wow. Okay, so this was long. I guess I had a lot to say. So, with all the evidence and the poor transitions, what did I actually say in this whole thing?
Morgellons is a disease that is highly controversial. Personally, I think it is most likely a collective delusion but it is always possible that it is in fact a real disease. However, this fact should not influence our ability to empathize with those affected by Morgellons. These “Morgies” still experience all the suffering and pain that comes with the disease, self-inflicted or not. And this suffering is something that everyone can relate to in some aspect.
Jamison says it best herself when talking about a dog, Sinbad, who caught Morgellons and was subsequently put down.
“Who knows what happened to Sinbad? Maybe he really did need to get put down; maybe he was old, or sick with something else. Maybe he wasn’t sick at all. But he has become part of an illness narrative — like lesions, or divorces, or the fibers themselves. He is irrefutable proof that suffering has happened, that things have been lost,” (Jamison 536-537).
