Diane KendigA NOTE ON HAVING TO CORRECT WIKIPEDIA AFTER I HAVE CORRECTED MYSELFThe disability of Maria Blanchard, an early twentieth century Spanish painter, was not caused by her mother's falling from a horse, and yet I found that piece of information on Wikipedia this week, citing me as the source in Wordgathering, no less. My distress on the perpetuation of this error runs deep, and I continue working to erase the error. But as we know, folklore on the causes of disease, disability, on any difference is hard to stamp out. In her own time and place, Blanchard was plagued by a folk belief that people would have luck in the lottery if they touched their ticket to the back of a person with a hunchback. Maria was literally chased down the streets of Salamanca by people reaching at her with their lottery tickets. Since I was born in the second half of the twentieth century, I should have realized that her kyphosis was not caused by her mother falling from a horse. I grew up knowing that mothers were unfairly blamed, by everyone from Freud to local doctors, for their children's diseases and disabilities. My first lesson on that error came in a freshman psychology class where the professor argued passionately against the idea that autism was caused by "refrigerator mothers. " And yet, when I began researching and writing about Blanchard in 1986, there were very few sources on her life, and the few that there were, from Federica García Lorca's funeral eulogy to a few other print sources, noted that her hunch back was caused by her mother's fall from a horse. The first poem I published on her perpetuated that story and dealt with her mother's distance from her when she was a child, not in Wordgathering, but I did repeat the false claim in an essay I wrote for Wordgathering. The first person to call me on that as a piece of prejudiced folklore, decades later, was a friend who is a nurse and a lover of art. "No, such deformities are congenital, " she said, "And I'm not surprised the mother tried to distance herself. Imagine the guilt they were saddling her with. " Then, in 2013, I received a documentary on Blanchard from filmmaker Gloria Crespo, who set the record straight on Blanchard's back by interviewing on camera Dr. José Ramón Rodriguez Altonaga who appears seated among x-rays of many spines and begins, "No es la verdad…" ("It's not the truth…") these stories about the cause of her disability. These things may be caused by a variety of factors, he says: "It may be congenital, it may be genetic, but no one is to blame." (You can read that review here: http://www.Wordgathering.com/past_issues/issue25/art/kendig.html.) Take that, Wikipedia. Please, take it.
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