This case always breaks my heart and I used to lurk it before I joined WS. I'm around the age Dorothy was when she disappeared and it sounds like we would have had a lot in common, so it always hits very close to home for me.
I was just wondering if there was a medical reason her mental faculties might have been affected. I don't know much about abortion procedures and didn't think I would enjoy googling them. I have a vague idea of how it's done but not exactly how a backstreet abortionist may have done it, other than maybe not using sterile instruments or having sanitary procedures in place. One of the articles made it sound as if she was dying quite some time after the abortion, so I wasn't sure what medical condition might have caused a delayed death. I don't have any problem believing this is what really happened and that the family covered it up.
There would have been several ways to do it. I don't know about the year 1910 specifically but I do know that it largely depended on whom you were seeing. For example, I've heard of medical implements being used in a semi-medical setting, but also common every day objects (a bit like modern-day wire hangers) and even some primitive versions of chemical abortions.
If Dorothy had an abortion and was mentally unwell afterwards, I think it would be more due to what she was going through and the procedure being scary or painful, than something in the procedure itself if this makes sense. The situation must have been very difficult to bear for her: an unmarried young woman in the 1910s, with a fiance who didn't seem particularly resolved to go through with the marriage, getting a procedure that was dangerous and complicated and much more taboo than it is today. I can't imagine what it must have been liked especially if she was forced by her parents.
I think it could have caused delayed death depending on the method. Something like septic shock could take a while, something that generally caused an infection that slowly spread and caused the rest of her organs to fail. Or maybe while she was recovering she had a sudden strong hemorrhage due to a tear or something. We don't know. There's a lot of explanations that could be possible if the abortion scenario is true.
Perhaps if they were using strong drugs like heroin for recovery purposes she got addicted??
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I don't know if I think this was the case... here's my reasoning. Back in the day, strong drugs were very commonly prescribed. An example I'm familiar with is laudanum which was use throughout the 19th century, it's basically tincture of opium. It was used for almost everything, from strong pain to psychological problems (I recall that a poet I like was often prescribed laudanum by physicians due to having 'a nervous constitution'). It became less common in early 20th century but as you point out, opium-based medicine and even cocaine-related drugs were very common. Even medicine for common ailments like diarrhoea included laudanum. In the US, I believe the usage only became more regulated around 1914 or 1915, but these things were still common until later.
Now, there were obviously people who became addicted to them, just as nowadays there are many people who become addicted to prescription drugs. In the case of some opiates for example, there were lots of books and more 'rag' type publications that told tales about addiction, both real and fictional.
However, I think it would have been much like prescription drugs these days but maybe even less regulated. IMO it would have been uncommon for someone of the upper class to become so noticeably addicted they'd run away from home. Opiates aren't like today where unless you have a very strong medical case, you can't just get them legally and easily. If she had become addicted she would have been able to make up something, in the scenario where she had an illegal abortion she would have been able to tell her parents she was still in a lot of pain and been given more for that reason. This is just my opinion of course but this is what I think - the fact that it was so common means she wouldn't have needed to resort to running away.
If you mean a scenario where she died of an overdose, I think that could have been covered up. Upper class family were very hush hush about addiction even when it was an open secret. However, I don't think this would have caused them to hide her body like that. If they thought it was a suicide, at the time this would have been a matter of scandal and if they were religious she could be denied a religious burial, but in upper class families when this happened it was more common to officially frame it as an 'accident'. In the case of an accidental overdose, it would have been even less of a problem to simply say so.
The most I can think of is if they were afraid that the medical inquest would also uncover the abortion if there was one. Even then I can more easily see them pretending to not know or trying to cover it up since it wasn't directly related to the official cause of death (overdose).
This is all my :twocents: obviously.
