“In view of all these facts,” he wrote in an article, published February 21, “there should be something more than a medical director, something more than a mere board of trustees… There should be such an ample and full provision [of oversight] as shall entirely prevent [the asylum] from being subverted from its original and true design.”
Yet McFarland, the trustees, and the AMSAII virulently objected to the very idea that their work needed inspection from an independent body. As the state stood in loco parentis to patients, they felt their affairs should not be “liable to any general inquisition,”5 just as “no father of a household allows of interference with his private…arrangements or discipline.”6 Such inspectors would be a “fruitless annoyance,”7 more likely to do harm than good. “Such a commission,” complained one doctor without irony, “would be governed solely by an enlightened sense of honesty, justice, and fair dealing.”8
So strongly did the AMSAII feel about the issue that in 1864, they’d voted unanimously to adopt a resolution condemning independent inspectors as “not only wholly unnecessary, but injurious and subversive.”9 To them, a board of trustees provided ample supervision—ignoring the evident bias and incestuous friendships that often influenced trustees’ work.
Yet the need for independent inspection seemed increasingly evident to Illinois’s citizens every time they opened up their newspapers that spring. Elizabeth maintained a constant campaign, seeking justice for the asylum’s inmates. She remembered all too well the women’s screams just before they were held under the water. She remembered all too well those crying voices in the night. So she spoke out, sharing her memories, describing all she’d seen, and “so pointed were her statements of the maltreatment of patients…so fortified by the corroborative testimony of other witnesses, that there began to be a State-wide outcry of disapprobation at the management of the Asylum, and a clamor for an investigation.”10
However, luckily for McFarland, at least one senator took his side. In the senate on February 23, the senator in charge of the Finance Committee announced that his team had “examined into these matters, and…the members were satisfied that there was no foundation for the charges.”11 He admitted they hadn’t had time to make a “thorough investigation,”12 yet concluded emphatically that the doctor “had been grossly misrepresented and slandered.”13 As far as he was concerned, it was the end of the matter.
“His statement seemed to be entirely satisfactory to the Senate,” reported the Illinois Journal, “and, we are sure, will be gratifying to the Doctor’s many warm friends.”14
Yet despite the senator’s declaration, Elizabeth had by then provoked such a sensation that the rumors were too loud to ignore. Even McFarland himself, in the end, wrote to his friend Governor Oglesby to ask for a chance to clear his name, while the Jacksonville Journal, a newspaper supportive of the doctor, called for an investigation too. “We have every reason to believe that it will greatly benefit the institution,” it said smugly, “and increase the well-earned reputations of the trustees, and able superintendent.”15
The politicians could not help but hear the outcry. Just three days after the senate’s Finance Committee had tried to put it all to bed, T. B. Wakeman rose to speak in the Illinois House of Representatives.
“[I have] waited for other gentlemen upon this floor to take action in this direction,” he said, “but as they [have] not done so, [I have myself] introduced…resolutions. [I think] it of the utmost importance that this general assembly should at once take such action as would prove the truth or falsity of the reports in circulation concerning the management of the penitentiary.”16
He used penitentiary synonymously for asylum; Elizabeth would have approved.
Wakeman proposed that a special joint committee be immediately appointed to investigate the charges—and his colleagues concurred. Reporting on the explosive development, the State Register declared, “The appointment of this [investigating] committee was mainly the result of the efforts of Mrs. Packard.”17
In the asylum, Elizabeth had often thought of what Mrs. Grere, one of her fellow patients, had said: “If Dr. McFarland won’t do right, can’t he be made to do right by some power?”18
At last, that day had come. Finally, an independent body was going to investigate the doctor and his hospital. It was what Elizabeth had only dreamed of when she’d started her secret journal. The committee was given powers to examine witnesses under oath, its mission “to ascertain whether any of the inmates are improperly retained in the Hospital, or unjustly placed there, and whether the inmates are humanely and kindly treated.”19