"Master of the Inn"

"Master of the Inn"

It was the year 1895. After ten years of practicing surgery in Cleveland, Dr. John George Gehring had become sick. So he moved to Bethel, Me., in the Androscoggin Valley. There he opened an "inn," a kind of private sanitorium. To Dr. Gehring for cure have gone, in the past 32 years, lawyers, doctors, merchant chiefs--victims of overwork. At Dr. Gehring's they found comfort. He would set them to digging potatoes, or planting green peas, or swimming. Or he would let them sit quietly on his Androscoggin porch, looking into the blank distance until after many passive days the White Mountains took form in the patients' minds. They would begin to notice the roads, the buildings, the fences, the farm animals. When once more they found themselves aware of the world, alert to their surroundings, Dr. Gehring sent them about their business, cured, happy. No stigma of nervous exhaustion remained.... Today Bethel is as calm and placid as Dr. Gehring found it 32 years ago when he went there to quiet his nerves. One of Dr. Gehring's neighbors at Bethel is rich William Bingham II, also of Cleveland. William Bingham II gave away $200,000 last week. Like the $200,000 donation by J. P. Morgan a month before, the money went to equip an entire floor of the new Neurological Institute, now1 abuilding in Manhattan. Mr. Morgan's gift was for research on Encephalitis lethargica, disease from which Mrs. Morgan died. It is his memorial to her. Mr. Bingham's gift is given as witness of his friendship with Dr. Gehring, aged 69. The gift is, in effect, a pro-memorial to the "master of the inn."

Dr. Gehring and his "inn" are the prototype and scene of Novelist Robert Herrick's The Master of the Inn, written during Writer Herrick's convalescence at Bethel.