The Retired Anthropologist Who Learned an Arctic Practice for Anxiety and Now Helps American Women Find Themselves Again
Dr. Patricia Marquette spent seven years living with a single Sami family in Kautokeino, Norway. What she carried home on the inside of her left wrist was a practice that American doctors had been prescribing until 1936. She is now in her seventy-third year and quietly handing the practice back to women who have been on long-term anxiety medication and do not yet recognize themselves anymore.
Sarah, 58, photographed three months after meeting Dr. Marquette at a gallery in Detroit. The woman she had been mourning for four years has, by her own description, mostly come back.
Sarah was not looking for a stranger to change her life when she walked into the Pewabic Pottery on East Jefferson Avenue on a Friday night in March. She was looking at a glass case. Three leather cords. Two stones each. The placard said they had been worn by women in the Sara family of Kautokeino, Norway, in 1924, 1956, and 1987. She was fifty-eight. She had been on a four-medication psychiatric protocol for three years. She had stopped, somewhere in the middle of those three years, recognizing the woman in her own kitchen.
She had told her husband Daniel she was not the woman he had married. She had told her sister. She had told her closest friend over coffee. She had not told them, because she did not have the words, that what she had lost was not the symptoms exactly. The medications had taken the symptoms down by roughly fifty percent. What she had lost was the woman underneath. The one who used to drive to the Detroit Institute of Arts on Sunday afternoons. The one who used to garden on Saturday mornings. The one who used to feel something at her niece's wedding without rehearsing the feeling first.
She was thinking about none of that when a seventy-three-year-old woman in a long-sleeve black wool dress with the cuffs at her wrists walked over to the glass case.
The woman who walked over
Dr. Patricia Marquette was, until her retirement in 2018, a tenured professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan. Her specialty was material culture in indigenous arctic populations. Her dissertation, defended in 1989, was on textile and somatic practice among the Sami of northern Scandinavia. Between 1991 and 1998 she spent seven years in residence with a single Sami family in Kautokeino, Norway, conducting the kind of long-form ethnographic fieldwork that has largely disappeared from contemporary anthropology programs.
She came back from that residency with three doctoral students' worth of unpublished field notes, two academic monographs that received reasonable attention in her subfield, and one leather cord on the inside of her left wrist. Sofia Sara had tied it on her in 1992. Berit Sara, Sofia's grandmother, had tanned the leather at her own kitchen table. Dr. Marquette has worn it continuously for the thirty-two years since.
She is in retirement now. She lives in Ann Arbor. She curates occasional exhibitions for regional museums. The Pewabic Pottery show in March was titled The Arctic Threshold: Sami Textile and Material Practice. It was funded by a small grant from the Michigan Council for the Arts. The opening drew approximately eighty people across three hours.
One of those eighty people was Sarah. Dr. Marquette walked over to her glass case at approximately 8:47 PM.
What she went on to tell Sarah was the substance of her work, distilled across thirty-two years, into a single conversation at a bench in the corner of the gallery. The conversation lasted approximately forty-five minutes. By the end of it, Sarah had a leather cord tied on her own left wrist and a second one in a small leather pouch beside her on the bench.
What she was looking for in Kautokeino
Dr. Marquette went to Norway in 1991 because she was trying to understand a question that had not yet been satisfactorily answered in the literature. Why did Sami women in their fifties, sixties, and seventies appear to have approximately one-fourth the prevalence of generalized anxiety disorder that American women of the same age had? Why did they have one-fifth the prevalence of major depression? One-eighth the prevalence of insomnia? The numbers were not a Sami invention. They came from peer-reviewed European epidemiological studies that had been running since the early 1980s.
The standard explanations were the standard ones. Diet. Sunlight. Genetics. Social cohesion. Physical activity from the work of herding reindeer. Each of these had been tested. Each of these had been ruled out as the primary variable. The disparity persisted after every adjustment.
What Dr. Marquette suspected, going in, was that the answer was material rather than environmental. That something about how Sami women lived in their bodies was being missed by epidemiologists who were not looking at the right object. She did not know what that object was. She went to Norway to find out.
She found it in the second month of her residency, when she watched Berit Sara tie a cord on the wrist of her own daughter on the morning of the daughter's fifty-second birthday.
What the cord is, and what the literature says about it
The cord is leather. It is bound with two stones. One obsidian. One black tourmaline. The stones are paired with antique brass spacers. The cord is tied on the inside of the left wrist, where the radial pulse runs near the surface of the skin. It is worn continuously. It is not removed for sleep or for water.
The Sami have been wearing this cord for approximately nine hundred years. The practice originated in trade contact with Anatolian merchants around 1090. It has been preserved through every generation since.
What is more notable, from the perspective of American medical history, is that the practice was not unknown to American physicians. It was in the U.S. Dispensatory, the standard American pharmacopoeia, from 1850 until 1936. Every edition during that eighty-six year window included the paired-stone wrist cord under the indication nervous exhaustion in women of the climacteric.
In 1936, the entry was removed. The removal was not preceded by clinical trials demonstrating ineffectiveness. It was not preceded by reports of adverse outcomes. It was a business decision made by an AMA committee during a period when the American pharmaceutical industry was consolidating around patentable chemical compounds. Non-patentable mineral interventions were being struck from the reference texts that prescribers consulted.
The decision affected an estimated one in eight American women of the period. For the eighty-six years since, American physicians have not been trained to prescribe the intervention. Most have not been trained to know it existed.
The mechanism, as the literature has documented it
- In 1880, Pierre Curie won the Nobel Prize in part for measuring what these two stones do when placed at the wrist under skin contact. They produce a continuous low-amplitude electrical current.
- In 1986, Japanese researchers measured the current produced by paired tourmaline against skin at body temperature. It is approximately 0.06 milliamps. Steady. Continuous. Below the threshold of conscious perception after the first hour of wear.
- CSIRO, the Australian national science agency, has separately characterized tourmaline as a passive electrical generator, a "natural dynamo" that requires no charging.
The current, delivered at the inside of the wrist where the radial nerve runs near the surface of the skin, appears to stimulate the vagus nerve. Vagus nerve stimulation has been well documented in conventional cardiology since the 1990s and increasingly in psychiatry over the past decade. The downstream effect is a downregulation of the autonomic nervous system and a reduction in the cortisol cascade that is the somatic substrate of what clinicians today call generalized anxiety disorder.
None of this is wellness-industry speculation. It is conventional electrophysiology, sufficiently understood in 1880 that the chair of the National Academy of Sciences gave Pierre Curie the Nobel Prize for measuring it, and sufficiently understood in 1936 that the AMA had to make an explicit decision about whether to keep it in the Dispensatory.
The patient at the gallery
Dr. Marquette reached into a leather bag. She pulled out a small leather pouch. Inside were two leather cords with two stones each. Obsidian. Black tourmaline. Antique brass. New.
She told Sarah that the practice has always been a matched-pair practice across spouses, and that her husband Daniel had been carrying the question for the previous eight months, and that Sarah was going to drive home and tie the second cord on him at her own kitchen table within two hours.
She tied the first cord on Sarah's left wrist.
The kitchen table that night
Sarah walked into her own kitchen at 9:54 PM. Daniel was reading at the counter. She handed him the muslin-wrapped package and told him what was inside. He set down his book. He held out his left wrist. She tied the cord on him.
He cried at the kitchen counter for the next twenty minutes. He had not cried in front of her since his mother's funeral in 2015.
What returned, and in what order
What Dr. Marquette is doing now
Dr. Marquette no longer travels to Norway. She is in her seventy-third year and her field-research days are behind her. What she is doing is something quieter. She is sitting in galleries. She is identifying, by movement, the women in the room who have stopped recognizing themselves. She is walking over to them. She is tying cords on their wrists.
She has done this, in the past eighteen months, for an undetermined number of women in the upper Midwest. She does not keep a database. She does not maintain a patient list. She is not, by any conventional measure, practicing medicine. She is doing what the women of Kautokeino taught her to do. She is handing the practice forward.
The practice itself, the leather cord with paired stones, is now being produced under the brand Veylor. Hand-cut obsidian and black tourmaline from Brazil and Mexico. Real leather cord. Antique brass spacers. Hand-finished to the specifications Dr. Marquette and the women of the Sara family verified in 2022.
For the woman who has stopped recognizing herself
If you have been on a multi-medication psychiatric protocol for one to fourteen years. If your symptoms are approximately fifty percent improved and have stayed there. If the woman you used to be has receded from your own kitchen and you have stopped being able to describe to your husband what is wrong. The cord is below.
It is not a medication. It is not a substitute for medical supervision. Any reduction in psychiatric medication should be done under the care of a prescribing physician. The cord supports the autonomic nervous system that the medications cannot fully reach. The two operate together. The woman underneath is still there. The cord is what helps her come back to the surface.