Eyes on the Prize: Elizabeth Keller and Sooah Lee

A Gold Medal Portfolio Award is the highest honor students can receive in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. Jurors choose portfolios by high school seniors whose works best represent the Scholastic Awards’ judging criteria: originality, skill, and the emergence of a personal vision or voice. These remarkable artists and writers will each receive a $12,500 scholarship.

For the next few weeks, we’ll be profiling the 2023 Gold Medal Portfolio recipients. Next up are Elizabeth Keller and Sooah Lee.

Elizabeth Keller

When someone asks me why I write, I usually just say because it’s fun. This is true. I’ve always loved chuckling to myself in the late hours of the night, dressing my characters with desires and flaws like particularly thorny paper dolls. I love the possibilities in poetry, everything that can be communicated through line breaks. Everything I’ve written, I wrote because I take delight in the premise, its improbability or surreal humor.

When I chose the pieces for my portfolio, I wanted to include pieces that draw on research, history, searching for answers that may not be there.

I Know a Game Called 19th-Century Medicine; It’s More Fun than You’d Think

SHORT STORY

Elizabeth Keller, Grade 12, Interlochen Arts Academy, Interlochen, MI. Karyna McGlynn, Educator. Kendall College of Art and Design of Ferris State University and The Howard Miller Company, Affiliate. Gold Medal Portfolio Award, Command Companies Writing Portfolio Award

1

It’s 1848, and a doctor in bloodstained overalls has just told you that you have fever and ague. Or maybe you’re just hysterical. It doesn’t really matter in the end. The treatment is the same: He’ll hold a wedge-shaped knife over your veins and tap the knife with a hammer until the skin splits. You’ll bleed into a bucket. There are no leeches to aid with the bloodletting here—leeches are for the rich. You’re not rich enough for leeches. It’s cool, though. When you’re carried to the window for one last look at the outside world, you watch children toss ribbon-covered hoops to each other, listen to the thin notes of a penny whistle in the distance. You cough up blood onto a handkerchief. This isn’t a symptom of fever or hysteria, so you probably just bit your tongue. Your last words, before you slip into darkness, are “When was the last time you washed that knife?” It’s romantic.

If you replay your life in those thirty seconds before and after your heart stops, remember this. You live in Washington state now, or I guess you just died in Washington. You came here with your husband, a fur trader. Before your anemic and weakened body succumbed to eternal slumber, you helped bake hardtack for sailors and sometimes tended to the garden. You died at twenty- two, which makes your life tragic enough to be nearly poetic. You’re laid to rest with a full face of powder (it has lead in it, but you’re too dead to care). Rest in peace. END GAME.

Maybe you’re left with a lingering sense of unease right before your death, like there was something important you were forgetting. Or was that all there was to your life? Were you born in 1826 to a French mother and a Scottish father who worked as a clerk, or were you hiding a time machine by that big rock over there? Don’t think I didn’t notice. You’re not as sneaky as you think you are. Go on. Leave a secret message so your future self knows to come rescue you. You just can’t stay dead, can you? Go to 2.

2

The skies are blue, the breeze is gentle, the apples in this orchard are ripe and fragrant, your friend Thomas is skipping work again to drunkenly play the fiddle, and you’re feeling a little down. The last few weeks you’ve spent mostly in bed, embroidering lethargically while you’re propped upright on pillows like a dying king. Occasionally you dab at some ladylike tears with a handkerchief, but today you’re walking back from the doctor’s quarters and taking a detour through this orchard.

The doctor has told you you have too much black bile in your spleen. It’s one of the four humors—black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm—and black bile is specifically melancholic. There are three main ways to restore the balance of the humors: cupping, bleeding, and purging. The doctor offers purging this time. The Everlasting Pill.

The pill’s a small nugget made out of metallic antimony. When swallowed, the pill leaves behind trace amounts of antimony as it traverses your digestive system. The antimony, just toxic enough that your body wants to get rid of it but not toxic enough to kill you right away, causes . . . purging, and when the pill leaves your body through whatever channel the antimony chooses for you, the doctor gets to play the world’s worst game of Go Fish. In the early to mid-19th century, if something looks clean, it is. The pill gets fished out of the chamber pot, rinsed, dried, and placed on the shelf for the next patient. Sometimes it’s a family heirloom. Sometimes you’re swallowing something that was inside Great-Grandma Martha’s large intestine.

If you take the Everlasting Pill, go to 9. If you refuse, go to 3.

3

Why not? Don’t you want to feel better? You’re not making sense. Maybe you’re making all of this up for attention. Do you think you might be hysterical? There’s a real wave of feminine hysteria around these parts. Why don’t you lie down for a moment?

The most popular treatment option, a vibrator, won’t become widely available until the early 1900s, so you’re mostly stuck with the rest cure (prescribed bed rest). You won’t leave your bed for weeks, staring at the same patch of yellow wallpaper. In theory, this sounds great. In practice, your thoughts might start to get spicy.

If you’ve had enough of 19th-century medicine, retrieve your time machine from behind that rock and travel back to 2022 for some real medical care. Go to 7.

If you fully embrace the hysteria and run out of the doctor’s quarters in a frenzy, crashing into doorways, petticoats bunched up, go to 6.

If you accept the bed rest, go to 4.

4

Your bed is comfortable, but you spend a lot of time lying flat on your back during the night. You can’t stop staring at that ugly yellow wallpaper. Are those patterns shifting while you sleep through the day? Is there perhaps a strange woman living in the wallpaper, rearranging the patterns to send messages to you? You bet she feels as trapped as you do.

Your Great-Grandma Martha, too, went through the rest cure. You’ve heard she took up knitting and bashing her head against the wall.

After a few weeks, you begin to notice sweating, aching muscles in your arms and around your knees, and headaches. You might break an occasional fever.

Here’s the problem: If disease isn’t caused by an imbalance in the humors, it’s caused by bad air. At night, everyone sleeps propped up nearly ninety degrees so they don’t breathe in the dangerous night air that settles closer to the floor.

If you go back to the doctor, suspecting fever and ague, go to 1.

If you brush off the symptoms as nerves or more hysteria, go to 6. If you keep telling yourself that the bed rest is working, go to 9.

5

You trip over a tent stake and get your leg caught in a gopher hole. The bone shatters, poking through the skin.

If you agree to surgery, go to 8.

If, like a show horse, you accept that a broken leg means the need to welcome death with open arms, go to 6.

If you decide to splint the leg yourself and wait until it heals, go to 4.

6

A bold decision. You die. What a ride this has been for all of us. Spoiler alert: it was also malaria.

I guess you just died in Washington. You came here with your husband, a fur trader. Before your anemic and weakened body succumbed to eternal slumber, you helped bake hardtack for sailors and sometimes tended to the garden. You died at twenty-two, which makes your life tragic enough to be nearly poetic. You’re laid to rest with a full face of powder (it has lead in it, but you’re too dead to care). Rest in peace. END GAME.

Or was that all there was to your life? Were you born in 1826 to a French mother and a Scottish father who worked as a clerk, or were you hiding a time machine by that big rock over there? Don’t think I didn’t notice. You’re not as sneaky as you think you are. Go on. Get a time-traveling friend to come save you. You just can’t stay dead, can you? This is a chance to start over. Go to 2.

7

You’re sitting in a clean examination room in a clinic. There are no bloodstains, only scrubs that have definitely been washed with more than the occasional afterthought of cold water. Fun fact: The more blood and bodily fluids 19th-century doctors got on their clothes, the better surgeons they were. More enthusiastic.

The doctor, with his stethoscope and name tag, asks you if you’ve considered the possibility that it’s all in your head.

You tell him you are so, so tired. You can barely make it up the stairs. He tells you this is normal for your age group (growing pains, etc.) and to maybe try going keto.

If you hop right back into your time machine, go to 3.

If you agree and book a consultation for a second opinion months down the line, stay on 7. Read it again. Maybe something new will stand out this time.

8

Germ theory is not yet realized. To prevent infection, hospitals “air out” wounds at midday by taking patients outside and exposing the open wounds to the sun. In the 1870s, Robert Koch will prove that certain germs cause diseases like tuberculosis. Even then, the news will take years to be implemented all the way out here.

The doctor saws off somebody’s arm, wipes the saw on his pant leg, and moves on to the next patient.

Anesthesia in the form of ether was discovered in 1846, but the most common painkillers remain alcohol or laudanum, a tincture of opium.

In 1867, Joseph Lister will present his antiseptic principles of surgery and wound care, except that’s in Scotland and you’re all the way out here.

You get gangrene in your leg. The broken bone splits the skin, and the open wound gets infected. You pass away. It would be romantic, except your entire leg is dark green and dribbly.

9

You’re not cured, exactly. But you feel invigorated, full of life. You just put yourself through something profoundly gross and came out on the other side. Whenever you close your eyes, you see Great-Grandma Martha dancing on your closed eyelids like an animated fever dream sequence. Call this feeling whatever you want: placebo, desperation. Maybe there’s even some truth behind all this medicine (or at least there is once you move past toxic metals and into medicinal tea). Whatever the reason, you feel invincible. You gather slimy rotting strawberries off the garden path and wonder if maybe you, too, will be everlasting.

END GAME.

Sooah Lee

My artworks primarily explore themes related to environmental issues. I investigate the natural world and convey the way humans are complicit in the rapid devolution of our environment. For a couple of years, my work primarily focused on truth in the beauty of the natural world, but once I began to formally study environmental science, my work took on a more urgent tone as I dove deeper into the causes and effects of our planet’s ecological crisis. Artists who’ve influenced my engagement with these topics include Olafur Eliasson, specifically his installation Life, and Cai Guo-Qiang’s exhibition, The Ninth Wave.

My work takes on a non-anthropocentric worldview, examining the effects humans have on plants and animals, rather than the other way around. All organisms, not just humans, must have a voice if they are to thrive again. In my work, the world’s vulnerable organisms are the subject, and in some cases, the story is told through their lens. Humans rarely appear, except when the viewer encounters their own reflection in a mirror placed inside the piece, implicating them in the crisis. My work also reveals silent, unseen casualties of this crisis such as the death of a coral or the constant positive feedback loop of melting icebergs.

Making art is an essential way for me to explain urgent ideas which people may not have familiarity with. As the Earth becomes more degraded by human and corporate interference, I feel the need to bring attention to these issues in order to help us gain a clearer, more embodied understanding of our actions. I believe that my art can help the environment gain a voice.

Featured image: Sooah Lee, White Death, Sculpture. Grade 12, Crescenta Valley High School, La Crescenta, CA. Sophie Chung; Sangmoo Lee (In Art); Ricky Ngai, Educators; Region-at-Large, Affiliate. Gold Medal Portfolio, The Harry and Betty Quadracci Art Portfolio

To see more Gold Medal Portfolio recipients, past and present, visit our Eyes on the Prize series.